Delivering successful products to market takes research, investment, and experience—but it isn’t a one-horse race. The competition is fierce. If you don’t design and engineer products that customers love, your competitors will.
Even when you deliver a superior product, arriving late to market can affect your ability to establish your brand as the market leader, reducing the proportion of the market you can capture.
Growing market share can help your company improve product profitability, increase competitive advantage, and even raise your company's bargaining power.
73% of business leaders surveyed for the 2023 State of Design & Make by Autodesk planned to increase product and service innovation investment. So, how can improvements in your design, engineering, or R&D process improve market growth and profitability for your company?
73% of business leaders surveyed for the 2023 State of Design & Make by Autodesk planned to increase product and service innovation investment.
Growing market share with product innovation
Isn’t market share considered a job for marketing and sales? The reality is that the foundation for market growth is innovation.
Innovation takes investment and time. Even for companies with a budget for R&D, the problem is time. With limited design and engineering resources, the concern is that investing time in innovation will mean falling behind on current project work.
With competing pressures from the support of your released products, overseeing your current products in manufacture, and the new product ranges you are working on, how can you find time to think ahead?
Modular Design, Design Standards, and Function Automation Using Inventor and iLogic, a class led by Demir Ali, shows how organizations are using design automation to reduce engineering time and create time for innovation.
Learn how organizations are developing standards-based designs, capturing engineering knowledge, developing recipes from existing assemblies to help build new designs, and automating tasks such as the creation of manufacturing drawings using Autodesk Inventor’s native functionality and the iLogic rule engine.
Improve profitability
Growing market share can increase revenue, which in turn can increase profits. Your other big lever for increasing profit is to reduce the production cost of your product.
Your 3D CAD model is not just a tool to visualize and communicate your design, your design and its data are key to optimizing your production process.
Your 3D CAD model is an investment of time that reaps rewards when it is shared with downstream teams in your company.
One of the easiest tasks to automate from a 3D CAD model is the creation of a Bill of Materials (BOM)—a list of all the components needed to manufacture the design. The BOM is added to and used by many teams across your organization, including procurement and manufacturing. Manually compiling the BOM can be laborious and prone to error.
In the AU class, Autodesk PDM and PLM: For the Long Run, Anthony Monty reveals how Woodway is implementing BOM management from Inventor to ERP—to reduce errors caused by manual processes and data re-entry.
Kelly Young gives us a great example, showing how 3D CAD models can be used downstream in his AU class, All You Do in One Platform—CAD to Nesting to CAM in Inventor, showing how to design data is repurposed to optimize the arrangement of components on sheet goods and then program CNC machines.
Dimitri Van Nuland Carl Schelfhout of Reynaers Aluminium show us how they use manufacturing data to supplement project management and New Product Introduction (NPI) in their AU class, Fusion Lifecycle and Vault: The Synergy.
The retained link is the big advantage of using a single data source to connect design and manufacturing workflows. If the design data is updated, the manufacturing data reflects the changes. No time is lost looking for the correct and current files or wrangling geometry and repeating programming work.
This provides an opportunity for product companies to move from a ‘Waterfall’ approach to design and manufacturing, where each person completes a task before handing it over to the next person, to an ‘Agile’ approach, where teams can work concurrently, reducing time-to-market while maintaining, or even improving, the quality of the design-engineering-manufacturing process.
Learn more about design automation
To continue learning how design engineers like you are using design automation and configuration to improve the profitability of their products and increase market share, check out these playlists of classes from AU, the design and make conference:
- Product Data Management (PDM) classes for design engineering
- Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) classes for design engineering
- CAD management classes for design engineering
For additional free resources for designers and engineers, including case studies and software training, visit our Design & Engineering page.