Expert: Scott Cook - 6/10/2009

Question
I work in a production atmosphere dealing in medical equipment and we were thinking of developing our own drawings.
I would like to know what CAD program is being used in the industry so we could decide on a purchase. Please take into consideration we would need tutorials to help us along.

Answer
AutoCAD is used for 2-D drafting and is the dominant player in the market for production drafting purposes. If you need to model complex shapes in 3D, you might want to consider something else, like Inventor. Some of the Inventor suites come with AutoCAD, so you can have both. Large corporate environments often use Pro-E, and smaller manufacturing firms sometimes use solidworks.
As far as diving into tutorials and doing this yourself, I would say that most of these programs have a steep learning curve. If you have someone on-staff who has experience in CAD drafting then they should be able to catch on and use tutorials to fill in knowledge gaps. If nobody has any experience with any of this, then you will need to select a local dealer that offers classes and take advantage of them, or take a class at a community college.
Something else to consider (and possibly of greater importance) is what your current drawings were produced with (I am assuming that you currently outsource this), and what any vendors or partners are using that you might need to exchange files with. This is one reason that AutoCAD is quite dominant in the Architecture/Engineering/Construction trades, files are often exchanged and everybody wants to be on the same version and platform.