The Benefits of Product Design Software & Digital Prototyping

Nowadays, the traditional use of physical prototypes is somewhat outdated. For many of the more advanced manufacturing and engineering companies, it has been replaced by the use of product design software & digital prototyping.

What Is It?

Instead of actually creating physical prototypes based on the designs, today manufacturing companies can just build a digital prototype instead. This is made possible with the use of 3D product design software. The program can then simulate the performance of a product design in the real world, without actually having to make a real world item straight from the designs.

How Does the Process Go?

In the old days of traditional prototypes, the process is basically like this:

1. The research and development team come up with a product design.
2. They build a physical prototype.
3. They test the prototype in various ways to discover any potential problems.
4. They fix the problems with the design.
5. They build another prototype based on the new designs.
6. They test again.
7. When there are no more problems, they pass the prototype and design to the production team and marketing teams.

The reality of this process is that a company often has to build many different prototypes based on various changes in the design until there are no more problems.

With digital prototyping, the process is different.

1. The research and development team come up with a product design.
2. They build a digital prototype.
3. They test the digital prototype.
4. They fix the various problems.
5. Then they finally build after there are no more problems.

What Are The Benefits?

Like traditional prototypes, digital prototypes offer product development teams a chance to test out the validity of their design. They can analyze how well the various moving parts work, they can check how various components work together, they can discover how easy it is for end users to use, and they can discover if the product will really work or if it will fail.

But it offers several advantages over the physical prototypes.

1. Building the digital prototypes is much easier and faster, since they’re just as digital as the designs they were based on.
2. The results can be shared easily online.
3. Various tests can be collaboratively done by people online. They don’t have to be in the same room.
4. The product development team can perform a wider variety of tests that may be difficult to conduct in the real world. For example, they can subject the digital product to extreme temperatures or extreme pressures. The testing and result are all done with calculations, so there’s no need to actually produce extreme temperatures and extreme pressures.
5. They can more easily find out which components are not working properly.
6. It’s been proven that using digital prototypes can get the products to market an average of two months earlier.
7. Prototyping costs are also reduced by almost 50%.

Basically, physical prototypes take too much money, time and effort to test, and digital prototypes are much more convenient. It’s no wonder that digital prototyping is becoming more common.