A part’s shape is not only synonymous with its function … but is also highly correlated with it’s price, manufacturing process and performance. This means that the ability to capture and compare shape allows that information to be used in a wide variety of meaningful ways.
Uses cases fall into 3 categories utilizing shape-based search and shape-based analytics:
Part Reuse
The ability to reuse an existing part in a new way avoids part creation costs ranging from $3,000 to $25,000 or more, and months of part development work.
It also eliminates the ongoing carrying cost of having a duplicate part in inventory, and avoid reduced manufacturing capacity.
Knowledge Reuse
When a part can't be reused as is, there are typically similar parts where the design is so similar to the desired part, that the existing part's design can be used as a starting point for the new design, saving tedious early design work ("Design Reuse"), resulting in better organizational consistency
Accessing the existing part's data and related knowledge, such as cost and testing data, can also accelerate the development of the new part.
Shape Analytics
The shape of a part is correlated with many engineering and business metrics, such as a part's cost and manufacturing process. Shape analytics is used to analyze an entire database to reveal, duplication, inefficiencies and improve data.
Examples include part consolidation, standardization and price variance discovery.
Part Reuse: Reusing an existing part can save from $3,000 to $25,000 or more in design, prototyping, testing and manufacturing setup, and $500 or more each ongoing year in inventory carrying costs for the life of the part.
Example of ROI Potential from Part Reuse
Design Reuse: when an existing design can't be reused as is, often an existing similar design can be used as an advanced starting point and modified to save a tremendous amount of tedious, repetitive design time.
Cost Estimation: similar existing parts share manufacturing processes and therefore have similar cost and performance metrics (allowing for material type and other cost issues). Therefore, a fast and accurate method to estimate the cost of a new part is to analyze the cost of a highly similar design, which not only adds efficiency but also eliminates tedious work.
Unwarranted Cost Variance Discovery: CADSEEK Analytics can be used to find situations where highly similar parts have cost variances when they shouldn't. The image below shows parts from two vendors which are 99.3% similar, but which have a 10% cost variance.
