2025 has ushered in geopolitical and economic uncertainty, leaving manufacturers to consider where to invest their time and resources. As a result, engineering leaders are looking at product development and CAD changes that could immediately affect business outcomes. When it comes to your CAD system, the questions you should ask yourself include:
- How can I get more value out of my CAD system?
- Am I taking advantage of available CAD technologies to gain a competitive advantage?
- How can my CAD system help me do more with less?
- How does CAD support my other digital transformation initiatives?
Working with our customers, we’ve identified key CAD trends that significantly impact business outcomes. Forward-leaning market leaders are already leveraging these capabilities to drive their businesses forward.
Model-Based Product Development
Many manufacturers have started or are actively looking at various model-based initiatives, and they are doing so because the business benefits are undeniable in terms of efficiency, cost, and quality. Model-based definition is an annotated 3D model containing all the information needed to define and manufacture the product, without requiring drawings. When used with a supportive PLM platform, a single source of truth emerges that provides critical information to the right people, in the right place, at the right time.
In the past, these annotated models have been seen as a burden on engineering, meant to benefit suppliers, manufacturing, and QA. However, engineering leaders increasingly see the value of MBD in making product development easier and faster. With a commitment to a directly manufacturable, annotated 3D model, engineers can use associated CAD technologies, like real-time simulation, optimization, tool design, and machine toolpath development, to streamline the product development process. PTC refers to this as Model-Based Product Development.
3D model used for simulation, tooling design, technical illustrations, renderings and GD&T.
Additionally, engineering leaders have found enormous opportunities in the right CAD solutions. By delivering a continuous digital thread with native CAD data managed in PLM, the MBPD process allows for engineering changes to be quickly propagated throughout the value chain, minimizing the risk of quality issues, errors and scrap. This use of the 3D model throughout the product development process is changing how companies deliver better products faster.
Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Automation
Advances in generative AI have the potential to alter every aspect of our interaction with product design, manufacturing, and service.
Creo pioneered the field of generative design, which uses AI algorithms to optimize designs based on specific requirements. Our award-winning, AI-powered Creo Generative Design is available today and helps engineers rapidly explore innovative designs using different materials, manufacturing processes, and performance requirements. This tool is proving to be a game-changer in terms of developing products that are higher-performing, lighter, less costly, and more sustainable than traditional design methodologies.
Creo Generative Design quickly produces design options for different materials and manufacturing processes.
In contrast, Generative AI creates content like text and images through Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLMs), and it has the potential to change the way manufacturers interact with data and information. PTC is researching ways to deliver trusted, responsible, and scalable AI value to our users across the portfolio.
While the potential of AI-powered generative design and Large Language Model generative AI processors is awe-inspiring, we often find that customers are looking to AI to help them automate repetitive, cumbersome or difficult design tasks. Fortunately, we have several intelligent automation (IA) tools to help customers. These innovative design tools, available in Creo today, can automate complex processes, streamline workflows, and improve productivity. Examples include intent references, user-defined features (UDFs), GD&T Advisor, and Creo Behavioral Modeling Extension (BMX). The design process automation that these capabilities offer, when repeated thousands of times per month, has the potential to help manufacturers deliver their best designs in less time.
Demonstration Videos -Intent References, UDFs, GD&T Advisor and BMX
Simulation-Driven Design
In a traditional product development cycle, analysts conduct product simulations late in the design process, when the design is well-defined. At best, the simulation confirms product performance and quality, sometimes revealing that the product may have been overdesigned with excess material and cost. At worst, the simulations identify design flaws, resulting in costly delays, rework, and scrap.
Simulation-driven design (SDD) is a process by which analysis is introduced much earlier in the design process, allowing engineers to perform generative design studies and quick real-time simulations to evaluate and refine their designs. This “shift left” approach to simulation is a process/cultural shift, putting easy-to-use analysis tools into the hands of engineers. The benefits are numerous:
- Engineers can quickly iterate and explore options to uncover innovative design alternatives.
- Parts can be optimized early in the process so that design flaws can be found early, and parts are not over-designed.
- Expensive late-stage redesign and rework can be avoided, improving both development costs and time to market.
- Dedicated simulation analysts and computing resources can focus on more critical and complex design challenges.
Complexity and cost of design changes can be minimized by introducing simulation early in the design process.
PTC’s partnership with simulation leader Ansys means that market-leading simulation tools are directly accessible within the Creo design environment. This partnership has enabled linear, non-linear and transient structural analysis, plus modal, CFD, and thermal analysis. With these powerful tools, design engineers can quickly and accurately predict deformation, temperature distribution, pressure drop, electronics cooling, strain, stress, resonance frequencies and much more.
The shift is more than just technology; it results in more significant interaction between engineers and analysts. This collaboration leads to more product insight, with designers using generative design and real-time design guidance, and analysts being able to focus on more complex validation studies.
Integrated Manufacturing
Ultimately, the product designs will need to be produced, and a disconnected design-to-manufacturing process invites errors, inefficiencies and higher production costs. In the past, CAD was for design only, distinct from manufacturing workflows. Design files were exported, imported, and translated, resulting in a broken digital thread that complicated design changes and re-use. Today’s CAD systems are far more capable and integrated with manufacturing systems. Manufacturers are harnessing these new CAD systems to reap huge benefits—by using integrated manufacturing tools. PTC’s Creo offers an impressive breadth of subtractive and additive manufacturing tools, plus new industry-leading composite manufacturing capabilities.
Subtractive
Creo supports a wide range of machining processes, including milling, turning, wire electrical discharge machining (EDM) and sheetmetal operations, all directly within the Creo design environment. Creo even offers tool-design capabilities.
Additive
PTC offers an impressive array of additive manufacturing tools, directly within Creo. Design engineers can easily explore lattices, metal printing, support structures and print nesting activities, tied directly to their native product designs.
Composites
Design engineers can use industry-leading Creo composite tools to design, analyze and create manufacturing plans for high-performance composite products.
With manufacturing processes deeply integrated with the Creo design environment, production plans are easier to execute, and design changes can be quickly propagated to production partners. This improves time to market and minimizes development expense.
Conclusion
PTC firmly believes that manufacturers who leverage these four CAD capabilities in 2025 and beyond will have a competitive advantage in quality, cost, and time-to-market. Are your design processes essentially unchanged from a decade ago? Is your CAD system just meeting your needs—or worse—holding you back? Or is it helping you make progress in accomplishing your business goals? Take a closer look at PTC’s Creo and discover how it can empower your engineering team, reinvigorate your product development process and help you gain a competitive advantage.
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