Would you like to increase part re-use but are lacking in the necessary tools?

Whether you are an engineer, designer or executive manager, you probably realize that companies that adopt automated part re-use strategies have the potential for huge cost savings. Here are some of the main benefits of a part re-use strategy:

• Eliminates the creation of duplicates. If you can find it in your database you won’t design it again.
• Reduces inventory costs. If you stop creating duplicates, they won’t end up in inventory.
• Reduces tooling, prototype and testing costs. With fewer new design parts you also cut the associated manufacturing costs.
• Knowledge re-use in core engineering. You can leverage knowledge in existing designs to create new ones.
• Increase engineering productivity. With fewer new designs, you can allow more time to optimize the newly created.

The key to a successful part re-use strategy is to have the ability to search on the basis of shape to find identical or similar items. However, most companies have yet to adopt such strategies because traditional search engines do not yield acceptable results. They use alphanumeric characters or metadata (data about data) as search criteria rather than the actual part geometry.

3DSemantix has created semantics that “speak” the 3D shape language necessary for accurate searching for similar parts within one’s directory. The 3DPartFinder is a shape-based search engine that uses these new semantics to help you find all similar or identical parts within seconds.