What is CAD

Drawings created with Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools, which were introduced in  the 1960s, represented tremendous productivity gains over paper drawings, such as ease  to revise and archive. CAD tools also opened new opportunities, such as enabling  manufacturing instructions to be derived automatically and executed directly from the  drawing. Nevertheless, as computer design and manufacturing tools proliferated to meet  increasingly complex and diverse engineering needs, so did the formats that each tool  used to capture and store product data. While paper drawings can be marked up by  anyone with a pencil, a product model that cannot be interpreted by the necessary  CAD  tool is useless. For organizations to share designs across various CAD and Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) tools, their data files must be formatted in a  manner that the tool can recognize. This requirement has become increasingly important  in an age where large manufacturers often form joint ventures to address a business  opportunity, and where partners in a supply chain are being called upon to deliver an  increasingly complex array of services.