As students go through our CAD courses here at NTI they should remember that CAD terminology does not fly with other members of an organization.  The CAD industry has done a very poor job in standarizing its language so that marketing, managers, human resources, etc… can understand what CAD users are talking about.  This limits communication that is vital to successful project/product launches or even the hiring of useful staff to an organization.

To that end CAD users must remember that they have gone through extensive training to understand the CAD tools they use day in and day out.  The rest of the organization has not.  When it becomes time to discuss projects, issues or even what they are working on leave the CAD terms at the door. 

 Terms I am refering to are, but not limited to: any name given to a particular CAD function (Loft, sweep,…),  any term used to describe the interface (feature manager tree, graphics interface,…) so on and so forth. 

 CAD users must speak to others in the organization at their level.  When discussing a “Lofted Feature” break this down to it’s primary components; maybe something like “…this feature is a blending that starts as a rectangular shape that tranistions to a circular shape to provide…”.  this is much easier for the non-CAD users to digest than, “…here I LOFTED a rectangular profile to a circular profile…”  here a non-CAD user might think you are talking about the shape of a room (Loft).

 More to come…..

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 9:39 am under SolidWorks, Pro Engineering, AutoCAD, Engineering. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.