CAD (COMPUTER AIDED DESIGN)

BHA provide drawing and drafting services as well as customisation and programming services.

By outsourcing all of your design and drafting work to a specialist like BHA you can improve your response times and increase your productivity.

Eliminate backlogs using our team as an extension to your drawing office or make your drawing office more efficient by using our programming and customisation services to automate repetitive tasks and enforce standards.

What is CAD?

Computer Aided Design is the use of software to assist in the drafting of engineering designs such as components, assemblies and building layouts in both 2 and 3 dimensions.

Traditionally these drawings were produced using pen and ink on a drawing board to convey the description of the object being made from the designer to the person manufacturing, assembling or installing the device. In simple terms CAD is an electronic drawing board which can be used to create precision designs or technical illustrations.

CAD is used by engineers and architects to create plans and construction drawings. This is done by drawing a series of lines, arcs, shapes and text objects to precise dimensions. These objects can be drawn on different "layers" to enable items such as walls to be differentiated from windows, either by giving the objects on a particular layer a certain colour, line width or line type.

Objects that appear repeatedly, for example light switches on an electrical layout drawing, can be created as "blocks" which are symbols that can be drawn once then copied multiple times - if the required symbology is changed then only one instance of the object has to be edited to enable all instances of that block to be modified.

Once drawn these objects can be manipulated by moving, copying, stretching or rotating which means that drawings can be rapidly modified or used as the basis of other drawings, both of which represent the major advantage of speed of production over traditional methods.

Benefits Of Customising CAD

Customisation of CAD enables you to minimise the time taken to produce drawings and to maximise the productivity of your staff.

If numerous drawings are required showing similar details, automation techniques can be used to assist the operator and remove the number of keystrokes and decisions that are required, so that errors can be minimised and productivity can be increased due to savings in time.

It is frequently possible to develop systems that are customised to such an extent that semi/non-technical users can be used as part of the production process, reducing costs even further.

In such an automated set up the operator would be presented with a tailor made user interface, where regularly drawn object types are presented as a set of menus, for example when drawing electrical layouts, menus would be provided showing images of blocks such as sockets, lights and switches. The software would set each object type to be on a particular layer, drawn in a particular colour and could even force attribute data such as manufacturer, voltage, asset number etc. to be entered from pre-defined pick lists - all ensuring that standards are complied with and enforcing consistency between operators.

Redundant commands can be removed to present a clean easy to navigate interface and attribute data can be extracted to create other documents such as parts lists.