Configuration-based design is a design approach that benefits companies confronting consumer-oriented market where customers demand more personalized products that are delivered in reducing time windows.

Whether you are designing new products from scratch or making modifications to existing designs, you will often find the need to reuse existing components to speed up your design process. The ability to store custom components in a convenient location that can allow quick access, search, the capability to quickly place these components accurately within the context of your design, and the flexibility to modify designs to meet new requirements is the basic essence of configuration-based design.

IronCAD is leading the industry in configuration-based design capabilities through its unique catalog drag and drop design process and its intuitive sizing and positioning utilities. Easily add assemblies, parts, features, or other relevant content such as materials and catalogs and share them among your design team for convenient access. Group common components and quickly search for desired components and simply drag and drop into your designs.

IronCAD not only provides precise reference locations when you drop your components, it also provide a power tool to position and locate your component in any complex orientation that is required.

Reuse and positioning alone will not fulfill the increase in productivity. It’s the ability to take the existing geometry and perform modifications that may have or may not have been planned in your original design. IronCAD’s flexibility is key to deliver the ability to make these changes confidently without worrying about how the original design was created while taking advantage of design rules where necessary.

Configuration-based design is this columniation of storing and reusing components, positioning components, and having the flexibility to make modifications to complete new designs in a shorter design cycle and IronCAD is at the forefront of delivering this capability.

Can I Use Configuration-Based Design with My Current System?

Understanding the value of configuration-based design is simple, but you might be asking how can I make use of this with your current design system investment.

Since this process actually enhances existing CAD investment, there’s no need for you to replace existing systems. IronCAD provides all the tools necessary to incorporate your design data within our application so that it can be leveraged within the configuration-based design process. IronCAD’s flexibility to modify component is not only available for its own native geometry but extends to any data. When your new designs are completed, data can be leveraged back into your existing systems for other process that you may have invested it.

Extend Your Capabilities by Adding Intelligence to the Process

IronCAD extends configuration-based design by allowing more intelligence and even domain-specific knowledge to be added to your components through a process we call Smart eBehavior.

Using smart eBehavior, you can create intelligent features, parts or components that simply position, size and orient precisely in place onto other components. You can even add behaviors such as predefined constraints that can provide accurate movements in mechanisms or other positioning commands. Further extend your design process by adding connections to other business related process such as ERP to provide information such as pricing, availability, or manufacturing delivery to make more informed design decisions on your new products to meet expectations of your customers.

Take Configuration-Based Design Outside Your Design Group to Maximize Productivity

Since IronCAD’s configuration-based design capabilities are available to anyone in your delivery chain through free-of-charge configuration tools along with your customized library, communication is enhanced dramatically and your client satisfaction increases exponentially. You simply store your intelligent objects in graphical, simple-to-access libraries called Smart eContent.

This Smart eContent enables you, your sales teams or your end-user customer to access their designs remotely without using a full-blown CAD system. Your customers get to experiment and participate in the design of their products and produce their own photo realistic images, animations, Bill of Materials and/or pricing information. When satisfied with their final design, your customer can transmit the lightweight data back to your design team where full details can be automatically generated.

Share Meaningful Design Suggestions and Expedite the Design Process

Even if you can extend your design data outside of your engineering group, you often find that the collaboration to convey design suggestion difficult.

IronCAD Smart eMarkup allows customers, suppliers, and even other designers the ability to suggest design changes on your shared data that extend beyond simple text annotated markups. Precisely communicate geometric changes such as positional, size, and even direct modifications of the geometry as well as adding new component without working on the real design data. Simply transmit your suggestions back to your design team where they can review changes, accept or reject changes on the real design data, and even communicate new changes. Sharing this information is provided through tools that are appropriate suited for the experience level of the participant.

Once the collaboration is completed, designers can simply accept the suggestions reducing the need to redesign the changes on the real design data.

What Does Configuration-Based Design Mean for You?

Simply stated, IRONCAD’s configuration-based design reduces production costs by decreasing human error and design cycle time and this reduced cycle time is crucial for staying competitive. IRONCAD allows you to deliver faster and by providing precise and repeatable results, you can simultaneously improve your design process reliability. IRONCAD delivers value beyond just horizontal collaboration and built-in vertical know-how, it allows you to extend your knowledge outside of your design group to others that can help shape your designs to meet the exact needs of your clients.

IRONCAD uses intelligent data shared in real-time with everyone. Designers, sales staff and even your own customers can access and communicate their ideas instantly. The most forward-thinking companies turn to IRONCAD to enable fast, smart and lean design. Driven by the need to improve efficiency, IRONCAD’s configuration-based design is intended to:

• Speed design creation and modifications using intelligent objects to enable automation – Smart eBehavior
• Capture intelligent know-how and design data for future use – Smart eContent
• Communicate client opinion and needs – Smart eMarkup

IRONCAD offers specific expertise across diverse industries such as aerospace, automotive, construction, consumer products, industrial machinery, medical, manufacturing, mold and die, packaging, and manufacturing. A worldwide team of in-house experts, solution providers and OEM suppliers support all IRONCAD products.

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