CAD/CAM and Plastics Product Design

Abstract

Many reasons have been cited for the CAD/CAM revolution, among them bourgeoning skilled labor costs, lagging office productivity, and continuing decreasing technology costs. While all of these are important, of paramount importance is increasing productivity while improving product quality. This translates to getting a quality product to market faster amidst ever increasing competitive pressures. CAD/CAM systems have many productivity-increasing features that are relevant to the particular problems encountered during the plastics product design cycle. The typical manual plastic product development cycle includes the following steps: concept design, engineering analysis, product drawings, mold design, mold construction, mold verification, part verification, and, finally, production. Each of these steps has to be virtually completed before the next step can begin. CAD/CAM does not eliminate any of these basic steps, in fact, contrary to most concepts of productivity improvement, it adds several more steps.