CAS:CADE
The Consultancy and Support: Computer Aided Design and Engineering (CAS:CADE) Project was a £1.63M initiative delivered by LPDU to assist over 100 companies in North West Objective Two Fully Eligible Areas up until June 2008.
The Project formed part of the North West Higher Education Manufacturing and Innovation Design Partnership, a collaborative venture allowing business support organisations to make full-use of available expertise.
The Project provided SMEs with assistance in the areas of product development, design optimisation and data management techniques for firms from a wide range of industries. It was anticipated that the CAS:CADE Project would create over 80 new jobs for the region and increase cumulative sales by £5M. The investment made in companies through the assistance delivered by support of this nature was significant; case studies can be seen in the News Section.
The Project was able to part-subsidise Computer Aided Design (CAD) software upgrades for eligible SMEs and in some cases, also part-subsidise the upgrade of hardware requirements. In doing so, companies realised the following advantages:
- Large reduction in development times
- Reduced development costs
- Improved design quality as a result of easier and more thoroughgoing product optimisation
- Improved data exchange between collaborating partners throughout the supply chain
- More seamless integration between design and production through automatic generation of CAM files
- Easy production of early product promotional literature
- The possibility of early virtual demonstrations to clients in order to refine customer requirements and improve customer satisfaction
- Reduction of production problems such as component clashes and lack of fit