Runners devote countless hours to mastering the best technique for exchanging the baton in a relay race. It’s critical to get it right, because taking too much time or dropping the baton means losing the race.

In optomechanical design, the handoff of files between designers and CAD users is equally crucial. An inefficient workflow can add tens to hundreds of hours to the schedule and incur considerable hidden costs, impeding your time to market.

With OpticsBuilder, you can circumvent these challenges and help your people run their best race with tools that significantly streamline the CAD workflow. It’s helpful to start by examining the factors that slow everything down.

The work that CAD users do to make optical designs a reality is vital to ensuring manufacturability. And yet we don’t always appreciate how inefficiencies associated with the CAD workflow can wreak havoc on schedules and budgets. Many challenges emerge from the basic handoff of files between optical designers and CAD users, including the following:

Redundant work - Because CAD users can’t open designs in their CAD environment, they have to recreate lens geometries manually. And optical designers have to prep template files. Both activities account for a lot of wasted time that could be spend on innovation.

Errors - Mistakes and miscommunications occur when the medium for transmitting complex information is not made for it. Manual processes not only take up unnecessary time but also introduce errors that have to be cleaned up later — that is, assuming that they are caught at all.

Security threat - Optical designers have to share supplemental design information in a scattershot way — documents, email, conversations, handwritten notes, chat, etc. This wastes time for all involved, and it puts your intellectual property at risk because the information is shared over non-secure communication channels.

Repeated interruptions - CAD users and optical designers get bogged down in numerous back-and-forth conversations to clarify specifications, evaluate designs, and check performance.

The right software can help you overcome these roadblocks by automating manual processes, streamlining processes, and optimizing team communications. OpticsBuilder was designed for just this need. OpticsBuilder helps your team members reach the finish line without setbacks.

OpticsBuilder enables CAD users and optical engineers to speed their processes and increase accuracy by providing the tools needed to build, analyze, and share their work more efficiently.

Flawless conversion of OpticStudio files into native CAD elements saves time and eliminates errors.

Complete design analytics included in a file reduces the threat of security breaches and cuts down considerably on the need for back-and-forth communications.

Mathematically driven optical geometry eliminates the need to create optical components from scratch.

The ability for CAD users to use exact lens and stray light data to analyze and optimize their housings saves expenses and months of trial and error.

Interested in how OpticsBuilder can help you build a top-performing optical team? Visit the Zemax OpticsBuilder product page to learn more.