AutoCAD Factory Overview

The AutoCAD Factory Design Utilities provide design tools and an optimized environment for factory floor layout. They also allow you to open legacy DWG facility layouts and add factory intelligence to those drawings. The factory drawings can then be used to populate a 3D layout in Inventor Factory.

2D Factory Layout

A 2D factory layout is a DWG model of a factory, warehouse, or office environment. The size and complexity can range from a work cell to an entire factory. The layout can contain building elements such as walls, columns, and utilities. You can lay out individual pieces of equipment and create routing paths for each product.

The AutoCAD Factory Design Utilities allow you to add intelligence to the factory layout. The intelligence can be added to a legacy facility layout or a new file. The additional data provides the needed information for analyzing layouts, generating reports, and automatically populating the factory layout with 3D assets in Inventor Factory.

A typical workflow entails the following:

1. Create a simplified layout (for example, rectangular shapes) and assign the station information.
2. Create products that will be manufactured using the defined stations.
3. Create product routings through the stations.
4. Save as a 2D DWG factory layout.
5. Bring into Navisworks Factory using the Sync Navisworks command, or Inventor Factory using the Sync Inventor or the Inventor Factory New Layout from DWG commands and populate with 3D assets. (If any 2D assets and chainable assets exist in the DWG layout, they are automatically replaced with their 3D asset equivalents when opened in Inventor.)

Suite Workflows

AutoCAD Factory provides a number of Suite Workflows tools that enable you to create an associative link between a 2D AutoCAD drawing and a 3D layout in both Inventor Factory and Navisworks Factory. The link, called Layout Sync, can be established between Inventor or Navisworks and AutoCAD Architecture or AutoCAD Mechanical. Keep in mind that the link from AutoCAD Factory to Navisworks Factory is one-way only. However, the link between AutoCAD Factory and Inventor Factory is bidirectional.

The Suite Workflows commands are:

• Sync Inventor - Starts Inventor and creates a 3D factory layout from an open 2D drawing.
• Create from Inventor - Creates a 2D AutoCAD drawing from an existing 3D factory layout.
• Update from Inventor - Any changes made in a 3D Inventor Factory layout are reproduced in the 2D AutoCAD drawing.
• Break Link with Inventor - Breaks the associative link between the AutoCAD and Inventor layouts.
• Sync Navisworks - Starts Navisworks and creates a 3D factory layout from an open 2D drawing.
• Create Process - Opens the Process Analysis 360 web-based process modeling tool from which you can run simulations and optimize performance.