The White Horse CAD Design Cycle – let’s get your ideas to market quicker

Happy Friday! We hope you enjoyed the jubilee celebrations and are having a good week.

This week we’ve been talking to new clients about their ideas and how we can help to develop these into fully functioning products. With this in mind, it feels timely to share a reminder of the White Horse CAD Design Cycle and take you through each step to get your ideas to market quicker.

Firstly, the WHC Design Cycle is flexible enough to work with projects of any size or scale. We listen to our customers and turn their requirements into designs, bringing their concepts and ideas to life using renders, 3D data, animations, and 3D printed parts.

So, just what is the White Horse CAD design Cycle?

Create

For White Horse CAD, the start of the design process is the most critical part of the cycle. In the ‘Create’ stage, listen to our client’s requirements and find out the main design inputs, the design requirements, and the required deliverables. During this stage, our clients share what they would like to achieve, when they would like to achieve it, and any other information that may be important to the project.

The next part of the process depends on the type of project;

Product Design

We create a concept design for product design projects that outlines our interpretation of the design brief. If required, we will develop several design concepts to give the client a selection of options to choose from. At this point, we will highlight any technical or manufacturing challenges we anticipate. We often supply 3D prints to aid decision-making during the early design phase.

Equipment / Tool Design

The process for specialist equipment or tooling is similar to a new product. But as well as presenting early concepts and outline designs, we will investigate off-the-shelf solutions that could potentially be modified or integrated into the concepts.

Paper to CAD

We will scrutinise the supplied paper drawings and highlight any geometry that may be difficult to re-create using the provided data.

Reverse Engineering

If you already have a product but no data, we can Reserve Engineer it. In essence, we will 3D scan your product to create the data to see how something works or to recreate the product.

 

Adapt

Design is a very iterative process. Once we have presented the first few ideas to our clients, we will refine the ideas to include any new requirements or design changes. At this project stage, we are getting to know the clients’ needs and learning their likes and dislikes. The information helps us to refine the early concepts into prototypes. We are also considering manufacturing options and creating CAD data that reflects the clients’ requirements and how the items will be made. Early consideration for manufacturing allows us to create designs for cost-effective manufacturing.

At this stage, we may also suggest a manufactured prototype and will create the first set of fully defined engineering drawings. We are also happy to suggest a local manufacturing partner if required.

Deliver

White Horse CAD delivers a complete set of CAD data and drawings as follows…

• Native CAD data
  • Models
  • Assemblies
  • Drawings
• Other Data
  • PDF versions of all the drawings
  • STEP or Parasolid Files
  • Any reports generated during the design process

We think it’s important that our clients have access to their data so it’s available should they want to make changes in the future. That is why we always make the native CAD data available to them. We understand that some competitors do not share native data with clients unless asked; some even charge a premium fee for this service!

So there you have it – the White Horse CAD Cycle! Please get in touch about your next project and let us guide you through the cycle to get your product to market.