White Paper

Leveraging Design Review Processes

into a Digital Manufacturing Age

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© 2011 Lattice Technology, Inc. All rights reserved.
Leveraging Design Review Processes
into a Digital Manufacturing Age
Authored by: Lattice Technology, Inc.

Consistent and accurate digital design review in your digital manufacturing processes is key to achieving the
productivity, efficiency and profitability benefits that have been promised by 3D CAD vendors.

However, these benefits are hard-won: barriers remain in place preventing fast, accurate digi­tal design review. These
barriers include interoperability, inadequate design review tools, problems with accuracy, and issues with data file sizes.
These barriers generally mean that designers and engineers have to resort to manual tactics, ‘work-arounds’, and lengthy
tricks to perform critical design review during their engineering, design and production processes.

This paper sets out processes, technologies and strategies that enable Design Review to remain within a digital
manufacturing process, allowing engineers and designers to do their digital design work seamlessly and effortlessly
using XVL® applications from Lattice Technol­ogy™.

Design

Manufacturing Marketing
Lattice Technology Digital Manufacturing solutions deliver
tools that allow rapid, accurate digital mockup using 3D data
and creation of technical documents for use throughout the
manufacturing process.
Digital
Production Sales
Engineering Manufacturing
with
These solutions add productivity, increase efficiency and
XVL Distribution
reduce costly mistakes in all areas of manufacturing
including: design, engineering, sales, support, procurement,
Procurement QA, service and maintenance.

Service Quality
Management

Copyright
© 2011 Lattice Technology, Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Understanding Design Review

Whenever a product of any kind is developed, diligent manufacturers have to establish a consistent, strong design review
process to ensure that the product meets all standards for design, engineering, manufacturing, safety and branding.

According to 6 Sigma SPC, design review is, “[An] official review, usually by a team or by one’s peers, or both, of the most
important targets in a program’s, proce­dure’s, service’s and/or a project’s design, or process, thus ensuring the optimum plan
prior to the start of project.”

These are systematic, comprehensive, and documented analyses of a design to determine its capability and adequacy to meet
its requirements. A design review also serves to identify present and potential problems.

Design Review is scheduled to occur at specific milestones, for example when concept design has completed and prior to the
product going to detail design. Another key milestone review often occurs after detail design but prior to releasing drawings to
production. This process allows a product to be visually assessed and assured at each stage prior to going into production, and
certain stages will often also involve physical prototypes.

In older, traditional processes for design review in manufacturing, paper drawings would be shared with peers, who would
use them to visually observe and identify conflicts with corporate standards, design problems, and potential problems with
manufacture and production.

Design review in a Digital Manufacturing environment already occurs, but is often bogged down by unanticipated barriers that
eradicate the benefits of digital manufacturing. To help understand the barriers, we will first look at traditional design review
processes, then at how manufacturers try and address it in 3D CAD, and finally the XVL solutions for accurate, rapid and robust
digital design review.

1.1 How does Traditional Design Review Occur?

For design review to have any significant value, design drawings

have to be viewed and assessed by peers, typically by those that
have a stake within the design-to-manufacture process.

As a design is poised to be released from, say, concept design to

detail design, so paper drawings, parts lists and all related data
is delivered to the design review group. This group will visually
identify issues and errors, and manually note errors that may exist.

Prior to releasing the design to the next phase, any issues

identified during design review must be tackled by the originating
designers or engineers. A second design review to ensure the
issues have been solved will be conducted prior to releasing the
design to its next phase.

Figure 1. A team reviews, discusses and redlines paper drawings Typically, a standard manufactured product will have at least 3 milestone
during the traditional design review process. Design Reviews during the process of design to manu­facture.

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© 2011 Lattice Technology, Inc. All rights reserved.
1.2 How Critical is Design Review?

Design Review of a product as it passes from phase to phase is critical to reduce errors in all aspects of the design. An
in­correct choice of material could delay manufacturing, an erroneous thickness on a sheet metal part could make the
design unproduceable. And any delay, or change to a design becomes more costly the later it is identified and changed.

It has long been understood that the cost to a manufacturer of changing a product design when it is going into
production is 10 times higher than the cost that would have been incurred for the same change during product design. It
is 100 times more costly to make that same change during the assembly phase. [source: “The Machine that Changed the
World.” MIT 1990.

As manufacturers have to face huge global competition, deal with rapidly changing consumer expectations,
environmental issues, and increased raw material costs, so the need to create and deliver a product on time and within
budget becomes more and more critical. This means that Design Review processes are key for any product to be
manufactured, and the more diligent they are, the lower the cost of the product will be.

2. Design Review in a Digital Design process

In an ideal world, every piece of technology used would work as advertised – CAD systems would deliver seamless design-to-
manufacture processes at the touch of a button; PLM systems would truly handle product design data all the way from concept
through to end of life of the product; and CAD file formats would not change, ever.

Unfortunately, life is never quite that ideal! Now, don’t be mistaken – 3D CAD has revolutionized design and manufacture
processes, making design more precise, shared across a global network, and allowing products to be delivered to market
faster than ever before. However, when a manufacturer embarks on 3D digital manufacturing or digital prototyping for its
design-to-manufacture process, they can quickly find out that what seemed to be a simple implementation can be fraught with
unanticipated, and poorly solved, challenges. These can include:

• Proprietary CAD file formats that prevent data being shared and used seamlessly
• The rapidly increasing size of 3D CAD assemblies brings up needs for new, better hardware and more CAD seats
• And the CAD systems themselves simply do not have many of the tools needed for actual, seamless design-to-
manufacture process, including fast, accurate design review.

These factors mean that often older, traditional techniques are still being deployed, even in an otherwise digital manufac­turing
workflow. And design review is no exception!

2.1 Design Review processes using only 3D CAD

There are many merits to the ideal of using 3D CAD data in critical areas such as design review. Essentially - and in prin­ciple -
3D is more straightforward and more descriptive than 2D, allowing people to rotate, view and zoom into the design, quickly
understand possible movement of parts and easily understanding details. By having digital data, more people can gain access to
it, and this saves time and effort by not printing paper drawings and shipping them to recipients.

However, as 3D becomes accepted as a standard within the organization, so problems can occur, making use of the 3D CAD
system as a design review platform inappropriate:- As assemblies are created in 3D, so the
size of that data rises, often to uncontrollable levels; When a product has many thousands of
parts, so viewing, using, and sharing an entire as­sembly becomes almost impossible; In this
situation, anyone wishing to work on the data will be forced to use very high end, expensive
computer hardware to deal with these massive files.
Copyright
© 2011 Lattice Technology, Inc. All rights reserved.
Alternatively, users can break up a 3D assembly for review, but this also brings the opportunity for critical errors and prob­lems
that are missed when using sub-assemblies and discrete parts, rather than the complete assembly.

Notwithstanding the need for more powerful computers on which to run large assembly design, so undertaking design review
processes directly on a 3D CAD platform consumes costly CAD licenses that are often needed for other critical design tasks.

Most 3D CAD systems do not easily integrate 3D CAD data from other systems and sources, meaning that entire as­semblies
might be difficult to combine from various parts and sub-assemblies. This can result in unanticipated and costly errors and
clearance problems that might only be found during the expensive production phases.

And ultimately, the design review tools within 3D CAD systems are typically inadequate for the needs of the design team,
resulting in poor design review results that have to be supported by tedious visual checking. 3D CAD viewers can assist with
visual checks and redlining but are very limited in terms of mathematical checks of data.

On the positive side, design review that is performed on a 3D CAD system can allow the data to be modified immediately.
This means that for casual design review, 3D CAD systems can be a useful tool, but are woefully inadequate for the criti­cally
important milestone reviews.

3. Design Review using XVL

XVL applications from Lattice Technology deliver design review tools that eliminate all the barriers previously discussed. XVL
formats compress 3D data with no loss of accuracy, so that mathematically correct design review can occur easily and
quickly. XVL applications deliver the tools for accurate interference, clearance, contact and gap checking, and provide
automated reporting to allow errors and issues to be documented, tracked and resolved. XVL Studio identifies all errors found
across parts and assemblies, listing each error found with a corresponding marker displayed on the 3D data. And the user can
quickly zoom, pan and rotate down to the smallest detail to view each error in 3D and in 2D cross-sections.

3D data in XVL delivers the industry’s most highly compressed format but maintains mathematical accuracy, allowing the data
to be easily exchanged, loaded, viewed and validated by the XVL applications.

These tools deliver benefits that include much faster and earlier identification of errors, more opportunities for design review
throughout the process, highly accurate design review and time savings for product design.

3.1 ‘Front Loading’ effect are realized with XVL

# of design change XVL applications allow for more frequent checking of a digital assembly,
Past and allow manufacturers to establish true simultaneous design processes.
With DR But XVL also delivers the ability to find errors in every part of the design
Design
even earlier in the process. This ‘front loading’ effect allows greater sav­
ings by eradicating errors early, when they are affordable, and avoiding the
Product Engineering
costly risks of finding errors during production phases where the cost of
change rises exponentially.
Manufacturing
Use Case: Major Japanese Automotive Company
Using 3 different CAD platforms to design a complete car assembly
proved problematic for this company. On adopting the XVL digital
Figure 2: The more errors that can be found early, manufacturing applications,
with XVL applications, means that the cost of more
expensive changes later in the manufacturing process the company now rapidly builds
are eradicated. (as in the red line in the image.) More complete or partial car as­semblies for
traditional manufacturing processes usually result in the the following multiple uses.
kind of cost fluctuations as described by the blue line.

Copyright
© 2011 Lattice Technology, Inc. All rights reserved.
 Design • Conducting tests and reviews with XVL that are not possible
Quality with CAD due to large data size
– Wire harness examination
– Assembly Process
– Appearance
New
• Design review
New Defects • Parts system
Defects
• Parts procurement
Existing New
Defects Defects
Existing
At the company, design review reports are used as overall
Defects management sheets, and all problems are investigated until
DR 1st DR 2nd DR 3rd No. of they are completely resolved. In actual operations, design
time time time defects
review is repeatedly carried out during the design stage and
Figure 3. Design review using XVL at the company during the design phases, again after drawings are re-drawn for the final design. Design
which is repeated until each problem is discovered and resolved prior to the review in the design stage is carried out in order to prevent any
design moving to the next phase.(Source: 3D Manufacturing Innovation.
Hiroshi Toriya) problems getting out of the design area. New problems emerge
every day during the company’s simul­taneous engineering
process and repeated design reviews are an effective way to
resolve them before they magnify.

As shown in figure 3, problems are discovered and resolved

with each successive review.

As a result of using Lattice Technology’s Digital Manufactur­

ing solutions, the company tracked efficiency and productiv­ity
improvements in its automotive design process, including:

• Decreased man-hours spent on part interference checking

by two-thirds
• More accurate, intuitive, and easier to use parts system
now substantially faster than before
Figure 4. Entire assemblies of cars are rapidly used, reviewed, manipulated and • Significantly decreased error rates in procurement by
reported in XVL. using interactive 3D viewing/selection or parts in XVL.

3.2 More Errors are found with XVL Design Review

than can be found through manual check

The mathematically accurate checking of 3D data by XVL means that far more errors and problems can be found com­pared to
manual checks. Although it is difficult to apply a specific ratio to this area, the benefit of XVL Digital manufactur­ing applications
is that assemblies can be larger and more complex than ever before, and yet still be highly accurate, and rigorously checked.

XVL (Automatic Check)

As demonstrated in Figure 5, an XVL customer found that
Past (Visual Check) XVL Design Review, when used on a 3D CAD model, found
about double the errors than were found during manual and
visual checks on the same model within its CAD system.
These errors can be everything from interference, clear­ance,
contact and gap issues within a part or assembly.

XVL Design Review tools also excel at allowing a user to clearly

and unequivocally understand each error or issue found.
For each error found, the user can view it both in 3D and 2D
cross-sections, zooming
in to the smallest part,
Clearances Interference Contact choosing types of display
Figure 5. Using the same model in its CAD system and XVL, in a customer (shaded, wire frame etc.)
situation, visual checks discovered only about half of the errors discovered by
XVL Design Review when checking the same model.
and also view dynamic 2D
Copyright
© 2011 Lattice Technology, Inc. All rights reserved.
 cross-sections. (See Figure 6) Dimen­sions and notes can be
added to these views, and then the images are easily saved for
the automated reporting. Any saved views will be added into
the report spreadsheet linked to the correct part name and
reference.

The automated report spreadsheets also include the part

numbers, the specific location of the problem on the model,
and also the extent of the error found.

Figure 6. An example of interference checking on a large assembly in XVL

showing both 3D and 2D cross-section data simultaneously on a large assembly.

3.3 Design Review using XVL saves time

Users of XVL Design Review have found definitive time-savings in the design review process. This means that the pro­cess is not
only more accurate than manual processes, but can also be carried out faster, and more often, with no loss of efficiency.

XVL delivers time savings not just in the actual identification of design issues, but also by relieving the need for lengthy
preparation of the data – for example, the need to cut massive 3D assemblies into ‘manageable’ sizes is not present with XVL.
Spending time manually thickening sheet metal components is a lengthy chore with 3D CAD, but is automated within the XVL
applications. Automated reporting in XVL Studio cuts away at the time needed to manually create reports out of design review.

In Figure 7, the comparison in hours for design review be­tween a file in XVL Studio and the same file in its 3D CAD system, is
demonstrated. The total time spent to review the 3D CAD
file, including actual checking, creating a data structure,
creating reports, thickening elements, and data gathering is
Hours Spent on Each Task

3D CAD file
270 hours, compared to 90 hours for the same data in XVL,
using XVL Studio.
XVL file
Create Data Structure
Create Report

Data Gathering

Thickening
Check

Figure 7. Time saved comparing manual design review using a 3D CAD file
compared to the same data in XVL. In this customer test, the design review
This XVL customer reduced Design Review hours from 270 using a
process took 270 hours using a 3D CAD system, and 90 hours using XVL.
3D CAD format, down to 90 hours using XVL applications.

Copyright
© 2011 Lattice Technology, Inc. All rights reserved.
3.4 XVL compression provides the industry’s best rates
with no loss of accuracy

XVL rapidly converts 3D CAD data using the industry’s best converters, and uses compression algorithms that make the 3D CAD
data between 50 – 200 times smaller than the original data with no loss of accuracy.

In actual user scenarios, a CATIA V5 file that was 10 Gbytes in size was compressed down to 171 Mbytes using XVL.

Another CATIA V4 file that was originally 400 Mbytes, was

Heavy compressed to 33 Mbytes by XVL.
Slow

In practical terms, this delivers the following benefits to

Size
users:

• Compression of the data means that 3D data can be

easily used and reviewed using even laptops. This relieves
Light the operation from having to invest in high-end hardware
Fast Company A simply to see, use and review 3D CAD assemblies.
Company B • No loss of accuracy of the data means that users does
e V-XVL not have to compromise between data file size and data
im n
ayt tio
sp
l mp ize e fidelity, as they are forced to do with many other ‘exchange’
Di
ns
u es tim
co Fil trol
XVL is No. 1 in Format Performance
ory co
n formats.
m lay 1. File size
• Use of XVL applications means that highly complex,
Me sp
Di 2. Less memory
3. Display performance mathematical calculations can be carried out in record time,
reducing time required for design review by 66%, eliminat­
ing manual errors when only visual review is available, and
Figure 8. Performance benchmarks for XVL compared to 2 other CAD file formats. allowing faster product time-to-market.

3.5 Automated reporting of errors

reduces time spent and increases accuracy

The XVL Studio application allows for the automated reporting of all errors and issues found into Excel spreadsheets. This is
enhanced by the tools within XVL Studio to manually review each problem, test each problem using the interactive 3D views,
3D cross sections and 2D views to establish where the
problem is. Dimensions and notes can be added and each
view saved for inclusion in the spreadsheet.

One heavy machinery manufacturer using XVL

applications found, during its milestone Design Review
process, that 3 people using XVL data could easily handle
3,000 error checks and results (1,000 each).

Figure 9. XVL Studio delivers automated Excel spreadsheet reports that link
saved views of each issue found to the parts list, for easy understanding
and comprehension.

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© 2011 Lattice Technology, Inc. All rights reserved.
4. Conclusion

The use of 3D data throughout enterprises is growing rapidly. Simultaneous to that growth is the increase in size of 3D
assemblies, as digital manufacturing, PLM and digital prototyping processes are established within an operation.

However, there are barriers to using that data that are not readily anticipated prior to implementing such a process. These
barriers include:

• Huge data size preventing re-use of the data in any way

• Lack of interoperability of the data across many disciplines
• Lack of tools to adequately test, simulate and animate the data for useful testing and reporting

The industry needs critical tools to relieve these problems. Solutions that address these are delivered by Lattice Technol­ogy and
which address the following:

XVL delivers the industry’s best 3D data compression rates with no loss of accuracy meaning that engineers do not have to
compromise precision of the data for file size. This also means that tests can be conducted using proven, math­ematically correct
algorithms.

Lattice Technology Digital Manufacturing solutions deliver the tools to interactively interrogate, test, report, simulate,
animate and illustrate directly from your 3D data, and while integrating to your digital process, allow manu­facturers to keep
using their 3D CAD system, PLM implementation, ERP and other business systems of choice.

Automated design review and reporting frees designers from lengthy, arduous and complex design review tasks, as well
as the tedious process of creating reports of errors found. In this way they can focus on the design tasks, not the process of
repeated error checking.

Lattice Technology’s Design Review tools allow for fast, highly precise, automated interrogation of the 3D data, while
delivering interference, clearance, gap and contact checking. Multiple result reporting is easily achieved, along with fast pan,
zoom, cross-sectioning and dimensioning to allow the operator to understand the problem. All saved views are automatically
linked to the part numbers and saved into the Excel spreadsheet report which can be sent directly back to the Design
departments for changes, or as a management tool.

Lattice Technology’s Converter products use the industry’s best interoperability and translation tools from Ely­sium Inc.,
which include world-class healing and repair of data, as well as support for all major 3D CAD platforms, includ­ing 64-bit systems,
neutral files and industry standards such as PDF.

Lattice Technology’s Design Review customers experience huge upsurges in productivity and efficiency using
XVL solutions.

You can find out more about Design Review using XVL Studio by visiting www.lattice3d.com. You can request a one-on-one
demonstration by registering at: http://blog.lattice3d.com/lattice3dcom/solutions/one-on-one-demo/ or by calling +1- 415-274-
1670, and select 1 for Sales.

About Lattice Technology Inc.

Founded in 1997 with headquarters in Tokyo, Japan and San Francisco, USA, Lattice Technology provides global companies with proven digital manu­facturing
solutions for 3D design data across the manufacturing enterprise. With Lattice Technology’s XVL applications, engineers and manufacturers can rapidly perform
design review, simulate assembly processes, automate creation of 3D parts lists / BOMs, and create animations and illustrations directly from very large 3D
assemblies. Lattice’s standards based XVL® (eXtensible Virtual world description Language) technology provides secure, highly accurate and compressed 3D
files that can be used, shared and easily supported by partners, suppliers, and internal departments in a lightweight browser-based solution. XVL® is unmatched
in performance, compression and accuracy. For more information on Lattice Technology’s digital manufac­turing solutions, visit: http://www.lattice3d.com

Trademark statement: XVL, Lattice3D are registered trademarks of Lattice Technology Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Copyright, 2011. Lattice Technology, Inc.

582 Market Street, Ste 1215
San Francisco, CA. 94104, USA
Tel: 415 274 1670
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© 2011 Lattice Technology, Inc. All rights reserved.