CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
17 October 2005
Product News
Kubotek USA and SolidWorks Partner to Demonstrate Leadership in CAD Interoperability
Kubotek® USA, Inc ., supplier of KeyCreatorT (formerly CADKEY®) design and manufacturing software, announced the company has entered a new alliance, joining the SolidWorks Solution Partner program. The partnership supports the company's focus on providing solutions that ease CAD interoperability, allowing designers and engineers to easily share product data and models.
"The reuse of data and model components from existing CAD files is a widely accepted practice but unfortunately, our recent Interoperability Survey ( view summary ) showed that only six percent of engineers receive files in their preferred format," said Bill DeAngelis, sales manager, The Americas, Kubotek USA. "KeyCreator software's flexibility and ease-of-use make it the perfect companion to SolidWorks® software."
"SolidWorks customers work in multi-CAD design and manufacturing environments," said Brian Houle, manager, Solution Partner Program at SolidWorks Corporation. "KeyCreator provides the tools to easily import and modify design data from virtually anywhere and quickly bring these designs directly into SolidWorks software."
KeyCreator's geometric architecture is optimized to work with various CAD models, integrating them into a single CAD environment. It reads files from other leading CAD tools available on the market and provides the geometric editing capabilities designers need to repair and modify those models for more efficient use in a SolidWorks design environment.
Like most manufacturing companies, Anderson Power Products® (APP) of Sterling, MA, an industry leader in the design and manufacture of high power interconnects and accessories, has a multi-CAD environment. The design engineering team works primarily in SolidWorks; and the manufacturing engineers choose KeyCreator largely for its flexibility. The company's customers send Anderson's designers a potpourri of Pro/ENGINEER, Autodesk, UGS NX and other, assorted proprietary CAD files. Anderson uses both KeyCreator and SolidWorks when it comes to creating illustrations of products for use by the marketing and sales teams.
Danna Mancini, Anderson's manager of engineering services explains the benefits of a multi-CAD environment. "All our product design and tooling projects start with 3D models created in either SolidWorks or KeyCreator. Those models end up being shared within our global engineering group, as well as with customers and suppliers. For example, 3D models of new products created in SolidWorks are passed on to manufacturing engineers who then import those files into KeyCreator for development of molds, fixtures and other production equipment. The approaches and the tools themselves are complementary, and allow us to easily work together and share files."
KeyCreator is designed to work on imported models as if they were native files. "With KeyCreator, users do not need to maintain several CAD products in order to be able to reuse legacy data. This saves companies time and money as they don't need to support a multitude of CAD applications," said DeAngelis. "KeyCreator's direct editing capabilities allow engineers and designers to easily edit features on imported models, manipulating the actual geometry, not the model construction steps, and dynamically discover features and edit them."
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