A Guide to Selecting a Mechanical CAD System for Small and Medium Businesses (SMB)

This paper is a follow on and update of TechniCom’s previous paper published in February 2005. In that paper we discussed “Selecting a CAD/CAM/CAE/PDM system” and noted that selecting such a system is no easy task. Today, five years later it is still no easy task to select a comprehensive engineering and product development system, yet it is crucial to the success of ANY business, be it small or large.

Our goal with this paper is to help people make better decisions when selecting software solutions to improve product development and engineering performance. This paper can provide you with a logical and orderly approach, which, if followed, will allow you to select the proper 3D mechanical Computer Aided Design (CAD) system for your company. In this paper, different than many others we have seen, we provide guidance for mid-sized businesses rather than large-scale enterprises.