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Tacton Design Automation

Score9 out of 10

4 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Tacton Design Automation?

Tacton Design Automation provides constraint-based and parametric engineer-to-order automation inside SolidWorks, PTC CREO and Autodesk Inventor. With needs-driven design, CAD engineers can configure designs of complex products – including feedback on incompatible choices - and automatically generate complete 2D drawings, 3D models and quote documents. The configurator-powered Tacton Design Automation is designed to propose a solution that's not just buildable, but optimal for the customer’s unique requirements.

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Tacton Design Automation Reviews

What users are saying about Tacton Design Automation.
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Dramatically reduce design time with Tacton Design Automation!

Incentivized
Chris PriceView profile
Design Automation Developer / Implementer in Engineering at ClearsStream Environmental, Inc. (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • The interface for programming and running Tacton Design Automation is directly integrated into SOLIDWORKS. Residing in SOLIDWORKS it makes it very quick and simple to program and test your configurator models.
  • Creating the end GUI is streamlined. No time is wasted creating, sizing, aligning fields and other data entry interfaces. Tacton Design Automation compiles all types of fields into a uniform interface for the end user.
  • Another great advantage Tacton Design Automation has is its error handling/trapping capabilities. Because Tacton’s solver is a true configurator, constraints set forth in the program will be automatically checked against other constraints and ranges to ensure all choices set by the user are within parameters. If the user chooses something outside the parameter, Tacton Design Automation will automatically present options to change other previously set choices to resolve those conflicts.
  • Layout mode within Tacton Design Automation allows you to assemble many Tacton ready parts together within SOLIDWORKS and from there they will share common data between each other. This provides a way to be modular. To create and use models right away and add to as more models become available. You can pick the low hanging fruit first and go from there, not necessarily needing to encompass all parts at once.

Cons

  • Layout mode is probably the most lacking aspect of the software (within Tacon Design Automation Engineer). Something so powerful as having modular parts should be more heavily supported. Although, I've heard Tacton is focusing on updating this with better functionality.
  • The constraint editor does not display complex/lengthy constraints very well. I end up using Excel to visually break out in cells the different aspects of the constraint.

Return on Investment

  • Time to produce submittals went from 1-2 weeks down to a couple of days. Then, once approved, normally to produce the fabrication drawings (70+ unique parts) it would take from 4-6 weeks. We can get it down to as little as a few days.

Alternatives Considered

DriveWorks

Tacton Rules!

Incentivized
Travis Kenworthy P.E.View profile
Principal Mechanical Engineer in Research & Development at ClearStream Environmental (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Tacton has a non-linear solver, meaning it can solve lots of equations without them being is a particular order. This enables the software to be incredibly flexible.
  • Tacton has a great interface to set up configurators for people to use. No knowledge of programming languages is required. The configurator uses equations similar to Excel equations to control what the users options are.
  • Tacton has the ability to easily add lists of data like product lists, beam or pipe sizes that because available for user selections or for calculations.
  • The Tacton configurator also automatically builds the user interface as you set up user inputs making it much easier to set up then competitor software.

Cons

  • Setting up a Tacton configuration can get very complicated, I usually end up with several pages in a binder or notebook of notes to track how a particular product was set up.
  • The fact that I need to reference several pages of notes to keep track of what I am doing or especially to tell what I did several weeks later, makes me think that maybe Tacton could come up with a way to better organize things or show the user an overview of what they are building so they don't get lost in it.

Return on Investment

  • The payback period is fast on the software investment but is slower to cover the investment in labor to set up product configurations. Depending on how complicated your products are
  • We look at payback period of our products and including learning the system and everything over the first year we average a .8 year payback on software and labor combined. Although some were much better around .3 years while some parts that were more complicated and done first with a steep learning curve were as much as a 4 year payback.
  • One of the down sides of automating your business like this is that the software can only help you save time and money if you sell the products that have been configured in the system, so if you sell less of the products you set up than planned it can be a big waste.

Alternatives Considered

DriveWorks

Other Software Used

Epicor ERP

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