3D Design Technology Serves as Leverage for PHL Manufacturers Amid Forthcoming ASEAN Integration

Manila (PNA) — As the Philippines ventures toward the upcoming Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Economic Integration, 3D design technology plays a key role in driving business competitiveness and productivity specifically among the manufacturing sector in the Philippines, Autodesk said on Wednesday.

The 3D design solutions provider, Autodesk Inc., highlighted 3D design technology as one of the greatest tools local manufacturers can leverage to boost their competitiveness for the open ASEAN market this year.

“Through 3D design technology tools in digital prototyping, industry players can upgrade their operational workflow, boost collaboration capabilities, expand production capabilities, and even reduce time to market—all of which are necessary in gearing up for the larger competitive market which is the ASEAN Economic Community,” said Autodesk Philippines country manager, Teddy D. Tiu in a media conference.

The Philippines’ manufacturing industry is consistently one of the biggest economic contributors to its gross domestic product.

Furthermore, the Philippine government perceives the country’s potential to become a manufacturing hub through state and economically inherent features such as the Filipinos’ creative and linguistic skills set and the current inflow of foreign investments, which provide sufficient advantages to the country.

One of the local manufacturers that have leveraged Autodesk’s 3D design and simulation solutions is Integrated Microelectronics Inc. (IMI).

“Digital prototyping has provided us with significant business advantages and increased our productivity and global competitiveness,” shared IMI’s Senior Manager for Design and Development, Dandy Jaducana.

Digital prototyping provides a better visualization of a product through a three-dimensional, realistic perspective.

Among the benefits include early detection of design flaws, on-the-fly optimization, minimized costly physical development iterations, shortened time to market cycle, and preventive assessment of designs and implementations of iterations whenever necessary.

“Having a single software platform to perform virtual prototyping is very cost-effective and reduces time of design optimization,” claimed Jaducana during the media conference.

“Having these set of capabilities helped IMI win more business and develop customer trust,” he added.

In line with gearing up the manufacturing industry, Autodesk also showcased pioneering technologies that are changing the way customers design and make products.

Autodesk’s first 3D printer called “Autodesk Ember”, which serves as a reference implementation for Spark, is an open software platform for 3D printing that makes printing 3D models more reliable, simpler, and easier to control.

Autodesk has made Ember’s mechanical designs schematics, and firmware open source to help spur innovation in the 3D printing industry, which product designers, hardware manufacturers, software developers, and material scientists could explore.

It has also launched a US$ 10 million Spark investment fund to push the limit of the 3D printing industry in terms of innovating functional capabilities.

”The Spark Investment Fund is open to entrepreneurs and innovators worldwide, and we’d love to see starts ups that are doing new things in the 3D printing industry in the Philippines take advantage of it,” said Tiu.

Another product of Autodesk is VRED which enables the automotive industry to create high-quality visualizations for use from conceptual design to design review to engineering.

Engineers can see full-scale, 3D images of a vehicle in development as they don a virtual reality viewer after loading up the virtual environment of the vehicle created in VRED.

This product enables them to make better decisions based on realistic parameters, and significantly reduce the number of physical prototypes needed.

Furthermore, virtual models can be used to let customers see their preferred car configurations, complete with custom colors and interiors, even before the vehicle has been manufactured.

“This is the next phase of the industrial revolution and we are committed to helping accelerate adoption of advanced 3D design technology in the Philippines so that our consumers can not only be more competitive locally, but also make their mark in the international arena,” said Tiu. (PNA) LGI/FMC