Digitization Forces CAD Admin to Evolve

Manufacturers and design companies are widely spread out along the digitization spectrum. Some have just begun, and others have digitized every area of the business they can reach.

Digitization is really a modern word for connecting business processes electronically through data, storage, retrieval, and connections. Computers were first brought in to companies to run lists and spreadsheets. This type of data is easy to understand, and information technology (IT) employees understand it well.

But as CAD was introduced, it became clear that a different type of technology manager was required to administer the CAD system. So should a CAD Admin be from the pool of users or from the IT department? This question can be debated, but it is usually settled by selecting the CAD user with the best IT sense.

I’ve written about CAD Admin before, and the special skills involved, along with the wide range of definitions applied to the position. Part of what the CAD Admin gets saddled with is all of the applications that come downstream from CAD. This like PDM and FEA. Part of the issue here is that for an increasing number of companies, this list of acronyms keeps increasing, and the CAD Admin job is already overloaded with honorary titles, plus, all of this really does require some IT skills, but it is mainly beyond what you could expect your average IT employee to really understand. Not to dis IT people, but would you trust a general IT person to set up your assembly templates, or write best practice for non-linear FEA or conduct training for your company’s library system?

Technology doesn’t bring you any benefits on its own. Simply buying a CAD or PDM system doesn’t bring you any savings in process time. You have to have a plan and the knowledge to implement the plan. You have to know how to get and interpret relevant results. You have to know your existing process and what would constitute an improvement to that process.

The people who administer all of this digital design process technology are much more than just CAD administrators. They also have to have a real Zen of Software kind of mindset, on top of an instinct for all of the CAD-and-downstream intuition. Wiring, plastics processing, stress analysis, large deformation non-linear analysis, thermal, electro-magnetic, flow simulation, motion simulation, manufacturing simulation, PDM, MRP, and the list goes on of the kind of applications that use data the flows downstream from CAD tools. Since all of this software is somewhat related and drinks from a single data stream, your company really needs one person who is responsible for keeping it all rolling. That includes managing ancillary processes such as evaluation, purchase, installation, licensing, training, tech support, data sharing, storing and revision controlling results, writing best practice documents, and more.

As the company gets deeper into the digitization rabbit hole, the CAD Admin needs a deeper relationship with IT to help establish and coordinate hardware and OS and software upgrades/updates, remote deployment of software, not to mention training, troubleshooting and tech support coordination

The bigger your company, the more territory your CAD Admin has to cover. But by this time, you should probably have a different name for the overworked CAD Admin. Director of Technology? Manager of Engineering Services?

At one of my favorite jobs, I had the Manager of Engineering Services title. I did the CAD Admin gig along with providing overflow design services for design and manufacturing departments, the document change process, file management, and technical writing. To me, this was very fulfilling work, and I was constantly learning new areas of engineering technology that I wasn’t familiar with.

This position for me was probably the spring board for my subsequent involvement in technical and training authoring. I had already done a lot of tech support and training as well as software implementation at that point. The point here is that when a job requires so many different skills, you never know where it will lead, and offers you many different opportunities.

A lot of the skills you need in this job are not necessarily skills that you already have. You have to learn some of them on the job. One way I did this was to have a list of bookmarks for manufacturer’s websites, blogs, forums and Facebook pages of various experts or discussion areas. A list of resources you use your self and hand out to others when they ask for help you can’t provide immediately is really essential to being effective beyond your actual experience.

Conferences are another great source of concentrated information on a topic. And in the age of covid, many of the on-line resources are actually recorded, so you can access them at a time and place convenient to you. On-line conferences are much cheaper and time-efficient, as well as accessible. This is one aspect of professional life that I hope never goes back to the way it was. On-line conferences make so much more sense, although I will miss the airports, slogging through conference centers, cab rides, coming home with some illness I caught at the conference or on the plane, the aching feet, exhaustion, finding clothes other than sweats or pajamas… Ok, I guess there really isn’t that much I miss about face-to-face conferences.

Anyway, digitization adds all of this opportunity for people who really love working with engineering technology and processes. If your company doesn’t have a single point of contact to help integrate all of the support, training, installation, maintenance, etc. knowledge needed to keep all of these pieces of technology moving and playing well together, maybe you should suggest it and even volunteer. Get friendly with your IT department, although I’d be willing to guess you are already.