Astranis: weekly CAD-to-Arena reconciliation down to zero
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Roughly 8 team hours a week spent reconciling CAD against Arena, plus about 10 hours of the CAD lead's own time. Now: none. (Astranis estimates)
- About 3 hours a week returned to each power user across a core of 40 to 50 active users
- Every file change visible before it moves to Arena, with nothing edited in the vault and nothing leaving Astranis
Meet Astranis
Astranis builds telecom satellites for commercial and government customers, and it's one of the few companies flying MicroGEO hardware.
Design lives in SOLIDWORKS. Arena PLM holds the product record for the whole company: BOMs, engineering changes, quality records, and supplier data in one place. A part gets manufactured or installed only once it exists in Arena. That makes the handoff from CAD to Arena the gate to building hardware, and for a fast-moving, export-controlled team, design data that's wrong or invisible is a risk it can't carry.
Zach Zupancic, Team Lead, Spacecraft Configuration, joined Astranis as its first senior designer and built the mechanical CAD team. Mechanical CAD is the iterative, difficult side of satellite design, and getting that work into Arena cleanly is his responsibility.
The challenge
Astranis already had an integration moving CAD data into Arena. The problem was what happened in between.
I need to know what's happening to my stuff.
Zach Zupancic, Team Lead
Team Lead, Spacecraft Configuration, Astranis
The previous tool checked files out of the vault, changed them, and checked them back in. What it changed, and whether those files were still right, nobody could tell. The only feedback was a progress bar. For a team working on export-controlled designs, a tool quietly rewriting vault files is a compliance problem before it's a productivity problem.
The software that had been previously used also mapped property names as code rather than readable labels before the data reached Arena. Engineers could not easily interpret the transferred fields or catch mapping errors, making the integration output difficult to trust even though Arena remained the company's controlled product record.
The team paid for that gap every week:
- Reconciliation. The mechanical CAD group spent roughly 8 hours a week as a team lining CAD up against Arena, for stretches of 2 to 3 months at a time.
- Babysitting the tool. Zach put about 10 hours of his own week into reining the old integration in, on top of admin time nobody counted.
- Duplicate entry. Engineers keyed the same information into CAD and then again into Arena.
- Spreadsheet BOMs. Planning BOMs got built in Excel because the CAD data couldn't be trusted to carry them.
All of those figures are Zach's own estimates. Averaged across the group, he puts it near 3 hours per power user per week.
THE SOLUTION
Finding CADTALK: Zach started with an internal shortlist, some searching, and a couple of cold calls from other vendors. Then he saw a CADTALK demo.
When I saw CADTALK's GUI of just, hey, these are your files? If it's this color, it's changing. If it's that color, it's not changing. And, hey, this is brand new. That instantaneous window was everything to me
Zach Zupancic, Team Lead
Team Lead, Spacecraft Configuration, Astranis
The color-coded view answered the question the old tool never could: what's about to change in Arena, what isn't, and what's brand new, all before anything moves. Two more things sealed it. Properties came through in plain language instead of code, and Zach could change the mappings himself. Against everything else Astranis looked at, he called CADTALK the early clear winner.
Building it
Dylan Olson led the implementation for CADTALK. The first job was the data itself. The PDM had been configured around the previous tool, so Dylan reviewed it field by field and stripped out what the team didn't need.
Astranis rolled the integration out on its own schedule, testing thoroughly before trusting it with production data. Working sessions between the two teams turned up small process fixes that stuck: version tracking in the settings file, and a way to pause the integration so the team could test in the background without anything moving to Arena.
THE RESULTS
Reconciliation went to zero. Asked how long the weekly CAD-to-Arena reconciliation takes now, Zach's answer was one word.
None.
Zach Zupancic, Team Lead
Team Lead, Spacecraft Configuration, Astranis
The 8 team hours a week are gone, and so are the 10 hours Zach spent managing the old tool. By his estimate, that's about 3 hours a week back for each power user, across a core of 40 to 50 active people with more occasional users behind them.
The vault stays untouched. CADTALK reads the CAD data and passes it through. It never edits a file in the vault, which is what gave the team confidence in file quality.
Duplicate entry ended. Engineers make their initial edits in the file, push to Arena, and the data card goes blank. From that point Arena is the source of truth and the only place anyone edits, which is how Arena is meant to be used.
Quality moved upstream. With CAD data the team trusts, planning BOMs come straight from CAD instead of a spreadsheet, and problems are identified earlier in design.
Less firefighting. When something is off now, it takes minutes to track down and the cause is clear. The background worry that something was silently wrong is gone.
Trusted product record. CADTALK's smart configuration engine gets the CAD system talking to Arena reliably and accurately. Astranis is able to move engineering data into Arena, where cross-functional teams rely on it to support product development, quality, manufacturing, and supplier collaboration.
The 'things are wrong' level of stress is gone. Now it's, this will take me five minutes to fix, rather than, I have no idea how long this is going to take
Zach Zupancic, Team Lead
Team Lead, Spacecraft Configuration, Astranis
Before and after
Figures are Astranis's own estimates.
Metric | Before CADTALK | After CADTALK |
|---|---|---|
Reconciling CAD against Arena | About 8 team hours a week, plus roughly 10 hours of the CAD lead's own time | None |
Visibility into changes | A progress bar. No record of which vault files changed or why | Color-coded view of what's changing, what isn't, and what's new, before anything moves |
Property data | Field names arrived as code | Plain-language properties engineers can read, with mappings the CAD lead adjusts himself |
Data entry and governance | Same data typed into CAD and again into Arena; planning BOMs built in Excel | Design data transfers from CAD, while Arena governs the controlled product record and downstream changes |
Time back per power user | Absorbed in reconciliation and rework | About 3 hours a week |
Why Astranis chose CADTALK
- Visibility before anything moves. The color-coded change view shows at a glance what's about to land in Arena. It was the first thing Zach saw and the reason CADTALK pulled ahead of every other option.
- Plain-language properties the team controls. Fields read like English, and Zach changes the mappings himself.
- Nothing touches the vault. CADTALK passes CAD data through and leaves the files exactly as the engineers left them.
- Everything stays inside Astranis. For an export-controlled company, where the data travels matters as much as how fast it gets there.
Looking Forward
Astranis continues to explore new integration opportunities, including bringing supplier information into Arena alongside design data and displaying Arena's release status in SOLIDWORKS as a read-only signal so designers can see whether an item is released or still in SOLIDWORKS without leaving their CAD environment.
When peers ask Zach about CAD and PLM integrations, his answer doesn't change.
Whenever I have an opportunity, it's always CADTALK. Just use this. It's going to be easier in every way, shape, and form.
Zach Zupancic, Team Lead
Team Lead, Spacecraft Configuration, Astranis
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Learn more about CADTALK for Arena by PTC. Learn more about the Arena PLM integration, CADTALK and Arena.
