We're looking forward to once again being a sponsor of the 3D Compatibility and Interoperability Congress (3DCIC), taking place in Golden, Colorado, from March 3–6. This will be our eighth year as an event sponsor.
Though the event will bring us to Colorado, the challenge being faced by stakeholders in the arena of 3D digital interoperability reminds us of a story from a different locale: Hawaii. In the 19th century, sugar plantation owners introduced the mongoose from Africa to try to control the rat population. Infamously, this failed for the simple reason that rats are nocturnal and mongoose are not.
The point here is that what appeared like an obvious solution didn't deliver the benefits it promised because the approach had not been fully thought through from the implementation side — the final steps necessary for the benefits of the whole plan to be realized.
In the world of digital interoperability, it has long been recognized that the day/night challenge has been between the interests and resources of large-scale product design and development and those of smaller-scale, often highly specialized contract manufacturing.
And to be completely candid, most of the decisions about the "digital transformation" to take place as a part of model-based definition (MBD) have been made with consideration from only one side (the plantation) without a real understanding of what would make it work when it came time to put it in practice (the mongoose).
We are not saying that the situation is as fundamentally incompatible as the mongoose/rat issue — far from it. In fact, we feel the opposite: we are convinced that the promise of MBD could be realized at an even faster pace than the progress made to date. Our point is that a working solution will arrive more promptly — and be more effective — when it is considered equally from both upstream and downstream perspectives.
To this end, Kubotek Kosmos has continued to innovate our MBD file utility programs like Validate and Revision to make it manageable for smaller shops with a history of relying on drawings to gradually move into this emerging production system. Progress towards this goal can be found in the upcoming 7.0 release of our MBD utilities; our purpose for being involved with 3DCIC is to continue to build on this progress for stakeholders throughout engineering and manufacturing.
We are looking forward to joining our colleagues at the conference in Colorado to discuss the ongoing developments in this field — whether those discussions happen nocturnally or not.
