Computer aided design package Essay

A company called Engineering ? Us have employed me to find out the cost, benefits and the drawbacks of upgrading from their current method of hand made technical drawing to using an up-to-date Computer Aided Design (CAD) package. This company designs and constructs office furniture to order; because of this work only begins on an item once the exact details of the item have been calculated and have the clients’ approval. The current method which is used to gather the information that the designers need to make the drawings for the office is to send over a person to measure the location where the item or items of furniture will be located and how they will get the item into the building. After this has happened and the measurements have been given to the designers the designers will draw the blueprints by pen and paper. After they have drawn the design they will send the blueprint via one of the company’s employee’s to the client for him/her to look at and decide if it is what they wanted. If the client decided they liked the design the blueprint would be sent down to the workshop where they would start construction of the design. If the client didn’t like the blueprint that the designers had made Engineering ? Us would find out from the client what was incorrect with the blueprints, then the designers would redesign the blueprints with the client’s inputs in mind. After this it is shown to the client again to see if it is to their liking. The reason the company is upgrading to a CAD based system from their hand drawn method is that up until now they have only had to make items on a smaller scale with a lot of time allowed for each project. Currently they allow the designer to make the drawings on the A0 paper taking their time which would take a few months, then have it sent to the manufacturing department to be constructed. Now they have managed to negotiate a contract with another company who will require Engineering ? Us to make the items faster, this means that they will need the technical drawings drawn faster so they can construct the items sooner. To allow this to happen they have decided to change from their current system to a computer based system using a CAD package appropriate to their needs. Engineering ? Us is a small company; they have one office and a workshop which are situated in separate places. The office block is where the items are designed and the workshop is where they are constructed using the designs from the office block. To transport the drawings from the office block to the workshop they walk over from the office block to the workshop with them, the reason they do this rather than any other method is that the two locations are very close together. Engineering ? Us has ten people working in the workshop where they are constructing the designs that are made and they have two designers drawing the blueprints in the office. There are also seven people who take blueprints out to clients to make sure that they like the drawing before Engineering ? Us constructs the design. These five people also take orders and measurements of the areas where the clients want the items to be placed and deliver the items to the client using a company van. The company has three supervisors, one is in charge of the technical drawing department, one is in charge of the workshop and one is in charge of the five people who communicate directly with the clients. One manager is in charge of all three of the supervisors and then the director of Engineering ? Us is above him. In total this brings the number of employees working for Engineering ? Us to twenty and two of these twenty employees will be using the system I am to justify. The company has recently won a new contract from a client and now has to construct a lot more furniture over a shorter period of time. For the company to meet these demands they have decided to upgrade their workshop to use a CAM machine that will speed up construction. The CAM machine has already been chosen by the company and the training plus everything else that is required for the CAM machine to operate. Engineering ? Us only require me to analysis the designing part of the company and make this more efficient to keep up with the new contract they have acquired. Engineering ? Us wants me to come up with a system that will run a CAD package that I justify for the company to use. This system will have to output a file format compatible with the CAM machine so that they integrate with each other easily. The contract will provide the company with i 60,000 at the end of the year once all of the items have been constructed and delivered to the client. This will be paid in instalments at the end of each month of i5,000. This contract will also be renewed with the client providing that Engineering ? Us can adequately provide the items they required within the allotted time frame. The system that I have been asked to come up with will have two users; these two users are currently working with Engineering ? Us and they will need to be trained in using the new system as they have not had any training or experience with any CAD application. They also need to have the capability to back up their drawings daily so that if something did happen to their hard drive they wouldn’t have lost everything. They also want all three computers linked up to their own network separate to any others that the company already have. It also needs to be connected to the internet so they can download updates for their CAD package as updates become available over the internet. The company has given me a budget of i 15,000 to come up with a costing to make or to buy two PCs capable of running a CAD package that I justify and anything else that is needed to run this application. With this budget I will also need to buy an A0 plotter, two graphics tablets, networking equipment and training for the employees on using the CAD package. P2 The company currently has two computers in their office block; these computers are very old and are only used for word processing for administration tasks. The current specification of their computers is shown in the table below: Component Specification Processor Intel Pentium 166 MHz (Random Access Memory) RAM 30MB Optical drive CD-ROM x8 speed Hard drive 9GB Modem 56K The computers they currently have can’t be upgraded to use any of the new CAD packages because everything in the current computers would all need to be replaced to make it compatible with any new CAD packages. This would effectively mean making a new computer rather than upgrading it, so just constructing a new computer would be a more cost effective way of proceeding. For that reason it would be better to keep these computers for administration purposes they are currently being used for, this would allow the company to still use them and not have to throw them away as they do their current task perfectly. DeltaCAD, MiniCAD, TurboCAD and AutoCAD are four different CAD packages that I have found that could do the job required by Engineering ? Us. The reason I have chosen these four is because the CAM machine in the workshop will only accept . DWG files for reading and if the CAD package didn’t output . DWG files it would not be able to integrate with the CAM machine. These files must be contained on a floppy disk as the CAM machine has only a floppy drive input and then it will read the data from it and construct to the specified design. I have chosen to further investigate three separate CAD packages out of the ones listed above; these three are DeltaCAD, TurboCAD and AutoCAD. The reason I have decided to investigate these further is that DeltaCAD is the cheapest, TurboCAD is the mid range and AutoCAD is the most expensive out of the packages. Using these three will give me a wide band of different costs for the different CAD applications which will allow me to come up with cheap systems, mid ranged and expensive an system for the company. This will help me not only stick to the budget I have been allocated but may also save the company money depending on the over all costs of the CAD package that is used. After finding out more on DeltaCAD, TurboCAD and AutoCAD I have found out that the latest versions of these three CAD packages are DeltaCAD 5. 0, TurboCAD 10 and AutoCAD 2005. DeltaCAD is made by a company called Midnight Software, TurboCAD is made by a company called IMSI and AutoCAD is made by a company called Autodesk, both IMSI and AutoCAD sell other products that are like CAD, but they will not be suitable for the tasks that Engineering ? Us require of it. Upon further investigation I have discovered one problem with TurboCAD that DeltaCAD and AutoCAD don’t have is that the CAM machine might not read the files it outputs perfectly. TurboCAD 10 outputs a different type of file but they state that this type of file is perfectly compatible with any CAM machine that reads . DWG files. Although they say this I think that from past experiences there could be problems from time to time with this type of file on Engineering ? Us’s CAM machine, when these problems arise it will slow the construction process down. P3/M2 I will have to either buy a new PC from a store or make the computers myself; whichever approach is adopted the hardware that will have to be in the machine will be the same and is listed below: Motherboard which will support all other hardware required for the computer   Video card to output a display on the monitor for the user to see what they are doing   CD-ROM drive to install the software applications which will be needed for the task the company requires of it   Floppy Drive to move the . DWG files to the CAM machine in the workshop to construct the items, this can also be very useful for fixing a broken computer or to help analyse its fault   Case for all of the components that will make up the computer to go into. RAM for the computer to open up applications and to keep data that is being used at the present times Hard drive to install the software applications on and store the CAD files created   Keyboard for the users to enter in alphanumeric data and other characters   Mouse or other pointing device for the user to move the curser on the screen   Processor to be able to process all of the data that needs to be processed   Processor heat sink to take heat off of the processor and disperse it into the air. Fans to keep the components inside the computer cool enough to work correctly, e. g. processor fan, case fans and video card fan   DVD/CD reader rewriter drive to back up the drawings that they produce during the day   Monitor for the user to view what they are doing while using the computer Other hardware that will be needed that is not part of the computer and is not needed to get the computer working, but will be required by the company to enable it to do all the work required is the A0 plotter and graphics tablets. An A0 sized plotter will be used to print off the CAD drawings on A0 paper and used to show the blueprints to the clients, they then decide if they like it or not from these blueprints. The reason that they will need to be printed out on A0 size paper is because due to the size of the items they are designing and the amount of information that needs to be shown to the clients it can only be easily displayed on an A0 sized piece of paper. One advantage of the system for the plotters is that there would only need to be one cheap plotter that prints off the drawings in low quality.