I come from the mechanical side where I've been involved with industries referred to 'discrete manufacturing' meaning that you produced things that were machines that made things (I worked 14 year where we built capital machinery for the food and chemical industries) or that you could drive or fly or operate or that you could pick-up and carry. In other words, we didn't engineer buildings, highways, process plants, etc. In my 47 year of engineering, 14 years in R&D and 33 years working for a CAD vendor, at least in our industries, Engineers and designers did their own work first on the boards and later using CAD and even when there were dedicated 'drafters' the original layouts and now 3D CAD models were alwasys the responsibility of the designers and Engineers. And where there were no 'drafters' you did your own Drawings (in my 14 years of real-world work, I'd been in both situations where I've had drafters working for me and other times I did that work myself, but when I started to use CAD, I never used a dedicated drafter again).
Now, at least in our industry (and I use that term with respect to the customers who are using our software), the trend is to move away from fully dimensioned and annotated, 2D Drawings with orthographic projected views and toward what is known as PMI, for 'Product and Manufacturing Information', which is added directly to the 3D CAD models and which provides the means to convey the non-geometric information about a part or product to the downstream organizations as 3D viewable models (not necessarily the original CAD model but a lightweight 3D representation which now represents the electronic document or specification). Of course any operations such as analysis and manufacturing would be done using the actual CAD models but for many people in an organization a 3D lightweight representation that they can view and manipulate on a computer screen is all they really need along with access to any documents associated with a part file or assembly model as is provide by modern PDM, or 'Product Data Management', systems. Al of these systems, the CAD, CAE, CAM and PDM, makes up what is now referred to as PLM, or 'Product Lifecyle Management'.
For an overview of PLM, please go to:
And for a look at PMI, which is more on topic for this thread and the questions originally asked, at least as we're seeing it evolve in the 'discrete manufacturing' sectors, please go to:
Now for some off-topic discussion:
mtu1972, does that 'MTU' stand for Michigan Tech (AKA da Tech)? If so, I graduated from MTU in 1971 with a BSME. And yes I to had to take something like that 'Engineering Communications' class, which included such things a working with collateral materials like overhead slides, hand sketching illustrations, flip-charts and posters and doing stand-up presentations (which were video taped and which were later 'peer reviewed'), etc. Looking back on my 6 years at the 'da Tech (I changed majors) I think that particular class was perhaps one of the most valuable (along with the one semester of typing I had back in high school) when you consider how, at least in my case, the workplace has evolved. And for the record, I never had a formal 'drafting' class, either in high school or college, just one term of something called 'Engineering Graphics' where you learned, among other things, how to draw ellipses, calculate the true length of a line, draw a two and three point perspective image, etc. but nothing that would be recognized as traditional mechanical drawing. However, I did co-op for 4 years working as a Draftsman so what I did learn was all OJT, and since I eventually went to work for the same company when I graduated, at least I had been 'trained' to do it their way and not how it was done in some textbook ;-)
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
