Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.” So spoke Bette Davis in the 1950 classic “All About Eve,” but the comment could just as easily have been uttered in 2008 by an observer of the current U.S. economic climate.

From the shrinking value of the dollar, to the continuing sting of $4 per gallon of gas, one can’t help but wonder what other dark specter will emerge from out of the shadows to spook the U.S. economy. This is to say nothing of the ongoing mortgage meltdown, which recently caused former Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers to file for the largest bankruptcy in American history, among other massive financial casualties like AIG and Merrill Lynch.

This “perfect storm” creates an uncertain economic environment for any company to operate in, but U.S. manufacturers are particularly susceptible to this turbulence. Manufacturers with offshore operations are watching their profit margins erode from transportation costs. The cost of raw materials continues to rise, especially as the dollar declines.

Can a small-to-midsize American manufacturer still make a go of things in this tumultuous economy?

The answer is yes. Fortunately, there’s a silver lining to all these dark clouds. Like most crises, the current economic climate provides manufacturers with opportunity – a chance to rethink things and embrace change. That opportunity is digital prototyping, and those companies that embrace it will be well positioned to weather the storm.

What is Digital Prototyping?
At its heart, digital prototyping helps manufacturers create more innovative designs and simplify the design-to-manufacturing process. With digital prototyping, manufacturers can optimize and validate their ideas before actually creating a product, helping to remove time and costs from the product development process, and get the “right” product to market faster.

Digital prototyping revolutionizes the manufacturing product development process. Historically, the manufacturing product development process has been dominated by islands of competency.

In the conceptual design phase, industrial designers and engineers often use paper-based methods or digital formats that are incompatible with the digital information used in the engineering phase. In the engineering phase, mechanical and electrical engineers use different systems and formats, and a lack of automation makes it difficult to capture and rapidly respond to change requests from manufacturing.

Manufacturing is at the downstream end of all the disconnected digital processes – the siloed conceptual design phase, the engineering components, electrical and mechanical – and they receive this analog information in the form of drawings. The result is a heavy reliance on physical prototypes and the subsequent impacts on productivity.

Digital prototyping helps in advancing past these kinds of roadblocks. It brings together design data from all phases of the product development process to create a single digital model that simulates the complete product and gives engineers the ability to better visualize, optimize and manage their design before producing a physical prototype.

Why Digital Prototyping Matters
Quite simply, digital prototyping helps transform regular manufacturers into best-in-class manufacturers. An influential report by independent research firm The Aberdeen Group found that digital prototyping was a hallmark of best-in-class manufacturers. The report details the various measures by which these companies are achieving success:

• Best-in-class manufacturers hit their IT revenue, cost, launch date and quality targets for 84 percent or more of their products;
• Best-in-class performers typically produce 1.4 fewer prototypes than average performers;
• Best-in-class performers average 6.1 fewer change-orders than laggard performers; and,
• In total, best-in-class manufacturers of the most complex products get to market 99 days earlier with $50,637 lower product development costs.

You Can Go Home Again
Clearly, the practice of digital prototyping is also a model strategy for good business. In the face of a receding U.S. economy, digital prototyping can benefit American manufacturers in a number of important – and sometimes unexpected – ways.

A recent article by Time Magazine noted that U.S. manufacturers who initially moved some of their operations offshore to reduce costs and stay competitive are now moving operations back home as shipping has become unmanageable due to fuel prices.

Does moving operations back home mean surrendering competitiveness? Not for companies that embrace digital prototyping.

By using digital prototyping to reduce the number of physical prototypes that need to be built, these companies can achieve the cost savings that previously would have only been possible through offshoring. At the same time, they significantly reduce – if not eliminate – their shipping and transportation costs.
 
Change is Good
For other American manufacturers, digital prototyping can help them weather the current economic storm by allowing them to reinvent themselves. For a case in point, one needs to look no further than Richlin Machinery, an industrial equipment manufacturer based in Farmingdale, N.Y.

As the 21st century got underway, Richlin saw the market for its standard machine tools dry up after companies began sourcing small, machined parts from suppliers in China and other low-cost countries.

“Customers that were making small, round parts here in the States all of a sudden started offshoring everything,” said Jeff Richlin, president of Richlin Machinery.

With the market gone overseas, Richlin took a hard look at its options and saw a niche for more customized systems that needed to be serviced. Embracing digital prototyping supported the business model transformation that allowed Richlin to recast itself as a custom builder.

Digital prototyping is central to Richlin’s success in offering custom, turnkey machines. “We’re able to take a customer’s requirements and turn them into a digital 3-D model that we can send to them,” Richlin said. “Though there might be additional engineering discussions, usually they will look at the 3-D model, confirm the process and ask us to continue on to a more exact digital model.”

Leveraging these digital prototypes helps Richlin avoid mechanical interference problems down the road. For example, on a recent order for a machine that included 170 pieces, there were only three minor discrepancies between the digital prototype and the final fit in the production shop, and these were easy to fix.

“With digital prototyping, we know that whatever we send to the shop floor will fit,” Richlin said.

Making it Possible
Richlin’s success demonstrates that the changing times don’t have to spell the end of times for small- to mid-size American manufacturers.

By helping manufacturers reduce costs and become best-in-class, digital prototyping allows U.S. manufacturers to battle the variables that are currently hurting the industry and to remain competitive. For some companies, that means bringing their manufacturing operations home; for others, it means switching focus to become a specialty manufacturer. In either case, digital prototyping is the underlying technology that makes it possible.

While smooth skies are doubtlessly preferable to turbulence, the uncertain financial markets and economic outlook force us to pause, reevaluate operations and see how we can do things differently.

In this way, digital prototyping is a key element to help U.S. manufacturing to reinvent itself and thrive into the future.

Robert “Buzz” Kross is senior vice president of the Manufacturing Solutions Division at Autodesk. For more information, visit autodesk.com/manufacturing.