Collaboration on the cloud brings design and manufacturing together.
Autodesk has sponsored this post.
The need to collaborate has been with us since the first project that involved more than one engineer—or a sequence of engineers working in a comfortable and linear world. That was a world where one engineer came up with a design, passed it off to a designer to detail it, who threw it over the wall to the machinist to produce it.
These days, increasing complexity leading to smart products that have as many electrical and software components as they have mechanical ones, and an abbreviated product launch schedule that marches to market demands, has many more people working on a product design. To make matters more complicated, it’s not just the people who are creating the product who are involved; now, it seems to be everyone: managers, marketing, purchasing. There are simply too many cooks in the kitchen.
As if that was not enough to contend with, we have the pandemic. Now the cooks are not just in the kitchen but in our dining rooms or bedrooms or our home office. In addition, the ones that matter, the creators and producers of the new products, are no longer down the hall or in the next building.
Deep breaths. You can do this. You have the tools to collaborate; perhaps tools you never had, or tools that were there all along that you may already have been using. They may have been tools you used when the machine shop was not down the hall, but across the ocean. You have already found that your design is portable, shareable. You have found your CAD files to be readable, and your design understood by all. To those old enough to remember shipping drawings in cardboard tubes or sending PDFs: Isn’t collaboration a lot easier now?
Companies that adopted the latest technologies for collaboration did not miss a beat during the pandemic; design work simply shifted from the office to the kitchen table and design reviews moved to Zoom. All the meaningful design and manufacturing collaboration was often managed inside the design and manufacturing software itself.
The adoption of the cloud for data storage has facilitated collaboration. Having the same data shared by all, all of it effectively in the same location*, rather than in silos all spread throughout your organization, has fostered a new design world; one with common, shared databases. A project can have a single source of truth. Modern collaboration means everyone works on or off the same design: the most current one.
With a single source, even the most geographically disbursed teams can collaborate all at once, in real time, rather than linearly with one group waiting for the other. Not only can design team members in different locations hold a design review, but purchasing can be checking the supply chain, the manufacturing team can offer them guidance, the factory can start getting the production facilities ready and marketing can be creating sales brochures and product pages for the website. With all of this activity happening in parallel, rather than in series, the design cycle can be significantly shortened.
Autodesk Fusion 360, the do-all design and manufacturing application, has long made use of the cloud to store data. From within Fusion 360, users can use the Data Panel to store a project on the cloud and make it shareable with others to view, review or otherwise work on. You can also create a shareable project outside of the Fusion 360 application using Fusion Team, which connects teams, suppliers, manufacturing ecosystems and more—and requires only a browser.
Find out more about Autodesk Fusion 360 here.
*We know data on the cloud is technically not in one specific, known location but probably in multiple locations, who knows where, but we have faith that someone has figured it all out.
