CAD Model and CAD Drawing Time Study

[tcusumano]

I wanted to reach out to the community to ask if anyone has information they can share on how long a designer takes to create a CAD model and the CAD Drawing. I know this is a loaded question with many variables; complexity, quality and experience of designer....and so on. Lets level set to average all across the board.

I can develop an internal questionnaire with my business and come up with numbers as well but wanted to get  more of a industry standard number from the community and ask if anyone has already done such a study.

Thanks in advance for any information you may have and willing to share in this thread.

[KenFarley]

What you're looking for is really of no use, unless it specifically relates to one product or type of product. Also, one would suspect that this isn't for the sake of quantifying the absolute time it takes to perform a "design" and "drawing" but rather how Creo does in comparison with other CAD software?

Literally *every* design task is different, the time for all the things one does varies. Even though we design many things that outwardly look similar, they can take drastically different amounts of time to create with Creo, depending on lots of different criteria.

[tcusumano]

Request was part of a larger scope I had on what it costs to generate a new SKU. Nothing to do with comparing how one CAD tool does it over another. A component of the SKU is the Design Engineering cycle to generate a manufacturable part and drawing. In general I have industry SKU costs but not to level I want to break it down to. Like I said I can conduct an internal questionnaire and most likely will have to.

Thanks for input though. I am aware of all that you stated.

[tbraxton · Accepted solution]

I have seen simplistic models that have used a set time per feature and then estimating the number of features to create a complete model. This is based on the unit of time being the mean value over a large sample size of models. These models are used by some very mature and sophisticated organizations who provide consulting services to CAD/CAE organizations to provide estimates for hours to complete a model. You could do internal studies to develop such a model for your business.

This approach is workable when you are copying an existing design or the design is extensively documented to define the geometry but will almost always underestimate creating a new design that has not been done previously by the design team.

If you are doing this in the context of comparing CAD tools to determine which is more efficient for your business then that is a completely different problem to set up and solve.