34% of CAD users increased use of CAM in 2015

The survey results are based on responses from CAD users, Designers, Engineers, Professionals including managers and senior executives. 

Chris Turner, CEO of Business Advantage Group commented, “Based on feedback, we added CAM as a CAD Trend to this year’s survey and gained many useful insights as a result.”

For example:

• Future CAM software growth potential is predicted as 17% (from 24 to 28% usage) this year and 29% (from 24 to 31% usage) over the next three to five years.
• CAM Usage is significantly lower in smaller companies (19%) than in medium companies (28%) or large (26%) companies.
• Overall 56% of CAD users are aware of CAM, 24% currently use it and it ranks 7^th out of 15 in importance across all the trends. Overall rankings are very useful to compare all the trends; however, some trends are mostly relevant to particular industry segments.  As expected in CAM, there is significantly higher usage in Manufacturing (34%) than in AEC (9%) or other industries.
• Looking at just those that use or plan to use CAM software,
  • 34% of them increased their usage of it over the past year, 48% used it about the same amount as the previous year and 4% saw a decrease. This indicates continuing potential to maintain and upsell current users.
  • 70% think it’s ‘important’ (36% think it is ‘very important’ and 34% ‘quite important’) to have machining instructions automatically generated from 3D CAD models.
  • 6 in 10 (61%) want to see ‘more’ (half of them want to see ‘much more’) software development effort on CAD/CAM integration.
  • The most used CAM software products are MasterCAM (20%), NX CAM (14%), InventorCAM (10%), SolidCAM (9%) and CAM for Fusion 360 (8%).

Turner added: “All this portends well for increased focus on CAM by CAD vendors.”

The Worldwide CAD Trends 2016 Survey Report is a high level report and many deeper insights are available from the full data set.