MCADCafe Industry Predictions for 2020 – GSC

Editor’s Note: As we have for the past several years, we provide a look back at the past year and the year ahead. This time around we have a new twist. Over the course of the next few weeks, we will be publishing MCAD industry predictions from prominent contributors representing different segments of the industry. These contributed articles should provide some interesting insights!

2020 Industry Predictions by Jeff Setzer, Technology Evangelist at GSC

1. 3D Printing shifts farther into true Additive Manufacturing (AM). Instead of concentrating on making prototypes, the technology will continue to progress into direct end-use applications. New materials, such as carbon fiber, steels and specialty metals will drive more tooling and fixtures to be directly created using additive technologies, and production-quality, higher-volume plastic printers will eat into the smaller-run molded part business.
2. Model-Based Definition (MBD) continues to grow. Companies wishing to take advantage of downstream electronic re-use of product manufacturing information (PMI) for machining and quality applications, in addition to enhanced communications on mobile devices, will proceed with their existing or new Enterprise MBD initiatives.
3. Cloud sharing of engineering data will slowly progress, but the vast majority of companies will approach very carefully to ensure their data is safe and secure. Expect the informal use of tools like Dropbox to be replaced with CAD-aware systems backed by the parent companies of the CAD software developers, while the CAD tools themselves remain largely on the desktop to enjoy the raw speed and licensing flexibility of the local installation.

Tags: Industry Predictions

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