Peter Leihn, product marketing manager, manufacturing, South Asia Pacific for Autodesk shares his views on the benefits of AutoDesk’s latest products, and the future plans of the company with Punita Jasrotia

What is AutoCAD Mechanical 6?
AutoCAD Mechanical 6 is AutoCAD for mechanical design and engineering, offering intelligent production drawing and detailing with standards-based design and content. Built on AutoCAD 2002 software foundation, we believe that AutoCAD Mechanical 6 will become the preferred choice for AutoCAD-based 2D mechanical design in the Internet age.

Until now the industry has not paid too much attention to the mechanical segment, as manufacturing is viewed as an integral part for economic growth. However, with AutoCAD Mechanical 6, we are providing an exclusive focus on this segment. We aim to establish that engineers are meant for design, and not for drafting tools. AutoCAD Mechanical 6 provides a better grasp of the subject to mechanical engineers and the overall manufacturing industry. We plan to run a series of user seminars across India with special focus on the mid-segment.

The product has enhanced design and detailing tools, built-in-IGES translation, better workflow, standards compliance, and provides simpler administration and deployment. The latest version of AutoCAD Mechanical also helps produce drawings, BOMs and reports, and shares design data on Autodesk Streamline, the new hosted collaborative service.

What are the features that would attract a customer to this product?
AutoCAD Mechanical 6 has been optimised for mechanical engineering and design, intelligent production drawing and detailing and standards-based design and content. Also, it has all the advantages of AutoCAD 2002 with additional functionality to address the 2D mechanical design market.

This product offers immense benefits. The biggest advantage lies in the kind of savings that it provides, amounting to 80 percent, as compared to previous tools. Starting right from driving customer productivity, (done through improved design and detailing tools), to improvements in the collaboration efforts with the extended manufacturing team, this product offers a lot of advantages.

It makes design changes 15 times faster than the usual AutoCAD.

This product is so extensive that it looks into every single part of design, which will help us in establishing a better relationship with our clients. The layer group enhancements in the AutoCAD design centre allow you to search for and re-use design data quickly and easily. Preview graphics of existing designs are displayed at the AutoCAD design centre to provide visual feedback during the search process. Besides this, the user can also freely share data quickly and efficiently with customers and suppliers with different CAD/CAM/CAE systems. In addition to this, the CAD department can easily install AutoCAD Mechanical 6 within the same environment without loss of productivity.

Could you elaborate on AutoDesk’s plans for Streamline?
We are planning to introduce this product by October. Basically, Autodesk Streamline is a hosted collaborative service, which will help in better design collaboration.

Autodesk Streamline’s advantage lies in its functioning—it can operate seamlessly with Autodesk Mechanical Desktop 6, as well as the 3D design system, Autodesk Inventor. With AutoCAD Mechanical 6 you can create designs and leverage them for collaboration with your extended manufacturing team.

Through this hosted Web service, companies can share their personalised design data across the manufacturing team. Once data is published on Autodesk Streamline, viewers can easily view and interact with this design data without having to wait for it to download. This is because the data streams to the screen, based on the user’s preference, allowing for incremental, smooth data transition even for assembly models consisting of thousands of parts. The Autodesk Streamline basically has two versions—the hosted and the installed version.

How important is India to AutoDesk?
India is a very strategic market for us and that’s the reason why we are looking at introducing three products simultaneously. We also plan to introduce the sixth version of 3D tools, namely the Autodesk Inventor series, by the end of October. Plans to get aggressive in our education initiative is also on the anvil.

In the next quarter, Autodesk would be introducing the ‘manufacturing curriculum’ in the Indian market, which would focus on different aspects of basics of design for engineers, manufacturing and modelling. For this, the company is already in talks with most of its training partners—engineering colleges and polytechnique institutes.

In addition to this, the company also plans to hold a series of seminars for making the product more viable to new and existing users.