Design Reuse

Transferring Design Expertise to the Next Generation of Engineers

Engineers continuously revise and improve product designs in order to address demanding industry and customer specifications. At the same time, they regularly re-use elements of older, successful designs to mitigate risk and compress cycle times. The problem is that most of the knowledge, details and expertise incorporated into the older designs reside in engineers’ heads or in notebooks. Today’s CAD software tools cannot capture design decisions such as why certain materials or methodologies were used to create the previous design. As a result, new-generation engineers are forced to “rediscover” why these critical decisions were made or risk creating design changes that could actually cause manufacturing problems and negatively impact the producibility of a product.

In addition, as today’s leading manufacturers outsource design and development responsibilities to OEMs and suppliers around the world, it is more critical than ever to efficiently capture and transfer design expertise to ensure the precise, accurate manufacture of final parts.

VISTAGY’s specialized engineering environments, powered by our unique EnCapta® technology, address these challenges by capturing the critical rationale and key characteristics of design decisions. Engineers can, for the first time, associate important non-geometric detail to the 3D model of a part, define a complete digital product definition, and efficiently share the detail downstream to globally-distributed manufacturing teams. By capturing this information in a single repository, VISTAGY enables future generations of engineers to more rapidly determine how products can be modified and improved without violating past design successes.

With VISTAGY software, engineers can:

  • Identify key characteristics for design domains and capture the rationale of why particular design decisions are made;
  • Provide a way to communicate design details around the world to ensure accurate part manufacture;
  • Enable today’s next-generation of engineers to confidently make design changes that will not impact past design successes.

To read about our customers’ success using EnCapta for design reuse, please click here.