Any report about the digital exchange of computer-aided drafting to computer-aided manufacturing must begin with a review of building information modeling and its role in the process.
In the late 1980s, when computer-aided design software arrived on the market, many North American sheet metal contractors adopted it quickly and were soon using it to perform what they referred to as “collision checking,” “3-D modeling,” “3-D spatial coordination” and “CAD/CAM direct downloading.”