READOS / Engineering / KEVOS® original book
CAD Standards That Stick
Settings, templates, properties, libraries and modelling rules for a small parametric CAD office
Set up a parametric CAD office so every seat, template, property, library part and model behaves the same, then check, train and change the standard without losing control.
Start readingAbout this book
Parametric CAD gives every designer a powerful, private workshop. That is its strength and, in a team, its weakness. Each seat carries hundreds of settings, each person has habits, and each file inherits whatever template, property names and library parts happened to be on hand when it was started. Left alone, a small office ends up with six slightly different ways of doing everything, and the differences surface where they cost most: in the bill of materials, on the workshop floor and during the next upgrade.
This book is for the person who has to make the office behave as one system, whether that is a full-time CAD administrator or, more often, a lead designer with a few hours a week. It works through the environment in the order it is usually built: what the role owns, how to measure the starting point, which settings to control, templates, custom properties, standard-part libraries, modelling rules, the written standard, compliance checking, and finally training, support and change. Each chapter ends with an exercise and its worked answer.
You will need working knowledge of one parametric CAD system and of mechanical drawings. The book is deliberately vendor-neutral. Menus and file types differ between products and change between releases, so the chapters describe what to decide and how to test it, and leave the clicks to your vendor’s current documentation.
The running case
Every chapter follows one fictional design office. This is an illustration. A small Australian manufacturer of modular belt conveyors runs six CAD seats: an engineering manager, three designers, a drafter and a graduate. Its main product family is a 600 mm wide transfer module made in seven lengths from 1,200 mm to 3,000 mm in 300 mm steps. The office issues about 480 new drawings a year, holds about 26,400 CAD files in its project folders and has 3,860 standard-part files scattered across personal and shared folders. One of the designers has been given four hours a week to act as CAD administrator.
The chapters measure the office, change it and measure it again. Money is in Australian dollars at an internal cost rate of A$95 an hour; internal labour costs carry no GST, and any bought item is shown excluding GST. The business, people, files, times and costs are invented for teaching. None of them describes KEVOS® work, a real company or a real software product’s performance.
Source limits and professional responsibility
The supplied source was a 2010 book on administering one CAD product. It shaped the list of subjects that a CAD administrator must cover, but its product instructions are old, and nothing in its text, figures, templates or macros has been reproduced. The current vendor guide cited in the references was checked for the general idea of deploying settings centrally. Drawing conventions belong to the standards your work calls up, normally AS 1100 in Australia; this book refers to them and does not restate them.
A CAD standard is a tool for consistency, not a substitute for engineering judgement. Consistent files can still describe an unsafe or unsuitable design. Design approval, checking of calculations and compliance with regulations remain the responsibility of competent people, and anything in this book that touches safety-related equipment needs review against the actual product and its standards.
Who this book is for
CAD administrators, lead designers and engineering managers in small design offices who need parametric CAD to behave the same way for every person, every file and every release.
What you will learn
- Define what a CAD administrator owns and measure the current environment before changing it.
- Separate settings that change results from personal preferences, and control only the first group.
- Build templates, a property schema and a shared standard-part library that feed drawings and bills of materials cleanly.
- Write a short modelling and drawing standard, test models by flexing them, and check compliance by sampling.
- Run training, support and change requests so the standard improves instead of drifting.
Inside this book
Chapters
- 01What a CAD administrator ownsDefine the CAD administrator's job as ownership of a shared environment, list what it contains, give it a time budget and test that budget against what inconsistency costs.
- 02Baseline the environment before changing itMeasure a CAD office before standardising it: compare settings across seats, time a reference model, sample drawings for errors and read the results with honest uncertainty.
- 03Standardise the settings that change resultsSort CAD system options into those that change results, those that affect performance and personal preferences, then control only the first group and deploy it without breaking trust.
- 04Templates that start every file rightDesign part, assembly and drawing templates that carry the right document settings and empty property fields, test them before release and identify their revision inside every file.
- 05Custom properties that feed the title block and BOMDesign a property schema with fixed names, types, allowed values and owners, link it to title blocks and bills of materials, and test it against the system that receives the data.
- 06Standard-part libraries people trustConsolidate scattered fasteners and purchased parts into one controlled library, name items by their standard designation, run a request process and keep duplicates from returning.
- 07Modelling rules that survive changeWrite a short set of part and assembly modelling rules, then prove them by flexing a configured model through every size it must make, and fix the rule that fails.
- 08Writing the standard people will readWrite a CAD standard short enough to be read, with testable rules, reasons and examples, that points to templates and drawing standards instead of copying them.
- 09Checking compliance without policing peopleCombine automated file checks, peer checking and a monthly random sample to measure compliance with a CAD standard, and design the checks so they cannot be satisfied by gaming.
- 10Training, support and changing the standardLog and classify CAD support requests, aim training at the causes they reveal, bring new starters up to standard and run a change process that keeps the standard improving.
References and source notes
The manuscript and worked examples are original KEVOS® writing. References inform particular concepts; their authors do not endorse this book. Web references were consulted on 26 October 2026.
- Matt Lombard; Wiley Publishing. SolidWorks Administration Bible (2010). Supplied copy, ISBN 978-0-470-53726-8, reviewed for its table of contents and the range of subjects a CAD administrator handles. Its menus, settings, macros, templates and chapter sequence describe SolidWorks 2010 and are neither reproduced nor relied on. This book is vendor-neutral and uses its own structure, case, figures and exercises.
- Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corporation. SOLIDWORKS 2025 Installation and Administration Guide (2025). Current vendor documentation, checked for the idea of an administrative image and option editor that keep versions, products and settings consistent across many installations. Used only as an example of a deployment mechanism; other CAD systems offer their own equivalents.
- Standards Australia, Committee ME/72. AS 1100.101-1992 Technical drawing, Part 101: General principles (1992). Named as the drawing standard that templates and the written CAD standard must follow in Australia. No values are quoted; READOS's Drawings That Make Parts explains the conventions themselves.
- International Organization for Standardization. ISO 7200 Technical product documentation: Data fields in title blocks and document headers (edition as called up by the contract). Named by number and scope only, as a reference point for deciding which title block fields a property schema should carry. Not read for this book; no field lists or values are taken from it.
- Australian Signals Directorate, Australian Cyber Security Centre. Essential Eight Explained (current guidance). Checked for its baseline mitigation strategies, including restricting Microsoft Office macros, application control and restricting administrative privileges. Cited in Chapter 9 as context for controlling CAD macros and add-ins; not a CAD-specific requirement.
