Three versions of the truth: reconciling a product's CAD
After production moved overseas, the CAD, the factory's files and the physical product all disagreed.
- When
- 2018–2019
- My role
- Co-op and Design Engineer
The situation
When I joined the seating team, the Float Table was being localized to a Chinese manufacturer, bringing in-house some components that had come from an outside supplier. The release had been handed off quickly. The factory's design team had refined the design themselves and produced a perfectly good mass-production product.
What I did
I audited three sources: Humanscale's SolidWorks package, the manufacturer's STEP files, and the physical parts. None matched. Dimensions, part types, materials and fasteners differed. I rebuilt one reference package that matched the real product, which gave the team a base for root cause analysis, failure modes and later improvements.