Global file-locking specialist Panzura has announced the results of its “State of Manufacturing Cross Site-CAD Collaboration” survey it conducted at SolidWorks World 2016. The survey details the top challenges that manufacturing professionals face when working with CAD/CAM applications across sites.
The survey revealed that many organizations struggle collaborating across locations with CAD applications due to long wait times for files to update, incorrect data, data loss, or versioning and replication issues.
50 percent of respondents are currently collaborating across multiple offices using CAD/CAM applications. These respondents indicated that their organisation had over 100 design employees. The data shows that organizations with less than 100 design employees rarely collaborate across sites within CAD/CAM applications.
When asked what challenges respondents had when tasked to collaborate with colleagues across distributed sites, difficulties included:
• Over 32 percent of respondents reported poor performance when accessing files across the WAN.
• 34 percent of respondents were unable to determine when a new file or version had been created.
• 36 percent of respondents experienced multiple copies of the same file.
• 22 percent of respondents were challenged with multiple standard libraries.
• 33 percent described challenges of knowing where to find their files.
• 17 percent listed maintenance of security and server access rights as an issue.
As such, these challenges made a significant impact on the organization, with problems including:
• Nearly 57 percent of engineers had to wait too long for files to update.
• 33 percent of product teams accidentally used incorrect or outdated parts.
• 26 percent had to merge multiple versions or parts of design files.
• 22 percent lost critical project and product data and were tasked with redoing their work
“Manufacturing professionals do not have the time to deal with the challenges associated with collaborating across distributed locations,” said Barry Phillips, chief marketing officer at Panzura. “Cloud technology today has the capability to eliminate these concerns, streamline file sharing and ensure efficient collaboration across offices.”
As luck would have it, Panzura has a technology that can help with these problems. The company’s global element locking technology is designed to make it much easier for multiple users at many different sites to collaborate. It can work in conjunction with a PDM or PLM solution providing improved file access and collaboration for all locations, while eliminating the need for replication.
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Panzura has already made a name for itself in the Architecture Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry by helping users of Autodesk Revit and other applications overcome the issues of latency when opening files remotely across large distances.
Last year, DEVELOP3D’s sister publication AEC Magazine spoke with engineering consultancy C&S about how it used Panzura technology to overcome collaboration issues when using Autodesk Revit.
