CDM Tech & Tech Soft 3D

The Challenge

Since its founding in 2016, CDM Tech has steadily honed its focus to better serve the needs of its customers, which are primarily the automotive giants of its native Germany.

“In the beginning, we started with metrology products and other solutions designed for the automobile industry,” explained Orhan Cicek, Managing Director of CDM Tech. “Augmented reality was something we dabbled in, but it wasn’t our main focus. That changed in the last few years: We decided to focus just on AR, and it’s now our core business.”

The company’s shift was particularly well-timed given the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which required companies of all stripes to find new ways to enable better remote collaboration.

“Having someone hop on a plane to go examine a new vehicle design or inspect an automotive component in person is an expensive way to do things even in the best of times,” said Kemal Gider, Sales Director of CDM Tech. “During the various pandemic lockdowns, it wasn’t even an option. AR seemed like a way to remove a lot of the pain points our customers were dealing with, from making better design decisions at the outset, to more easily performing quality assurance and inspection tasks later downstream.”

While CDM Tech had historically done most of its software development in house, it knew that it made sense to utilize a third-party SDK for certain foundational aspects of its AR product.

“You can’t use AR in an effective way in an industrial setting unless you’re able to bring in and support a wide variety of different CAD models,” said Cicek. “That’s why we partnered with Tech Soft 3D.

CDM Tech saw Tech Soft 3D’s HOOPS Exchange SDK as an ideal solution for building powerful CAD import and export functionality into its AR product, called SuPAR. As the leading CAD data access toolkit, HOOPS Exchange provides support for over 30 file formats, including CATIA, SOLIDWORKS, Inventor, Revit, Creo, NX, Solid Edge and many more.

Beyond the breadth of formats it supports, HOOPS Exchange delivers high import quality, ensuring that details like accurate product manufacturing information (PMI) and the complete assembly tree can be pulled in.

While these technological capabilities were an important part of CDM Tech’s decision to partner with Tech Soft 3D, the company also appreciated the human side of Tech Soft 3D.

“When we were evaluating potential solutions, we were in contact with another company that made a similar offering to HOOPS Exchange,” said Cicek. “Quite often when we called them, they were not reachable, and they did not get back to us in a timely manner. Our experience with Tech Soft 3D has been just the opposite, and it’s one of the big reasons we chose them. A strong product is all well and good, but you also need to have great people standing behind it, supporting it.”

With HOOPS Exchange providing extensive support for multiple CAD formats, CDM Tech’s customers are able to use SuPAR to streamline a variety of key workflows.

“Once customers have brought the CAD models into SuPAR, they can simply hold an AR-enabled tablet in front of them and start superimposing digital models onto the real world,” said Gider. “During the design phase, for instance, they can overlay different design options onto clay models so that they only have to build one or two clay models rather than four or five.”

Gider continued, “Customers can also do visual inspections much faster and better by overlaying videos in real time with digital images and information. Even if the team that designed the component is in one part of the country and the other team is in a completely different area, they can all be looking at the same thing and having a shared sense of understanding.”

CDM Tech is proud of the progress it has been able to achieve in a relatively short amount of time, with a growing list of customers as well as an innovation award from the local government Baden-Württemberg in Germany.

“Our goal was always to understand the demands of our customers and the problems they face, and then try to solve them in innovative ways,” said Cicek. “So far, the market is responding positively to the solutions we’re producing, and we’re pleased with how Tech Soft 3D has helped us get there.”

Industry:

Robotics, Factory Planning and Simulation

Challenge:

Automotive manufacturers require new ways of working together and collaborating remotely on design and inspection tasks - Young, dynamic software company spotted opportunity to address needs via an industrial AR solution - Needed to support multiple CAD formats in order to effectively serve customers operating in multi-CAD environments

Solutions:

HOOPS Exchange enables rich CAD data import for industrial AR applications

Results:

Provide support for more than 20 different CAD formats, expanding the range of data that can be re-purposed for AR - Enable customers to streamline key workflows, from design to quality assurance and inspection - Secure competitive advantage in the marketplace by leveraging SDK to speed time to market