CAD Data Mining is Critical to Competitive Decision-making for Manufacturers

Manufacturers' single greatest asset today is the intellectual property captured in their CAD models, according to Elysium Inc.’s new vice president of sales.

“Almost everything being manufactured today has been designed with a CAD system,” said Martin Nowakowski, whose appointment was recently announced by Elysium, a leading global provider of design data exchange software. “To make informed business decisions, the extended manufacturing organization needs to be able to tap into the vast amount of data locked inside proprietary CAD files.”

“For example, if you are a company that sources cast or forged parts, the ability to understand the material used, the type of parts it’s used in, its manufacturing characteristics, and other unique IP assets—all of this has tremendous value to the business intelligence applications in R&D, purchasing, cost-control, supply chain, serviceability and others,” said Nowakowski. “Outside applications, that historically haven’t touched CAD, now can have direct access to that information. You gain competitive advantage by having complete and accurate information immediately.”

Traditionally, extracting such data has been done manually or by opening up numerous drawings, tables and spreadsheets to get information out, a highly time-consuming process. Elysium, which provides leading manufacturers with data translation and repair through CADdoctor, CADfeature, and other types of interoperability software, is now offering customized services for automatically interrogating the CAD geometry and metadata to provide the specific part and product feature information a manufacturer requires to fully empower their business analytics.

“We are seeing a growing need of business enterprise systems for information from the CAD system,” said Ken Tashiro, COO of Elysium. “And with the increasingly global nature of the supply chain, where everyone is operating in a multi-CAD environment, that IP must come through a system-neutral environment. Elysium has specialized in this kind of data management for decades. Martin has joined the company to support manufacturers who need to access vendor-neutral information from their own engineering departments, as well as their supply chains, in order to make effective business decisions.”

Nowakowski brings to Elysium some 30 years’ experience in software and services for engineering applications and analytics across a wide range of industries including automotive, heavy equipment, defense and aerospace. Prior to joining Elysium, he was general manager at manufacturing-analytics specialists, Akoya Inc., and he previously held senior roles at Right Hemisphere, Lattice3D, PTC and other technology companies.