cad productivity & standards

• Do you routinely spend time manipulating the drawings and data you receive from your clients, vendors, and colleagues before you can use it?
• Does information you manually input into your CAD drawings already exist in an electronic format somewhere else? Or, is basically the same information being read off your drawings and input into other applications used by other departments?
• Do you have to contend with problems that arise because the information in your CAD application doesn’t match what’s supposed to be the same information in some other business system?
• Do you have issues associated with time delays in getting critical information into the hands of those who need it in a timely fashion?
• Do the downstream consumers of your design data have to edit what you give them in any significant way before they can use it?
• Do tensions exist between various groups within your organization because how information does or doesn’t move between them?

If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the questions above, DWGraphics can partner with you to remove the roadblocks that are limiting the productivity of your organization. And it’s highly likely that the solutions we develop will pay for themselves by preventing expensive mistakes, keeping projects on schedule, and/or potentially freeing up large blocks of time that can used to do more business with the same resources.

For more information or to arrange a time for us to do a CAD workflow assessment for you, call us 509-991-7350 or send us an email at ContactUs@DWGraphics.com.

Implementation of CAD Standards

There most obvious benefit of standardization is that it enables the people on your design team to work together. Anyone can on your design team can open up a drawing file created by someone else and begin working on it immediately without having to become familiar with how it’s put together. If you haven’t already developed good CAD standards in your organization, the savings in billable hours for multiple people over a year’s time can be quite astounding.

But a more powerful benefit of standardization is that it is also the key to automation. When every drawing you create is built in the same consistent fashion, they can be processed programmatically in a myriad of interesting ways that can have an enormous impact on your bottom line. For instance, we could develop an application for you that would total up the cumulative length of all the line work on a given layer to determine how much baseboard, wire, or pipe you need to order for a particular project. But this can only work if you’ve adhered to the drawing standards you’ve established and are certain all the entities are on the proper layers.

DWGraphics can help make drawing standards a reality at your organization by making it EASIER to for your users to adhere to them than it is to deviate from them. We do this by embedding your standards into AutoCAD’s user interface – its menus and toolbars and palettes. DWGraphics can help you move from drawing lines and polylines to drawing baseboard, wire, and pipe. Which in turn lets you automate tasks like material takeoffs or cost estimates. With our help, you’ll see faster turnaround times on your design work, improvements in the accuracy of your estimates, fewer errors, and as a result, higher profits.

AutoCAD Customization Services

AutoCAD is a tremendously powerful program out of the box, but very few individuals or organizations tap the full potential of the application.

• Have you reaped the benefits you can achieve by tuning the user interface of your AutoCAD-based application to the work you perform day in and day out so you can reap the productivity increases it is possible to achieve?
• Have you developed routines to automate the repetitive or tedious design tasks you see over and over again? How much time could you save if you had a program do those tasks instead of you? What would you do with that time?
• Have you made your library of blocks intelligent by embedding attributes in them? And if so, are you taking advantage of that fact by extracting that attribute data they contain for use in other areas of your business operations?

If you haven’t customized AutoCAD in these or other ways yet, you’re essentially leaving money on the table. At DWGraphics, we’re all about helping you become more efficient so you can reduce your costs and take home a better paycheck at the end of the day.

Inventor Customization Services

If your organization designs families of products, Autodesk Inventor has a series of tools – iParts, iAssemblies, iFeatures, and iMates – that can be harnessed to automate your design and documentation work. At DWGraphics, we can help you develop the “factories” for these products so you can create entire designs in almost no time at all based on inputs from a configuration spreadsheet.

We can also tap into Inventor’s programming environment to create add-ons to automate other aspects of the application. If you have ideas you’d like to discuss, please call or email us.

Custom Programming Services

DWGraphics can develop applications of all types to fulfill needs within your organization. We can:

• Parametrically build parts or assemblies from data read into your CAD application from a spreadsheet or database
• Exchange CAD drawing data with any VBA-enabled application, including Excel, Access, CorelDRAW, Adobe Illustrator, and others.
• Batch entire folder trees of drawing files to perform global updates, search for information, and so forth.
• Convert your legacy AutoLISP routines into Visual Basic to improve their performance, make them more maintainable, make it possible for them to interface with other VBA-enabled applications, and to provide opportunities for a richer user interface.