Speed and Efficiency

nagaTool drastically reduces the time associated with the machine design process.  It automates large portions of tool design, and allows the engineers to concentrate on the unique portions of each design.

Another major efficiency increase is due to the ease of modification of models created by nagaTool.  Smart features and design intent attributes allow the user to quickly and easily make modifications to existing designs.  Simply put, a designer should never have to create the same geometry twice.  And if the geometry is standardized, the designer should not even have to create the geometry initially.  When modifying a tool, the only input that should have to be added is that which has changed, while allowing existing design attributes to remain.

Accuracy

Because nagaTool produces much of the finished tool design, the accuracy of the tool can be substantially enhanced.  When a designer manually draws standardized features and parts, the probability of an error occurring is significant.  Spending hours looking up dimensions and creating solid models is a task that allows much room for human error.  

Another substantial benefit of nagaTool is the ability to place the actual models of parts and features into the designer's assembly.  In the past "place holders" have been used in lieu of the actual features and parts for standardized geometry.  This puts the designer at risk of overlooking a specific aspect or limitation of the design, because the place holder may turn out to be less representative than originally thought.  nagaTool allows for quick, efficient creation of the standard geometry and parts that would have been traditionally left out.  With nagaTool, what the user sees on the screen is what comes back from the machine shop.  The risk of oversights is substantially reduced, while the effort to achieve the risk mitigation is minimal due to the use of nagaTool.

Standardization / Utilization

By using nagaTool, each feature or part is created from standardized tables, or from parameters designated by the user.  In the case of user inputted parameters, the inputs are tested against design rules incorporated into nagaTool.  The result is identical parts and features, and custom features that conform to standardization rules.

Standardization allows the machine manufacturing process to be streamlined.  The fabrication process for each specific feature can be standardized, and small dimensional variations between common features on tools created by different designers are avoided.  The intent is to ensure users will never have to pay for the costs incurred by unnecessary custom processing.

Expert Systems

nagaTool is not a parts library, it is a design tool.  It contains expert systems to aid designers in creating complex components such as gears accurately, and to adhere to proper design methods.  nagaTool serves as a design guide, containing much of the rules and methods that the designer would normally have to research and implement.  For example, in the nagaTool gearing functions, the calculation and creation of the gear tooth involutes is handled entirely by nagaTool.  The program handles all of the calculation and rules based decision making of the involute creation process, and lets the design concentrate on other aspects that are unique to the design.  It is Naga Software's goal to incorporate much more expert system features into future revisions of nagaTool.