News & Events
Press Releases : August 1, 2005

KUBOTEK USA: "CAD INTEROPERABILITY PROBLEM STILL EXISTS"
-- 2005 CAD Interoperability Survey Offers Comprehensive View of Interoperability Issues Across the Design and Manufacturing Marketplace --

Marlborough, MA - August 1, 2005 -Kubotek USA today unveiled the results of the 2005 CAD Interoperability Survey, the company's study of the design and manufacturing marketplace. The survey was designed to find out how widespread the issues around CAD interoperability are and the depth of the problem. More than 1,250 CAD managers and users provided valid responses. An executive summary is available online at: www.kubotekusa.com/products/spectrum

Engineers who design products or manufacturing equipment based on models created by others need to be able to efficiently share their files. Industrial engineers need access to the files for in-process assembly and fabrication drawings. Manufacturing engineers need to modify designs based on what machine tools are available at the time. CAD vendors often describe this sharing as "interoperability" and claim to support the process through industry standards like STEP and IGES or direct translators. However, converting a CAD file to a different format does not capture all the information that an engineer needs to do the job

"CAD was supposed to make life easier for designers and engineers," stated Robert Bean, chief operating officer, Kubotek USA. "The reality is that CAD files need to be leveraged and shared by everyone in the design and manufacturing cycle. Unfortunately, the proliferation of different, proprietary CAD formats has added a new level of complexity and has created an additional roadblock to productivity."

Kubotek's CAD Interoperability Survey demonstrates that, although many design and manufacturing companies are focused on standardizing on a small number of tools, and CAD vendors claim to have "solved the problem" through the use of industry standard formats and direct translators, the end users are still having difficulty sharing files. Key data points from the Kubotek CAD Interoperability Survey include:

• More than eighty percent of the respondents indicated that they re-use data and model components from a previous model (either their own or someone else's) when constructing models.
• Only 30 percent of the respondents consistently received CAD models from their co-workers in their preferred tool's format.
• Only 6 percent of the respondents always received models from other companies in their preferred tool's format.
• Over three-quarters (77 percent) of respondents said they receive half or fewer of their external CAD models in their preferred format.
• Almost half (46 percent) of the survey respondents need to use 3 or more different CAD tools per month.