Designing Custom Architectural Metal Products with SolidWorks and DriveWorks
Architectural metal product manufacturers, sheet metal fabricators, or the metal fabrication industry as a whole has witnessed significant changes over the past 15 years. From modernizing the back-office IT systems and design tools to upgrading floor equipment, the industry also faces growing domestic competition as more projects continue to move overseas. With this shift to low-cost providers, fabricators find themselves in a situation where reducing cost without sacrificing quality and maintaining efficiency with reduced wastage has become necessary.
These challenges ultimately create an operational environment where metal fabricators cannot afford to continue working with conventional 2D design approaches and 2D CAD tools. Instead, they must keep up with competition and find ways to design products faster and at lower costs without compromising quality. The immediate and necessary step is to switch the design process to 3D. And, as this new process matures, manufacturers must look for opportunities to automate repetitive design tasks and bring down the production cycle time.
SolidWorks and DriveWorks are two critical design productivity tools that help fabricators bring their metal fabrication products to market faster. If you're an architectural metal product manufacturer looking to speed up your product design process, minimize wastage, and reduce costs, here are some of the key capabilities of both these tools your design teams can utilize.
Key Features of SolidWorks
3D Solid Modeling
One of the fundamental capabilities of SolidWorks is that the tool inherently supports 3D modeling, offering multiple advantages to you and your end customers. For instance, architectural metal products such as luxury handrails, decorative collars, post tops, and stairways are often complex in design. Starting the design with a 2D drawing for these products may likely lead to occasional conflicts and inconsistencies at the manufacturing and installation stage due to misinterpretation of multiple dimensions.
In addition, not all your customers can clearly understand the product's appearance through a 2D document. With a 3D design approach, SolidWorks brings both parties on the same page. Instead of 2D drawings, sending a 3D model and a photorealistic rendering of the product with a quote will offer your customers a better understanding of the designs and likely help you secure the contracts faster.
Sheet Metal Design
With a dedicated sheet metal design capability, the 3D CAD tool also enables faster and accurate designing of architectural sheet metal products such as facades, metal cladding, doors, windows, and screenings. SolidWorks allows you to design a complete sheet metal product as it would appear when manufactured. With one click, designers can produce sheet metal flat patterns with exact dimensions for the shop floor to fabricate an accurate product while reducing the chances of material wastage. This capability speeds up design cycles and can slash design times significantly.
Parametric Capabilities
One of the major issues with architectural metal products is that each product design undergoes several iterations and dimensional changes to suit the specific needs of customers. These changes can be as simple as changing the cladding shape to complex modifications like replacing entire patterns in the cladding design. In a traditional 2D approach, such changes mean making extensive edits in the drawings to avoid errors later during the fabrication process.
However, with the parametric capabilities of SolidWorks, it is easier to apply these changes without going through re-sketching the entire part in 2D. Any edits made in the 3D model automatically update the associated dimensions and reflect the new changes in manufacturing drawings. Alternatively, this 3D CAD tool also offers intuitive drawing capabilities that design and fabrication teams can utilize during the conceptualization stage.
Key Features of DriveWorks
Design Automation
While SolidWorks offers convenience to your designers for generating product designs quickly, you can take the productivity levels further by integrating automation in the design process. Architectural metal products such as railings, collars, post tops and caps, and other ornamental metals are ideal candidates that share a standard skeletal-level design despite having unique design characteristics. Stairways, for instance, share the same design but only differ in terms of configuration. There can be different handrails, post tops, post caps, or other decorative elements depending on your customer's preferences. However, the core design of the stairs remains the same.
Traditionally, you may require producing drawings and 3D models for each new custom order of these products. However, with design automation, these repetitive design tasks can be completely automated. Using DriveWorks, your design team can define the design logic and rules for each architectural metal product. Once the rules are established, they simply require feeding the dimensional details through a form, and SolidWorks will automatically generate 3D models, BOMs, cut lists, and related manufacturing documentation.
Figuring out such automation opportunities in your product design can reduce design and manufacturing cycle times from months to weeks, or even a few days.
Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ)
The capabilities of DriveWorks don't end with design automation. You can utilize the advanced versions of this tool to automate ordering and product configuration processes for the customer-facing side. The Pro versions of DriveWorks allow you to involve customers in your design process. For example, if your customer is looking for a custom cladding solution, they simply require feeding all their design requirements, such as hole patterns, type of metal, colors, finishes, or any other design feature, through a web-based UI. As they continue configuring their custom cladding design, they can readily see the configured 3D model in real-time.
In addition, if you've already defined the pricing for each customization, your customers also get to see the total quote for their custom design request. Alternatively, they can request a quote for their configuration directly. Once you confirm the design and quote, DriveWorks automatically generates all the 3D files, BOM lists, and CNC data for the shop floor. The net effect of these automation upgrades in your design processes is faster production, reduced cost, and improved customer experience.
Bring Efficiency to Your Product Design Processes with 3D CAD and Automation
As an architectural metal product manufacturer, if you're looking for ways to stay competitive and reduce operational costs, your digital transformation journey should begin with adopting 3D workflows. Once you've established a robust 3D design process, start looking for automation opportunities in your design and sales processes to drastically reduce the lead times and bring your products to market sooner. SolidWorks and DriveWorks are two critical tools that will help you transform your product design process and make it more efficient and cost-effective.
At TrueCADD, we've enabled businesses in the metal fabrication industry to successfully adopt 3D workflows and reap the benefits of design automation. With our 3D CAD and design automation services, one of our clients managed to reduce the design cycle time by 70%, bringing down the overall lead time from days to hours.
Contact us to learn more about our 3D modeling and automation capabilities to discuss your specific project requirements.
About Author:
Usha B. Trivedi is a mechanical design engineer at TrueCADD – a company invested in industrial CAD drafting, modeling, and design automation. Ms. Trivedi writes about solution finding approach in CAD and design automation challenges backed by her years of exploration in industrial designing in furniture, millwork, and metal fabrication designs.