Key Points to Remember Before Starting a CAD Migration Process

Despite the exponential growth in recent years, product-data inter-compatibility and CAD interoperability still persists to be a key issue plaguing most businesses around the world. This is perhaps the biggest impediment smothering an organization's efforts to establish an effective and efficient collaboration amongst its various internal as well external teams associated with product development and manufacturing. Technical-data inter-compatibility issues may arise in many areas during a typical product development process, but the most notorious amongst them usually occur while trying to read or export the data from one CAD system to another.

Worse still, in some cases different versions of the same CAD system may also repudiate inter-compatibility. This, needless to say, emerges as the single largest source of wastage of cost and resources in any complicated mechanical engineering project. That's why it is imperative for project managers to lay down well defined CAD migration policies even before the design phase begins.

Things to know to ensure that your migration policy succeeds and produces desired results:

The amount of data in a CAD migration process: For example, if there are about 1000 native files in the "source" system, you need not waste much time in the selection process and might just begin the legacy data migration phase leaving aside the obvious junk files. However, if the amount of raw data is enormous (e.g. 1,000,000 files), then the need arises for you to spend some time pondering which files are worth leaving behind.

There are many factors that might make a large chunk of the raw data in the source system unworthy for automated migration. It is important to identify these issues up front, so that you can be prepared proactively before CAD migration. Taking care of the following points will ensure that only the necessary data is migrated:

1. Suffixed/prefixed file names: These are the files with correct moniker, but may have some extra (mostly unnecessary) info in the form of a prefix or suffix
2. Invalid file name: Sometime the files may have names that do not match any moniker-standard at all
3. Legacy naming conflict: If the organization has been in business for long, then it is possible that some of the legacy data comply with old standards, which are no longer valid with the newer data regulations and standards
4. Different versions of a file stored in different directories: It is usually expected that all versions of the same file are stored within a single directory, or at least in a predefined set of locations. However, that does not always happen, and what one could take for the latest version of a file, in fact, might not be the latest after all as the actual latest file was probably stored in another directory.

These are only few scenarios where improper data may occur and it varies with organizations. One needs to carefully avoid such scenarios, so that migration yields the desired results.

With a simple data model, it is usually safe to leave the assigning of item-types to a user. However, when the data model is complicated, it is always safer to turn to a decent automated tool to handle the task. Project managers also need to figure out how much design history is actually required, will the latest revision suffice, or the current working plus latest released will serve the purpose better. If required, they may also need to consider embarking all released revision.

Why outsource CAD Migration Process?

Project managers need to decide if the CAD migration process should be outsourced to a third-party or whether the internal team is capable of handling it on their own. The latter can be effective only when there is a scope to form multiple teams, and assign them individual responsibility to migrate own data. However, this strategy can also backfire in case there is not enough manpower with the required skill set and/or experience. In such a case, outsourcing to India is the best way to execute the CAD migration successfully, as it will be faster, accurate and cost-effective.

Outsource2india is one such outsourcing company that has multi-industry expertise in managing CAD migration, CAD translation and CAD conversion process. Contact us today for outsourcing CAD migration processes and talk to one of our executives to understand our CAD offerings better.