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The work of the CAD manager

This page is not about the product. It is about the work of the person responsible for getting tools onto engineers' machines — and about why that work is never finished.

The work is not done once

What follows are not projects but events: none of them is scheduled, each arrives on its own, and every time it does the same steps are run again. They have no order either — whichever happens first is the one you handle.

  • When a tool gets a new version

    Someone decides who should receive it, the files are placed somewhere, word goes out. Then comes the waiting: on the machine of anyone who did not install it the old version keeps running, and nobody sees that.

  • When a new engineer starts

    The list of tools they need is worked out, each one is installed by hand, each one is configured. If the list is not written down anywhere, it is remembered from the previous setup.

  • When an engineer leaves or moves to another project

    The question appears of which tools they should no longer use and what is still on that machine. If the answer is not written down anywhere, the question stays unanswered.

  • When a new project or client standard arrives

    The same tools have to go out again with different settings or a different version — and this time only to the people working on that project.

The cost is not addition, it is multiplication

Each of the steps above is small on its own. What makes the number grow is not how hard the steps are but how many times they repeat:

number of engineersnumber of toolsnumber of versions

That is why the work does not grow in proportion as the team grows; it grows faster. And the day it does is not the day anyone notices, because every single step is still small: what gets noticed is the day it can no longer be kept up with.

This work breaks in three separate places

Each has its own page — and none of them starts with the product; they start with how things work today.

Let us talk about your situation first

How many engineers, how many tools, how you distribute them today — talking that through takes half an hour, before you see the product at all. The pilot installation is free.

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