Computer Aided Design (CAD) has been firstly used in the U.S.A., when the reduction of lead-time and costs, as well as quality improvements pursued by the manufacturers started to be supported more and more by the increased availability of hardware and software for both design and manufacturing.
Initially, the application of electronic processing reached the shop-floor, by means of machine--tools automation, and robots.
In order to effectively use this automation process, an automatic feeding system was also required and led to the idea of designing the product in such an integrated manner that would avoid or minimize the necessity of manual data manipulation.
In this paper we will describe how General Motors do Brasil has been tackling this subject, by using CAD tools in the Product Engineering area, as well as the results obtained so far, including some technical details on the hardware and software used.