Design Tables, Configurations and DriveWorks This question crops up a lot. When are Design Tables and Configurations the best way to achieve my Design Automation goals, and when would I benefit from the Capabilities of DriveWorks? The answer is simple. The answer is short. The following 124 page document explains
Design Tables Don t get me wrong, I firmly believe that design tables are fantastic. I can think of no better way of creating multiple variations of the same design in such a quick way its simple, create a design, insert a design table, click on some dimensions, enter some values, Fill Down - (how good is fill down?) and close it. Voila. 30 different variations created in a flash. Zoro would be proud. Inserting a new configuration is easy, editing existing ones is easy. It s just easy. And the really cool bit is that the design table itself is Excel. All the power of excel wrapped up in one little icon. Fun There are no bounds to the formulas and tables you can create in a design table; you can use the full 256 Columns by 65536 Rows that s a possible 16777216 pieces of data or individual equations. And if that is not enough, you can pull data in from external spreadsheets as well. There are no bounds. I ve seen some Design Tables that would be just as at home in the Louvre Paris, as in an engineering department. Pure works of art. Genius. Now let s take them a step too far. Let s take them past the point that they were originally intended. Let s create 30 individual and unique Drawings, one for each of our variations. Let s increase the options to create 500 variations, and then create their drawings. Funny Now let s work on a four level deep sub assembly. Let s have a design table in each part, and let s link them all to the same external spreadsheet so that we can update the whole lot from 1 place. Let s then use that to insert a new variation of our whole assembly, with new variations of each sub assembly and parts, with a new drawing for each. It s starting to get hard. If you have nothing better to do one weekend Switch off the phone. Stock the fridge full of beer. Shave the bottom off your study door (about 1 pizza deep). And have a go. Create the most complex, multi-relational, all updating automatically, complete with drawings, assembly you can think of, and link it all to one external spreadsheet. Funnier At the end of the weekend sit back and bask in the knowledge and glory that you have completely abused and overused one of the most useful innovations in 3D modeling. Join the Club. We meet on the third Friday of every month. We shouldn t stop there. Let s think about what we can do with our masterpiece.
Let s give it to someone else to work on it while we are away for the week, and then cry as we try and understand the formula =IF(OR(B8<K9+1,AW754= Yes ), X7*(A8-12.87), IF(VLOOKUP(M3, O4:S87, 4, TRUE), M351+M322, V6 I88)) that they created, overwriting the one we spent 4 hours working on that was half the size. Now apply that to the world of Engineering to Order; Your world, where everyday you need to create new variations using your very own Frankenstein. Imagine how you will feel when the first order comes in, your chance to shine arrives. This is your moment. You read down the requirements, you translate them into your inputs, you start entering the data, and Bam!! Side swiped, T-boned off the track and over the wall. One option required by the customer isn t in your Model; a vital feature is missing in one of the parts way down the assembly structure. I could write books on what happens next. They would be found in the horror section of any respectable book store. Funniest Now let s give it to our sales team to use. Now that would be funny. Let s Copy the whole assembly structure and rename all of the files because we have a similar product, with similar rules. No That would definitely NOT be funny. Let s have more than one person working on creating new variations of our creation at any one time. AAAAAAAAAAahhhhhhhhh! So in reigning in our abusive tendencies towards the wonders of Design Tables, what other options do we have? You could write some code. How cool will that be? You will learn some new skills, develop some new capability. You could be a hero. Just imagine, you record a couple of macros, combine them together, learn to adapt some of the code to take in new arguments. How hard could it be? It isn t. Trust me. It s easy. Have a go. You ll start by creating a form which will drive some dimensions. You fill in the form, you hit a button and there you have it - An updated model that fits your criteria. Next its features - Very easy to control. Let s keep going, we are on a roll. We need a drawing to go with our model. That s easy we can open that up and rebuild it. It will update to show our new assembly, fantastic. Woh there, hang on a second. We don t want to update the same model, we want to copy it, and all of its sub assemblies, parts and drawings into a new folder for each job that we do. That s going to cost us a week or so, and a lot more Pizzas under that gap under the door. Never mind, at least you don t have any production information to get out this week, and no tender drawings to do. And if you have, there s always the weekend. The code will now start to mushroom. We will have grown out of VBA, and we will be telling our boss that we need to buy a grown up development tool. We will
throw away all the code we have so far why not? We have learnt so much in the past 6 months, we can re-write it in a flash with what we know now. 18 months have now passed and we are bored with code we want to get back to some good old engineering. All those promises we made at the start haven t quite materialized. It s taken a lot longer than we thought, we don t quite have the results we needed; we are constantly updating the code to work with different versions of Windows, and Office, and SolidWorks, and changes to our product. We tried passing it off to someone else, but they couldn t understand the code we had written. We tried using it for a second product line, but too many of the rules and forms were hard coded. We spend a lot of time telling ourselves that it was time well spent, that we have taken the company forward, whilst at the back of our minds, we wish we had done something else. Something more transferable, something available to start using now, something DriveWorks-ish! DriveWorks (It had to get a mention at some point; after all, this is a sales aid) Oh yes, we have been there with the whole design table thing, and sure we spent quite some years writing custom code for custom applications. It s the reason we created DriveWorks in the first place, all those years ago. I don t want to go into a sales pitch at this point; it s not really my thing. Needless to say that all of the fun and frivolity outlined above is not an issue with DriveWorks. Let s use an example. Let s take a Company that bought SolidWorks to help them automate their designs. Who saw the power of Design Tables early on, and who took them over the edge. Bring in Doug. Doug was an AutoCAD user who saw what 3D could offer, and had a particular fondness of Design Tables. They blew his mind. Then they became normal, then old hat and then Doug tried driving them in a way that would make clowns cry. This is Doug s story. Let s start at the beginning. Doug works for ABC Engineer-to-Order Inc. ABC Engineer-to-Order Inc make a simple product, yet highly configurable and with millions of options. ABC Engineer-to-Order Inc had a vision to automate their design; a process that was taking up to 45 minutes per product in 2D. The problem was that if they only sold one item, they made a loss. Not very good for business. The other issue they faced was that the number of products they could sell was limited to the number of guys they had to do the quotations and the design. Also not good for business. They knew they had a much bigger market if only things didn t take so long. Still, Doug wasn t put off and embarked on a mission to use design tables, with a single updatable configuration that could be driven by entering values elsewhere in the design table.
The first bit of fun Doug had was that his product was made of 2 or more components. Having an assembly level design table and part level design tables wasn t really an option. He insisted that he only update one design table to achieve his automation. So he created a multi body part. Problem solved. Except that he had so many product options that he had to create many many multi bodied parts each with its own design table. This led to another exciting challenge, how to manage the rules and equations in so many design tables when the vast majority of the rules and equations were the same in each? The next fun that Doug had was that he needed to create a drawing for each product he designed. He became the Save As king. Selecting the part he needed, opening it up, saving as, editing the design table, rebuilding the model, opening up the drawing, ensuring that he re-referenced to the correct part, rebuilding, deleting the dimensions he didn t need, changing the scale, moving the views, tidying up the dimensions and annotations, Saving as and then closing. Job done. The only problem was that if the 2 save as operations were done at the wrong time; he was in danger of overwriting the master. Doug lost track of the number of backups he had made. He had achieved semi automation of his designs. But he still had to lookup lots of data to be able to know what to enter in the design table, and they still had to create the quotation manually. Doug knew he needed more. His design tables had run out of steam. They had become too big, too many and too unmanageable. Bring in Scott. Scott is Doug s Boss. Scott could see that Doug had gone a long way, but also that Doug needed a better solution. He needed a design automation product that would handle everything that Doug could throw at it. That last bit was the most important, read again, that DOUG could throw at it The one thing that ABC Engineer-to-Order Inc. needed as much as a hole in the head was a bunch of outside consultants turning up and charging them a small plane load of cash to suck the product and sales rules out of Doug and into a product. So, back to Doug and Scott. Scott found DriveWorks, and between the two of them they embarked on a mission to create a product configurator and design automation tool all of their own. Neither knew how to program. Neither needed to. What they did need to know was everything about their own products. Surprisingly enough, they are the experts at that bit. So they gathered together all of the data they could about their products, and started linking it into DriveWorks. Everything from their pricing details, supplier product details, customer details etc etc.
The design automation came naturally to Doug. He could go back to having one master assembly that DriveWorks would control. He no longer needed to worry about doing his save as. DriveWorks took care of the creation and naming of all his new files, even down to the drawings, even down to the DXFs required for manufacturing, even down to the printing on the right printer. But that s not where it ended. Doug and Scott created such a good user interface, that they were happy to pass it to Sales to use. And what s more, Sales could now not only fill out a set of forms and get an accurate quotation, but would also have all of the designs done for them in the background. The 45 minutes to design a product became zero. But Scott wasn t happy with that. He had the vision that his customers should be able to enter their own requirements and that in doing so, his customers would actually be doing the design, without knowing it. Scott thought that would be funny. It is. They can t stop laughing.