With a new CEO at the helm, Translation Technologies Inc., of Spokane, is preparing to launch a software product that customers could use at their locations to translate computer-aided drafting, or CAD, files between CAD programs.


The 4-year-old company currently provides such translations for clients from its offices in the SIRTI building at 665 N. Riverpoint Blvd., and now is in the final testing phase of its customer-site installation software.


New CEO Robert Stevenson, who most recently served as president of Denver-based GeoGraphix, is taking the reins at Translation Technologies from Frederic Zucker, one of the founders of the Spokane company, also known as TTI. Zucker will move into semi-retirement while continuing to serve on Translation Technologies board of directors, and says hes planned for more than a year to make the transition.


Stevenson has worked in the CAD marketplace for more than 12 years and says he can steer TTI toward more of a sales-and-marketing focus than its had, which he and Zucker believe is needed. Until now, the company has been focused on developing and testing its software, Stevenson says. Looking ahead, he says, the key questions are, How do we leverage that now? How do we start growing this?


The growth potential for TTIs software, called Acc-u-Trans, is huge because the manufacturing sectors CAD-translation problem is huge, he says.


Theres a clear need for the products, he asserts. Its a great starting point.


The problem is that different CAD systems use different, and sometimes proprietary, mathematical approaches to build geometric electronic designs. Those geometric designs are used to make parts for automobiles, airplanes, and all kinds of mechanical devices, and those parts must be manufactured exactly as they were designed.


Collaborations, acquisitions, and outsourcing are common in the manufacturing industry, so a car, for example, could have parts coming from a variety of companies that use numerous CAD software programs. Those 3-D images eventually must be joined together electronically, but the competing programs dont translate one anothers data.


Its a huge problem, Stevenson says. He says a recent study found that in the U.S. automotive industry alone, the incompatibility of CAD drawings costs $1 billion a year.


Much of that cost comes from engineers taking time to extract data from one program and input it in another, and the rest comes from errors that are made during that process, but often arent found until the product is being produced, says Mike McDonald, TTIs executive vice president and chief technology officer, and another of the companys founders.


The problem doesnt appear to be one that will go away on its own because no one CAD program is in a position to dominate the industry, McDonald says.


We dont see a Microsoft Word of the CAD market, he says.


Stevenson says the global market for Acc-u-Trans is into the hundreds of millions of dollars. TTI currently has several hundred mechanical-engineering clients, mainly from the automotive and aerospace industries. He declines to disclose the companys annual revenue, but says he expects annual revenue growth of as much as 50 percent over the next four years, he says. That kind of growth likely would mean adding about 20 people to TTIs now 30-person staff, he says.


Customer-site installations


Currently, customers send CAD files to TTI via the Internet for translation. McDonald says the files are encrypted and stay online only for a short time, and thus arent vulnerable to unauthorized viewing for long. Still, Internet transfer isnt possible for some companies, especially those that have contracts with government agencies, which can raise concerns about national security, he says. Those companies are TTIs main targets for a licensed version of Acc-u-Trans that they can operate at their own locations.


Such installations are being tested in about a half-dozen locations, and so far, the response has been positive, Stevenson says.


Along with licensing the translation software to its customers, TTI will train their staff members to use Acc-u-Trans and provide technical support, McDonald says. He adds that TTI will be one of the few software companies that uses its software in the same way as its customers.


McDonald claims TTI is the first company to design software that translates accurately between CAD programs. Acc-u-Trans currently can transfer CAD drawings between six CAD programs that make up about 95 percent of CAD systems in use, he says.


The key to a successful translation is realizing that software cant do it all, McDonald says. For that reason, Acc-u-Trans often requires human input to translate a CAD model successfully.


We jokingly say we started by admitting defeat, he says.


For example, when Acc-u-Trans converts designs for automobile-engine parts between two major CAD systems, such as Catia and Unigraphics, most of the work is done by the software. If one aspect of a part, however, was created in Catia using a complex proprietary mathematical procedure, Acc-u-Trans cant duplicate it in Unigraphics. When that happens, Acc-u-Trans signals an operator that it has a problem. The operator then looks at the part in Catia and determines the best way to duplicate that part in language Unigraphics can understand.


Once the design for the part is rebuilt, Acc-u-Trans finishes the translation, then does a mirror-model comparison in which it ensures that the drawings in Catia and Unigraphics are identical. If it uncovers an error, it again calls for an operator to fix the problem.


McDonald claims that Acc-u-Trans can provide translations in one-tenth the time and at one-fourth the cost of having an engineer do it manually, and that the translations are guaranteed to be accurate.


Stevenson says he was in Detroit last month showing Acc-u-Trans to prospective clients, and,They were wowed.


Yet, marketing Acc-u-Trans customer-site installations in a foundering economy poses extra challenges, Stevenson says.


Companies are having a dilemma of investing now to save money in the future, he says.