A “scalable design” approach focuses on creating products that can be adapted and expanded as the needs of an organization shift and evolve. It makes modifying, customizing, updating and improving products easier.
With scalable design, manufacturers that create products on behalf of the military can integrate their product design cycle with other software systems and processes to help drive end-to-end automation.
Scalable design is a fast and adaptable approach, unlike traditional batch production and mass production methods. It leads to creating higher-quality and more innovative products and enables design and engineering teams to configure products to the military’s unique requirements.
Modular design and automation are vital to increasing a design cycle’s scalability. Let’s take a look at these approaches in more detail…
What Is Modular Design?
“Modular design” is a design principle that involves breaking products down into multiple components (or modules) that can be combined and assembled to produce many different finished products. Think of a car. Each new model has improved features but shares most of its parts with the previous model. This approach is far more efficient and scalable than starting from scratch every time with each new feature.
Modular design enables manufacturers to create more customizable products. Design engineers can improve products by tweaking each individual component rather than reinventing the wheel every time. And, because modules can be isolated and tested independently, diagnosing and fixing issues is relatively painless.
Overall, modular design makes manufacturers flexible and amenable to the needs of their customers – including the military. It enables them to launch new and improved products more quickly and boosts efficiency and productivity across their design and engineering teams.
But how do you enable modular design?
Computer-aided design (CAD) software like AutoCAD enables design engineers to create 3D models of individual components or modules. They can then use product data management (PDM) programs and product lifecycle management (PLM) tools to manage and track these various components and coordinate the work of designers and engineers in assembling them into finished products.
What is Design Automation?
Design automation is the use of computer software and algorithms to perform design tasks traditionally done by a human designer or engineer. Design automation software captures engineering knowledge, stores it as code, and reuses it to create detailed CAD files, BOMs, instructions, and other documents for the shop floor.
Design automation improves the accuracy and consistency of the design process and accelerates design cycle speed and output. Instead of applying theories, concepts, and techniques to every design, design engineers can program this information into CAD once and move on to more meaningful tasks.
Working collaboratively with the military, industry partners can identify design tasks ripe for automation. The aim is to automate the cycle of digital product design end-to-end.
What Are the 5 Benefits of Scalable Design?
These are the five main reasons why manufacturers should adopt a scalable solution
1. Increased Efficiency
Scalable design principles like modular design maximize reuse and minimize rework, enabling designers and engineers to get more done without increasing their workload. Meanwhile, design automation eliminates all the time-consuming, repetitive work that slows engineers down and fuels frustration.
2. Improved Branch Satisfaction
Scalable design makes custom engineering painless, allowing engineers to provide more product options and a better user experience.
3. Reduced cost
Design automation reduces manual work such as drafting, supervision, quality assurance, and other checks and balances.
4. Greater agility
Scalable design makes manufacturers highly adaptable. They can scale production up and down without increasing or decreasing the size of their workforce and modify products. This can be incredibly useful for the military, which might require its manufacturers and industry partners to quickly scale up production in times of confiect, or may need to shift product designs based on shifting requirements.
5. More innovation
Scalable design frees up the time and resources designers and engineers require to focus on more creative and strategic work. They can spend more time exploring new ideas, testing new concepts, refining their designs, and developing more advanced and innovative products.
By speeding up design and development, automation allows for rapid iteration, enabling engineers and designers to develop new products and approaches more quickly. They can integrate other technologies like simulation into their workflow to test designs virtually under thousands of different scenarios and conditions, launching new products faster.
