Today, Panzura, leading the charge in removing the barrier to the cloud, announced the results of its "State of Manufacturing Cross Site-CAD Collaboration" survey conducted at SOLIDWORKS World 2016. The survey details the top challenges that manufacturing professionals face when working within Computer Aided Design (CAD)/Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) and design applications across sites.
More than 5,000 manufacturing professionals attended SOLIDWORKS World 2016, with a significant portion participating in the "State of Manufacturing Cross-Site CAD Collaboration" survey. The survey revealed that many organizations struggle collaborating across locations with CAD applications due to long wait times for files to update, incorrect data, data loss, or versioning and replication issues.
The survey found that 50 percent of respondents are currently collaborating across multiple offices using CAD/CAM applications. These respondents indicated that their organization had over 100 design employees. The data shows that organizations with less than 100 design employees rarely collaborate across sites within CAD/CAM applications.
Manufacturing firms need to rely on fast, efficient collaboration across sites to remain competitive in the global economy. When asked what challenges respondents had when tasked to collaborate with colleagues across distributed sites, difficulties included:
Over 32 percent of respondents reported poor performance when accessing files across the WAN
- 34 percent of respondents were unable to determine when a new file or version had been created
- 36 percent of respondents experienced multiple copies of the same file
- 22 percent of respondents were challenged with multiple standard libraries
- 33 percent described challenges of knowing where to find their files
- 17 percent listed maintenance of security and server access rights as an issue
As such, these challenges made a significant impact on the organization, with problems including:
- Nearly 57 percent of engineers had to wait too long for files to update
- 33 percent of product teams accidentally used incorrect or outdated parts
- 26 percent had to merge multiple versions or parts of design files
- 22 percent lost critical project and product data and were tasked with redoing their work
The top CAD/CAM applications seen at SOLIDWORKS World 2016 include; SOLIDWORKS CAD, SolidCAM, Dassault Catia, Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk AutoCAD, Revit, Siemens NX, Bentley Microstation and PTC Creo.
"Manufacturing professionals do not have the time to deal with the challenges associated with collaborating across distributed locations," said Barry Phillips, chief marketing officer at Panzura. "Cloud technology today has the capability to eliminate these concerns, streamline file sharing and ensure efficient collaboration across offices."
Based on the results, the current industry solutions are suitable for managing product data -- but they don't solve the poor performance of replicating files over a WAN. Designers and engineers need to access shared project files quickly from anywhere in the world, so CAD and CAM applications need to work as well across offices as they do within a single office.
Panzura, with an established expertise in the AEC industry, provides manufacturing customers with the proven and patented global element locking technology to handle multiple users and many different sites, all to make collaboration feel as if users are sitting next each other instead of on different continents. The Panzura Global File System can work in conjunction with a PDM or PLM solution providing improved file access and collaboration for all locations, while eliminating the need for replication.
