From CAE to STEP, there seems to be an endless parade of acronyms. We spell them out and explain why they’re so prevalent.

Engineers have a fondness for acronyms, and it shows. They use three-letter shortcuts like CAD, CAM, CAE, FEA, PDM and PLM, and that’s in engineering technology alone. In fact, notes one engineer, there’s actually an acronym for three-letter acronyms—TLA.

“Acronyms serve a useful purpose to people in a certain industry because they know right away what area you’re referring to without having to go into a long, elaborate explanation,” says John Krouse, editor of Engineering Process Journal, a management-focused industry newsletter that delves into CAD, CAM and PLM.

But while some people find these three-letter-or-more acronyms helpful, others, especially industry newcomers, are simply confused. Most of the time, these shortcuts are not accompanied by their definitions, leaving many scratching their heads or feeling too embarrassed to ask for an explanation.

Here’s one clarification: CAD is short for “computer-aided design,” CAM refers to “computer-aided manufacturing” and PLM means “product lifecycle management.” All three are software applications that engineers use.

“We try to stay away from acronyms in our company, but we end up having to use them because our technology is a mouthful,” says Michael Jannery, vice president of marketing at Massachusetts-based Proficiency Inc. The company develops a technology that lets engineers exchange CAD data between different types of systems without information loss.

“We’re about moving design features, history and constraints out of a CAD system and into a universal product representation, and that gets shortened into UPR,” says Jannery.

The engineering field may be filled with acronyms, he concurs, but every area of specialization has its own “speak.” “I’ve been in the industry 20 years, and there’s always been a lot of acronyms out there,” says Jannery. “Engineers like acronyms. They are to the engineering world what legalese is for lawyers and what medical technology is for doctors.”

Three-letter engineering acronyms are only the beginning, too. There’s also STEP and IGES, two abbreviations describing standardized methods of converting CAD images into a common language so they can be exchanged between CAD systems. Spelled out, they are “standard for the exchange of product model data” and “international graphics exchange specification.” Got that? These two abbreviations are so common that they are almost never clarified in engineering literature. Most engineers already know the words behind those initials.

Making things more complicated, technology vendors sometimes make up new phrases, with acronyms, of course, to set themselves apart from competitors, says Krouse. “They’ll come up with acronyms that don’t mean anything to anyone outside the company, which throws in confusion for everyone,” he says.

But not to worry. Acronyms coined by vendors tend to fade fast, says Bruce Jenkins, executive vice president of Daratech Inc., a Massachusetts-based CAE market research and analysis firm. Irrelevant phrases and acronyms eventually get weeded out, he notes.

“There are plenty of acronyms. Almost half of them come to very little, but the important ones do find resonance with customers and get adopted by solution providers, and help to focus and frame what users are thinking about,” says Jenkins. “That’s the upside of acronyms. Yes, a majority of them don’t amount to very much at the end of the day. But the ones that do amount to something tend to frame and summarize concepts that are useful to technology users.”

So how come some abbreviations endure while others disappear? The answer lies in the technology’s usefulness. “Each of these technological developments has been driven by commercial imperatives,” says Jenkins.

While engineers have always embraced acronyms, he points out that the widespread use of abbreviations started in the 1970s, coinciding with the marketplace arrival of new and helpful engineering technologies. Then the Internet and the 90s technology boom brought another flood of new phrases (with shortcuts, of course), such as “turnkey solution,” “enterprise resource management,” “e-business,” and “business-to-business.”

CAE, which means “computer-aided engineering,” is one of today’s most popular technology acronyms. It took root in the mid-1960s, says Jenkins. The term encompasses computers and other technologies used by engineers. Another familiar engineering technology shortcut is FEA, for “finite element analysis.” NASA (another acronym!) created one of the first FEA codes called Nastran, an abbreviation meaning “NASA Structural Analysis System.” Nastran has become the FEA standard for structural analysis.

Meanwhile, engineers first got wind of CAD in the 1970s, says Jenkins. Then other applications like CADD (computer-aided design and drafting) and CAM entered the fray. Developers soon began working on ways to make computers even more useful to engineering, giving birth to new phrases. For example, PDM (product data management) is one newcomer to the market. This software application handles data and the subsequent engineering work processes. PDM has led to the creation of PLM, which helps manage the product creation process, say Jenkins.

In fact, PDM has a long list of technological kin, such as collaborative product commerce (CPC), component supplier management (CSM), configuration management (CM), software configuration management (SCM), and enterprise application integration (EAI).

And while such acronyms are relatively young—none are over 35 years old—you can expect them to be joined by even more youthful abbreviations. For example, two software applications will likely gain prominence in the coming years—CRM and ERP.

CRM is short for “customer relationship management.” It’s a software application that could, for example, help an engineering company create a database holding detailed information about customer relationships. With this information, management and salespeople can track top-selling products and gear product offerings toward specific needs. Customers perhaps could even avail of the information to see buying patterns. This software is often regarded as a marketing and sales tool and is becoming more widely used.

On the other hand, ERP means “enterprise resource planning.” The software links the whole company so that an executive can gain a bird’s-eye view into the entire organization and figure out how one operation affects another. This type of enterprise software might even be combined with a company’s PDM system.

Indeed, making sense of such abbreviations is part of an engineer’s job. “Manufacturers have an ongoing task of sorting through acronyms and finding those that have meanings for them, as opposed to those that are merely flavors of the day and will ultimately fall by the wayside,” says Jenkins. The tricky part is using such acronyms with non-industry types.

“Where you have to be careful is communicating outside the industry,” he says. “You have to make it really clear what you’re talking about. A lot of these acronyms we use stand for different things outside the industry.”

For example, according to one of many acronym-decoding sites on the Internet (www.acronymfinder.com), CAD also means “cable air dryer,” “Cadillac,” the “Canadian Association of the Deaf,” among many other things.

And watch out for those acronyms for companies. Many CAE software marketers prefer to go by initials only. For example, Parametric Technology Corp., a CAD technology maker, is now officially just PTC while Silicon Graphics Inc. is now formally SGI. Unigraphics, a CAD software maker, was bought two years ago by EDS and was christened UGS. At around the same time, EDS purchased SDRC and merged it with UGS, creating PLM Solutions.

Here’s some help sorting things out:

http://www.ucc.ie/acronyms/

http://www.whatis.com

http://www.acronymfinder.com

http://www.freewarehof.org/acronyms.html

http://www.thesurrealist.co.uk/acro.cgi

http://www.acronymsearch.com

http://www.stands4.com

Source: Alphabet Soup
Jean Thilmany
Mechanical Engineering, Jan. 2003
http://www.memagazine.org/backissues/jan03/features/alphabet/alphabet.html