By Andreea Andrei, Marketing and Business Administration Executive at The Cloud Computing and SaaS Awards
This article is part of an A to Z series by Cloud and SaaS Awards, continuing with C for Computer-Aided Design (CAD)
Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is a software package for creating and editing two-dimensional and three-dimensional models of physical objects. There is a wide variety of sectors in which CAD is used on a very regular basis, especially in engineering, civil or aeronautics, but it is also used by architects of the automotive industry, among others.
What is CAD technology?
CAD technologies allow work to be streamlined, automating the manual processes of the product design, reducing errors, gaining speed, and increasing quality. With CAD, companies achieve greater efficiency and productivity, since it allows them to preview the final product and also play interactively with different designs, without the need to create a large number of prototypes.
In today’s most modernized systems, this process can encompass the shaping, assembly, storage and even the final shipment of the product.
CAD is a starting point for the application of an analysis series and simulation processes of work and operation, which aim to achieve greater quality, reliability, and competitiveness of the created product.
CAD also generates the necessary information to be used by the CAM in the manufacturing of the piece through numerical control systems.
A modern product design and manufacturing process requires the use and integration of these technologies, which have come to facilitate and optimize all manufacturing steps, from the initial conception to making it available to the customer.
In the same way, the incorporation of these processes implies the need to raise the qualitative level of the personnel, which also results in the optimization of manufacturing and the final quality of the product.
Industries where CAD software is needed
The present and the future of CAD
Nowadays, it would not be possible to speak of technological development or design of new products without immediately relating these to the new technologies in sustained growth. The creation of tools for Computer Aided Design (CAD) is constantly evolving and most branches of technology use it to increase the productivity of designers and to obtain increasingly complex and precise elaborations.
CAD systems allow the design of products and components through interactive graphics. A designer working on a system with a high-resolution screen generates multiple views of components and assemblies. You can also obtain three-dimensional views which can be enlarged, rotated and cut by sections, which allows customers and professionals involved in design and manufacturing to form an idea of the product in question, facilitating all possible modifications and elimination of defects before the product hits the market.
Initially, CAD was introduced to provide designers with help in error testing their creations. Likewise, this was used to help engineering analysis. Although the design process continued to be carried out by hand for a long time, at certain points throughout these processes the data was entered into computer programs that analyzed and determined possible errors and then made the necessary modifications to these projects.
Over the years, CAD has been in a continuous evolution and that has led it to occupy a very important role today in the design world of various industries, which improves manufacturing and design development overall.
CAD programs are of great importance since they have become a great tool for engineers, architects and other design professionals in their respective activities. We consider it an essential part of the set of skills, as it allows working with a team to modify dimensions, geometry, materials or adaptations in order to reach the proposed objectives.
We believe it is key to have a category of awards designated for it, having created, thus, a whole new category for Best SaaS Product for Engineering Management, PLM and CAD in the SaaS Awards program this year.
The shortlisted candidates have been announced already, and are now expectant for the finalists and final winner announcement.

SaaS Awards 2022
Best SaaS Product for Engineering Management, PLM or CADHere you can see the full 2022 SaaS Awards shortlist.
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