Engineers Defeat Lockdown as Cadonix enables enterprise engineering from home with their latest run-in-a-browser Arcadia CAD suite

Dr Andrew Armstrong
5 min readMay 14, 2020

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OXFORD, UK — May 13, 2020 — Cadonix Ltd can today announce that their browser CAD suite Arcadia v19 is being rolled out on their cloud platform, bringing a host of new features and improvements to all customers globally.

It is clear from current events and the global pandemic that we will never look at our position in the world in the same way again. We have all discovered new ways of working and interacting that moving forward we are likely to adapt to. If anything this pandemic has proven that a large number of people can enjoy the flexibility of working remotely, however, it has also shown that the bulk of legacy enterprise systems are unable to adapt or be adapted to this new way of working.

Cadonix has launched v19 of its browser-based design and manufacture suite Arcadia and included new heavy-hitting enterprise features and ease-of-use optimisations in equal measure. This will allow larger OEMs and harness manufacturers to coordinate and develop their programmes with globally distributed teams and vendors.

Enterprise users are well catered for, and the new platform Architect module allows for configuration management for vast programmes. This added functionality allows high complexity multiple variant platforms to be managed with ease. Not only can these be managed but variant specific datasets can be automatically generated for a specific variant for use in manufacture or service.

Enterprise customers can also benefit from Arcadia Schematic’s new concurrent user support feature which enables large teams, even those distributed globally, to collaborate seamlessly on complex multi-sheet schematics.

You can now import and export from the MCAD interfaces provided by most vendors. For example, a harness manufacturer may receive a design in Catia or wish to import Arcadia harness data into Solidworks. These interfaces serve to reduce the friction between organisations and eliminate rework.

Cadonix continues to bolster Arcadia’s connectivity to other systems. The Arcadia enterprise API allows for all manner of custom integrations with third-party systems. Common integrations include PDM, MRP, stock control and web. The powerful API allows for virtual all Arcadia project management, reporting and documentation control to be customised. The App interfaces can be used by enterprise customers to build extensions of their internal systems to be directly accessible from within Arcadia. Suppliers can use the App interfaces to provide portals to their goods and services to their customers from within their own Arcadia installations.

Every organisation has the need for documentation, both for internal or customer use. Often this is a separate process requiring costly and error-prone rework; Arcadia v19’s new automated technical publications module, techPublisher, produces an automatic technical drawing and viewing package at the click of a button. This is viewable on any device with a web-browser (even in-vehicle!) and offers a significant advantage over traditional paper-based documentation. Arcadia techPublisher’s smart drawings have an embedded intelligence and meta-data allowing fault tracing, searching and diagnosis — a boon for any service department or field engineer.

Every user will enjoy 20+ new ease-of-use features and even more enhancements including faster response times, cloud-accelerated job processing, additional shortcut menus, and a new range of data input and validation tools. Ninety per cent of these refinements and optimisations were driven by customer feedback and based on repeated or complex operations where performance and intelligence significantly boosts productivity.

In order to support global teams, Arcadia v19 also brings in multi-language support, supporting not only the preferred language for the Arcadia user interface, but also enabling the users to use special symbols and non-Latin characters in their drawings. Collaboration will further be enhanced with our planned in-suite communication features — Arcadia Chat and Arcadia Notes. These are designed to help engineers document and share information, which is especially useful when a customer’s teams are separated geographically.

Arcadia v19 also brings with it the latest part selection and ordering system app. Cadonix has always understood the need for engineering teams to hit the ground running. Customers can choose from an ever growing library of 20,000 curated parts. These contain all the metadata and views they need to both design their parts and ensure they are manufactured to their specification all from the built-in shopping application.

“Through our continuous investment in research and development of our technologies and infrastructure we are proud to continue support our customers by offering the maximum flexibility the cloud can offer. Today Arcadia will run in a browser on a commodity Chromebook or laptop with an internet connection. There has never been a better time to leave behind legacy technologies and experience the future.” Dr Andrew Armstrong, CTO, Cadonix

Please head over to https://cadonix.com for further information on Cadonix products and services, including downloadable datasheets for all product lines. Customers can request a trial or purchase directly from the website.

Originally published at https://www.cadonix.com on May 14, 2020.

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Dr Andrew Armstrong
Dr Andrew Armstrong

Written by Dr Andrew Armstrong

Andrew has been developing leading cloud brands through computer research, cloud technologies and advanced software architecture development for several decades