Engineer To Order (ETO)
In these tough economic times it is more important now than ever to streamline the design process wherever possible. I had the opportunity last week to see a presentation on Autodesk Inventor Automation Professional 2009 which helps to combine your "Engineering Rules" and 3D Inventor models into a very powerful Engineer to Order design tool.
Basically you use Inventor Automation to capture all of your design rules for a given product line such as a series of conveyors. Maybe one of the rules would be every 10 feet of conveyor there needs to be a motor, etc... Then after you have all of your design rules in place you can modify the front end GUI to get accurate configurations of these designs.
Using the GUI, your sales team, proposal engineers or anyone else in your organization can create accurate quotes on the fly in front of the customer with 3D models, and 2D documentation. This can also provide BOM information that will allow you to provide accurate pricing much earlier in the project. Having the ability to do this will allow a company to bid jobs more accuratley and have more profitable business.
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