What is CAD
Drawings created with Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools, which were introduced in the 1960s, represented tremendous productivity gains over paper drawings, such as ease to revise and archive. CAD tools also opened new opportunities, such as enabling manufacturing instructions to be derived automatically and executed directly from the drawing. Nevertheless, as computer design and manufacturing tools proliferated to meet increasingly complex and diverse engineering needs, so did the formats that each tool used to capture and store product data. While paper drawings can be marked up by anyone with a pencil, a product model that cannot be interpreted by the necessary CAD tool is useless. For organizations to share designs across various CAD and Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) tools, their data files must be formatted in a manner that the tool can recognize. This requirement has become increasingly important in an age where large manufacturers often form joint ventures to address a business opportunity, and where partners in a supply chain are being called upon to deliver an increasingly complex array of services.