Does it feel like your business isn’t growing?

You are not alone! It’s not surprising that under the pressures of a typical business day that a lot of people take an atomistic view of their tasks in the effort to ‘knuckle down’ and ‘dig deep’ to meet customer demands. Sure, it gets the job done, but are you working harder than you need to be and at what cost? Is your bottom line, or even worse, your quality suffering?

Here we present 5 steps you can take to guarantee that you build the right framework to ensure that not only can you start to work smarter, but you can continue to easily implement new ways of improving your business with the least friction.

These steps will enable your business to react quicker to customer demands, exceed quality criteria, reduce wasted time on mistakes, meet statutory compliance and more importantly provide valuable time back to your business for growth.

1) Invest in a CAD suite

Admittedly its hard to shift away from what we are used to, especially if we already invested time and money in existing process and software. However, whether you are using in-house tools or a legacy CAD system, it have never been the best time to consider what is available on the market to capture your designs. Good quality CAD tools will make it easy to capture design and engineering intent, allow you to share and collaborate, and produce the outputs to make it easy to manufacture. 

Lecacy tools may still provide the base functions – but do they connect to the modern world and are their data formats still relevant?

2) Invest time in your parts libraries 

You may have parts on the shelf you want to reuse – those you are familiar with, those you stock etc. Now is a great opportunity to plan and use best practice to ensure your library of components is structured in a controllable and scalable manner to serve you well for the next few decades. In my experience, good library management is the keystone of the most successful organisations.

3) Understand your customer needs

Consider what your customers need back from you in terms of deliverables. It may require data in particular formats, outputs with certain graphical properties, custom drawing frames or perhaps integration with their processes. Now is a great time to set up your customer profiles and templates to ensure every new job is a one click process to get going.

Configuring your customer profiles will pay dividends simplifying the management of your customers varying requirements

4) Implement in an automated QA process

We all make mistakes! Studies have shown that high-detail repetitive tasks in complicated CAD drawings are easy to miss. One mistake in a drawing can cause critical manufacturing issues down the line and often cost more than the project to rectify. Tools that aid in the QA process, be it design-rule checks, electrical-rule checks or even manufacturability-checks will ensure that all mistakes – trivial or critical – are prevented from getting to the customer.

5) Re-used tried and tested manufacturing data and process

Having existing drawing and data modularised and ready to cut & paste into new drawings and revisions will be a massive boost to your efficiency. Known good design blocks and components will allow you to turn around work and quotations quickly. Up-versioning a design becomes trivial as all the impacts of the changes are automatically calculated and new outputs automatically generated. This is a real level-up for your business!

wire harness design software reverse engineering
Arcadia has powerful tools for digitising line drawings and converting them into CAD

How Arcadia can help

Our Arcadia electrical CAD suite contains all the features needed to help you along each step, our browser-based cloud suite is used by companies all over the world in almost every industry imaginable. From designers to manufacturers Arcadia contains everything needed to take a customers retirement and result in a manufacturable and testable product with the tracking and accountability you need to be confident of the correct result, first time, every time.

Please feel free to get in touch with us to discuss any of your concerns or requirements you have in your business. We are here to keep the industry productive. Additionally, if you are interested in our Cloud SaaS Electrical and Harness design software head over to www.cadonix.com or email info@cadonix.com for more information.

Andrew Armstrong https://www.linkedin.com/in/drandrewarmstrong/

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