Engine Works saves time and money with subscription-based 3D design software

Engine Works Batavia, Ill., is a $6.5-million assembler and distributor of small engines and parts. It generally builds standard products using off-the-shelf parts from other suppliers, but occasionally a customer requires a custom assembly.

Using traditional 2D CAD software for those projects involves an expensive, time-consuming design-build-verify cycle, says Fred Story, company president. Engineers consult with customers, draw up plans, and build a physical prototype, which usually reveals design errors or necessary changes. Then the drawings are corrected and the cycle begins again.

Story's customers were pushing Engine Works to go to 3D design, which makes seeing and correcting design issues much easier, but most such software is expensive and complicated to learn and use—a drawback for a 14-person company with no IT department—and not all Engine Works' jobs require it.

One of Story's customers recommended the OneSpace Designer Modeling 3D CAD system from CoCreate. Story found the system easy to learn; his engineers became productive on it within two weeks. Using CoCreate also cut design time by half.

"It speeds up the design process," says Story. "More important, 3D enables us to present pictures to the engineers, work with conflicting priorities, and do all that without having to build a prototype."

OneSpace is a "history-free" CAD system. "History" in CAD-speak is a structured piece of code, almost like a recipe, explains Todd Black, marketing manager at CoCreate. "It's a record of all the steps you took to create the geometry to build your design. If you want to go back and make changes, you have to juggle and modify the steps in the 'history' tree," he says.

Because OneSpace eliminates this history tree, designers work more intuitively and updating designs is faster and less error-prone. "You can add new features directly to the model," says Black. "[OneSpace] follows the Microsoft paradigm—almost like cut, paste, modify, edit—enabling anyone to modify anyone else's design."

This dynamic model also makes exchanging data easier. "We receive a lot of models from others and send them on to other people," says Story. "The people providing us with drawings aren't necessarily using CoCreate, but we can still use them easily. Not having to deal with the history tree is a big help."

OneSpace offered another benefit for Engine Works: purchasing flexibility. Using the subscription model, Engine Works buys unlimited access to the software, including all major and minor upgrades, and full support a year at a time.

"It's strictly a financial decision—a matter of what's the best use of the capital. It seemed the dollars for the subscription were reasonable on a yearly basis," says Story.

According to Black, the CoCreate subscription model "is like turning inventory into cash. Companies don't have to allocate funds to licensing. That can prove the ROI without putting a lot of money into it."