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Have you ever imagined the life of design engineers if we are still in the age of manual drafting? I’m pretty sure advancements would be that less if we don’t have these very powerful softwares that are a result of human ingenuity. Imagine spending countless number of hours doing manual drawing which are very susceptible to errors and worst may not get detection in early which is very tedious to do and costly both in time and money. Well, let us give thanks to software developers and engineers who work hand and hand in making the designing of all sorts of products of engineering such as architectural, machines and structural just to name a few; much  easier and very convenient. Engineering students know about Computer Aided Design softwares, some were taught of the basic CAD softwares such as the Autodesk AutoCAD, Autodesk Inventor and perhaps the SolidWorks of Dassault Systemes. As for me, who was a mechanical design engineer, I was introduced to the powerful CAD softwares used in the automotive and aerospace industry; these softwares are Siemens NX or Unigraphics and CATIA of Dassault Systemes. Those mentioned 3D CAD softwares had their own specialties. With the advent of CAD softwares, the workload of engineers were once again made easier thanks to the existence of Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) softwares whose functions is to simulate and test the feasibility and functionality of the designs. Softwares produced by ANSYS are the examples of CAE softwares that features a Finite Element Analysis (FEA). Additionally, when I entered the Steemit blogging platform I got to know about free and open source softwares (FOSS) and I thought CAD softwares wouldn’t be classified on that or being offered for free, but I was wrong. There are CAD softwares too that are free to download and powerful too, one of which is FreeCAD, a CAD software which has a UI quite close to CATIA. Well, there are many CAD/CAE softwares out there but I just mentioned what I’ve known and tried.

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So today, allow me to share the importance of Computer Aided Design (CAD) Softwares.
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<h3>It Saves A Lot of Time.</h3>

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CAD softwares are very easy to use and as time passes by every designer/engineer would learn new strategies to make the modeling and designing of a certain product much easier. In the early stages of designs, errors are easily detected and can be easily modified. As compared to manual design and drafting, CAD makes the lead time in designing is optimized and maximized. The good thing about those projects made using CAD softwares is that developers of these softwares made programs wherein all the design modifications or versions of a certain program/product are stored in a vault such as Siemen’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), wherein in my experience, old designs can be used as reference for future designs and traceability of the development of the design is very great! To top it all, that would mean lesser headaches for engineers thanks to this wonderful innovation in the field of designing and in engineering.

<h3>It Saves A Lot of Money.</h3>

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Well, time and money go together especially when we speak of businesses. Cost savings are achieved thanks to the technology that CAD/CAE offer to designers and the businesses itself. When a design is being proposed like for example in the case of automotive suppliers when submitting for Request for Quotations (RFQ) designs, the automotive supplier can directly use its proven designs (designs that passed numerous tests both by the governing body and customer specification tests) in its quote and present it to potential customers. Once the quote design is approved and accepted by the potential customer, it is a great win for the automotive supplier since they don’t need to design from scratch.

<h3>Better Efficiency.</h3>

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Products that are designed thru CAD softwares are highly reliable and have greater efficiency. Thanks to this powerful softwares especially CAE softwares that provide statistics and analysis by doing simulations that test the functionality of the product. The simulation that this software performed are very helpful since it lets the designers know what part of the design is the weakest and at the same time how these weaknesses need to be addressed in order to pass design specifications. Additionally, predictability for which the design of the product would experience failure and malfunction; are available for designers and that is of great help since it allows engineers to improved its design and perhaps slightly decreased its quality especially if it is found out to be over-engineered and over-designed. In other words, this allows the team of engineers and designers to have a better decision making in their projects since the results of simulations generated by this softwares are close to reality.

<h3>Very Great Tool for Everybody.</h3>

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Well, the mentioned benefits are mostly for the corporate side, but this softwares too are very helpful to students who are fond of designing 3D models and are inclined to the recent trend of 3D printing technology wherein 3D printers are getting smaller and smaller and very handy and very smart, imagine a 3D printer being operated by a smartphone. Since there are free and open source softwares especially FreeCAD, which helps designers/users have a perfect design thanks to its constraint sketching feature. With this current trend in 3D printing, DIY (do it yourself) activities are made easier and much convenient to users since they can have their customized designs for their own usage which is fulfilling to achieved.

Well, those are thoughts on the importance of CAD/CAE softwares to mankind. I’m pretty sure everyone has its own thoughts; the thoughts above are based on my experience.

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Stay tune for my future blogs!

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Much love and respect.

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