3D Visualizations Enhance Decision Making, Quality, and Profits, but Not All Types are Created Equal
If you’re in B2B manufacturing, you know complexity and precision are vital to the successful delivery of your product. Getting complete and often customized products designed, built, sold, and supported post-sale efficiently requires a clear process and absolute accuracy across the entire product lifecycle. Research shows that utilizing 3D visualizations across industrial processes enhances decision-making and optimizes production efficiency, quality, and profitability for manufacturers.
While 3D visualization software for manufacturers offers a powerful way to showcase products, not all 3D is created equal when engineering accuracy matters and needs to be preserved throughout the entire product lifecycle. Artistic 3D visualizations might look great on the trade show floor, in a demo, or on a website, but they often lack the precise details needed for actual production. Additionally, they become unmanageable in maintaining accuracy throughout the sales process or as products evolve post-sale. CAD-based visualization enables a digital thread throughout the entire product lifecycle, ensuring your visualizations reflect up-to-date and accurate digital versions.
CAD-based 3D visualization is a game-changer for manufacturers because it uses your original engineering CAD assets as the ultimate source of truth for your product to generate enhanced 3D visual content. Because of the digital thread connecting your CAD assets to your configured, standard, and spare parts data, the 3D visualizations dynamically update across systems anytime an engineering change is made, or the machine is serviced with a replacement part. Without this digital connection, you cannot ensure accuracy and consistency everywhere throughout the product lifecycle.
Top 10 Reasons Manufacturers Should Choose CAD-Based 3D Visualizations:
Using your core engineering CAD data as the foundation for 3D visuals offers practical advantages that other methods cannot. Here are 10 key reasons why using your CAD assets for visualization is essential to support the entire product lifecycle:
- One Source of Truth for Everyone: The primary advantage of utilizing CAD-based visualization is that everyone operates on a single source of truth. Basing all your visuals on the master CAD data ensures everyone, engineering, manufacturing, sales, marketing, and service, is working with the same, accurate information. Digitization helps you eliminate more disconnected or outdated methods to drive consistency in your complex manufacturing, sales, and delivery processes.
- Faster Design & Less Guesswork: CAD-based visualization lets your sales team, partners, engineers, and customers all see the design in interactive 3D. Because the visualization is directly on the CAD assets, you can inspect issues virtually while giving the customers a visual representation of their product for standard or configured products, as well as service parts. Visual confirmation makes it easy to accurately capture requirements and eliminate errors while speeding up design reviews without needing costly physical prototypes.
- 3D Configurators That Actually Work: Let customers and sales reps customize products visually online. When your 3D configurator is CAD-based, you know the options shown are accurate and manufacturable. Video game-like renderings or basic models can’t provide validated assurance without requiring valuable engineering resources. CAD-based 3D configurators mean what they see is what you can build, which significantly decreases errors in quotes and orders.
- Create Marketing Content that Generates Leads: Need product images or videos to help generate high-quality content for leads? Generate photo-realistic visuals for product pages or utilize 3D configurators online to provide customers with self-service interactivity, supporting their buying journey. An interactive 3D experience significantly enhances engagement, resulting in up to a 250% increase in online conversions. Marketing materials are not only faster to produce and less costly (no photoshoots needed!) but are also guaranteed to be visual and technically accurate representations of the final product.
- Clearer Instructions for Manufacturing Operations: Confusion from ambiguity on the shop floor can significantly impact frontline operations. Building a connected workforce with visually interactive digital work instructions created from original CAD assets is far clearer than relying on PDF manuals or standard operating procedures (SOPs). Workers can see exactly how parts fit together, step by step, when building a component or assembling the final product. When linked to the CAD assets, you empower your frontline to drastically reduce assembly errors and training time while ensuring they build exactly what the customer ordered.
- Better Training and Service Information: Create intuitive 3D service manuals and training guides that empower technicians in the field to perform maintenance more efficiently. Utilizing CAD-based visualizations as part of your training and service instructions provides unprecedented clarity when showing technicians how to take things apart, identify the right parts, and perform maintenance. The clarity speeds up repairs and boosts customer satisfaction without relying on generic and difficult-to-manage 3D models.
- Eliminate Errors and Expensive Reworks: Using CAD assets to visualize the exact product your customers want makes potential problems obvious before anything is manufactured. Spotting configuration conflicts or assembly issues through digital channels saves enormous amounts of time and money compared to fixing mistakes discovered during production assembly or from a customer after delivery.
- Focus Engineering on Innovation, Launch Products Faster: Free your engineers from repeatedly manually updating CAD assets, working on inaccurate quotes, or supporting sales and marketing with product details to allow engineers to concentrate on core innovation and design. CAD-based visualization empowers Sales and Marketing teams to independently generate accurate, engaging content like 3D configurators, website visuals, CAD assets, or other marketing materials before final production starts
- Give Customers a Better Experience: From accurate configurations online and through all sales channels to building and delivering the right product to customers and efficiency improvements through post-sale services, using CAD-based visuals improves customer understanding and trust for the entirety of the product lifecycle. It shows a level of reliability and accuracy that other visuals lack.
- Real Cost Savings Across the Board: The top and bottom line benefits add up fast when 3D visualization can be accurately utilized across the product lifecycle. You can eliminate the need for extensive maintenance from expensive photoshoots and non-CAD digital 3D product renderings while also decreasing waste from manufacturing errors. Using CAD data ensures you have dependable 3D visualization that directly cuts costs throughout the product lifecycle by supporting marketing, sales, engineering, frontline workers, and service technicians with accurate content.\
CDS Visual Helps Manufacturers Leverage Existing CAD Assets to Transform Their Sales Process to Support the Full Product Lifecycle
For manufacturers navigating complex products that require lifetime support and demanding circumstances, relying on just any 3D visualization is not enough. Non-CAD 3D renderings or product photography lack the precision needed to support your complete product lifecycle. A single source of truth ensures the critical accuracy required for marketing, sales, engineering, frontline, and service teams to service the customer across every channel efficiently.
CAD-based visualization for manufacturers drives efficiency, cuts costs by reducing errors and rework, speeds time-to-market, improves lifecycle services, and enhances how customers interact with your products. Don’t let the value of your CAD data stay locked away. Transform it into a versatile tool that benefits your entire business.
CDS Visual is the #1 3D visualization software for manufacturers, helping you transform your engineering CAD designs into powerful visual assets that support the entire customer and product lifecycle.
Ready to see how accurate, CAD-based 3D visualization can streamline your operations and improve your top and bottom lines? Contact us today for a free consultation.
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