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Concurrent Engineering Blog

How to Improve Interoperability at your Company

Posted by Emma Rudeck on 26-Jul-2013 11:34:00

interoperabilityIn today’s design environment, the ability to leverage a design up and down the design process is critical. But, for many companies, there is a real challenge here; they need to overcome the difficulties of managing interoperability between different environments and tools.  

Why is interoperability important?

There are key individuals in the design product development process. Each may have their own tools and each have their own skill sets. But, for the product development and manufacturing to be successful, these key individuals will need to work together.

The challenge that companies face with this is how to deal with data created in one tool that needs to be leveraged in another tool. Historically, we would do an export/import process; export the design data from one tool and import it into another tool. But, this approach is not ideal, as it can mean you lose a lot of the value and richness of the original model.

How can companies overcome the interoperability challenge?

With Creo, you can now manage the interoperability between different areas of the product design easily and seamlessly, without compromising on your tools. In essence, it is about having the right tool for the right task at the right time. But, at the same time, it’s knowing that you can easily leverage models from different stages of the design process.

How does this work in practice?

For example, say you find that part of your model is under increased stress and prone to failure. You need to be able to analyse what this stress is and then use the tools available to optimise the design quickly, so your product development time doesn’t overrun. Being able to complete this process from within Creo, without continually having to resort to exporting and importing files, save times and improved the continuity. It also removes the problems that can be caused by exporting and importing in downstream processes.

To start you can fully analyse the part in Creo Simulate, to find out where the part failure is taking place. Then, you are able to use this information, to return the part into modeling mode. This will then enable you to make the necessary changes to the design. After you have made the changes, you can then return to simulation mode, to re-run the analysis. Then, once the analysis is complete, you can review the results and confirm whether or not the change that you have made has resolved the problem.

By using Creo, you can create your design, interpret your design, isolate forces at specific moments as they are acting on the model, apply those forces in Creo Simulate. The results of this will generate the maximum stress should be on your component. Analysing that maximum stress and isolating where that is taking place, you can make immediate changes, using Creo Flexible Modeling to optimise the design. Once this is complete, you can re-run it through the analysis and see how your changes have impacted the overall design.

Do you want to see how Creo works in practice? Get our free 30-day Creo Parametric trial here:

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