So you have opened the new Inventor and seen a new tab with Model Based definition on it and wondered what this is. It is a new way to communicate the design downstream to the manufacturing department while keeping all the information about the product in 1 file.
How does this benefit you, you might ask? Well the first thing I can think of is that everything is in 1 file! How many time shave you had to find information about something and then had to open you outlook and maybe check on the server. It is a complete waste of your time, the companies time and the clients time.
Model Based Definition can also help in a few other departments. For the designer they will realise a reduction in time spent creating and checking drawings. That’s right! With MDB you will find that you do NOT need to create drawings as all the information for manufacturing is stored directly in the model and that is all that the manufacturer will need to create the component. With all the manufacturing data stored inside the component if the component changes the manufacturing data need to create that part changes automatically as well.
You also have the ability to save time creating and checking tolerances. Definitely a win in my books. With the time saved not creating 2D drawings you can spend that additional time improving the design. Streamlining it to the best of its capability and being able to save costs from start to finish.
With the inspection of the component, you can re purpose the MDB annotations via a STEP242 file to program your inspection equipment. Once again realising a time saving as the information comes directly from the original model with the original instructions.