-
The consulting firm concluded that AutoCAD 2011 showed an average productivity improvement of 31 percent for users who upgrade from AutoCAD 2008 to AutoCAD 2011, and a 44 percent overall productivity improvement for users who upgrade to AutoCAD 2011 and Windows 7, while also upgrading to a new HP Z200 workstation.

“The most costly expenditure in an engineering or design firm is time. After 28 years of working on this product, it’s Autodesk’s goal to continually deliver new and improved functionality to help designers and engineers complete projects faster, and at the same or higher quality”

“The results of the study were more dramatic than I expected -- after all, how much faster can you draw a line?” said Cohn, a widely recognized expert in the use of AutoCAD and president of the independent consulting firm David S. Cohn Consulting. “To test AutoCAD 2011, I selected eight designs, most of which I concluded would take a typical user anywhere from an hour to half to a day to complete. I saw dramatic improvements in overall productivity. It took 13 hours, 24 minutes to complete all eight designs using AutoCAD 2008, compared to 9 hours, 16 minutes to complete the same tasks using AutoCAD 2011.”

The consulting firm’s study found that for typical drawings, the ease of access afforded by the user interface, together with new features and functionality, resulted in individual user productivity increases ranging from 15 to 94 percent.

“The amount of improvement likely to be recognized will lead most users to conclude that the cost of upgrading is easy to justify,” said Cohn.

Performance improvements documented in the study include:
- 50 percent productivity gain due to new functionality in surface modeling, surface associativity and materials
- 40 percent productivity increase through use of dimensional constraints and constraints as annotations
- 39 percent increase in productivity due to the hatch enhancements and grip editing
- 20 percent productivity gain through use of the ribbon interface, 3D gizmos, subject selection, navigating with the Autodesk ViewCube 3D navigation widget and the ability to extrude a curved edge of a solid to create a surface

“The most costly expenditure in an engineering or design firm is time. After 28 years of working on this product, it’s Autodesk’s goal to continually deliver new and improved functionality to help designers and engineers complete projects faster, and at the same or higher quality,” said Guri Stark, Autodesk vice president, AutoCAD and Platform Products. “As demonstrated in this study, AutoCAD 2011 delivers on the promise of increased productivity, with the speed, power and flexibility needed to take documentation and design further.”

www.autodesk.com

For more DPN News, click here

To subscribe to the DPN eNewsletter, click here

To subscribe to the Print or Digital Edition of DPN, click here