Jon den Hartog
March 21, 2025
14 min read
A look at how the Fusion data platform is being built for collaboration across design and manufacturing.
Roadmaps are plans, not promises or guarantees. We’re as excited as you to see new functionality make it into the products, but the development, releases, and timing of any features or functionality remains at our sole discretion. These roadmap updates should not be used to make purchasing decisions.
Product companies are increasingly looking for agile practices to improve their competitive edge. Agile promises reduced time-to-market, faster adaptation to customer needs, and continuous improvements that optimize performance in a dynamic environment.
CAD and PLM software vendors have positioned traditional tools as enablers for agile, but in most cases haven’t lived up to the promise. The CAD world largely remains tied to applications originally built decades ago to compete against paper. These tools were designed to create models within the constraints of limited processing and network speeds of the time. They typically optimized for local resources and proprietary file formats.
As powerful as these tools were, the world has changed dramatically since their creation. Teams are increasingly distributed and developing more complex products. Traditional tools have become too heavy for supporting the kind of highly collaborative and multi-discipline work they do. These limitations are amplified when bringing a product to market, from design to manufacturing. Design teams often realize too late that they didn’t consider manufacturability in the design phase. This oversight leads to product quality issues, increased costs, or re-work that could have been avoided through better early collaboration.
Traditional CAD software can be well matched with the needs of large enterprises that have decades of legacy data in closed CAD file formats and systems. However, modern companies looking to move quickly and drive innovation are looking for a different approach. Not only are traditional tools costly to run, but they also impose limits that complicate collaboration. Studies have estimated over 8 hours are spent per week on average by engineers trying to find models, rebuilding others that couldn’t be found, dealing with version mismatches, and sharing their work with others. Over 20% of an engineer’s time can be lost to tasks that could be drastically reduced with a more modern collaboration capability.1 It’s surprising this persists in today’s hyper-connected world, but there’s never been a better time for change.
Fusion’s primary mission is to eliminate barriers between design and make, enabling teams to bring better products to market faster. Enabling early and parallel collaboration allows the manufacturing team to begin early planning. It also provides the design team with critical feedback on manufacturability before the design is complete. The convergence of design and manufacturing requires a fundamentally different approach to data creation and usage across the platform. We’ve made key choices in Fusion’s data architecture to overcome the limits of traditional CAD.
We built Fusion with evolving product development workflows in mind to seamlessly connect design, manufacturing, and analysis. Unlike standalone CAD applications which are typically centered on only one part of your design team’s problem, Fusion offers an end to end connected experience.
As you work in Fusion, your task may require capabilities from any number of different domains. Fusion helps by offering these capabilities using the right representation and solver for the design and manufacturing work you call for. Surface, solid, mesh, 2D, and 3D modeling capabilities are brought together within the experience. When your product requires complex organic surfaces, Fusion offers integrated advanced surface capabilities. When you’re working on mechanical assemblies, our solid modeling kernel powers both direct and parametric design with options for configurations with rule driven design features. PCB schematics are represented directly within 3D enclosures and housings, enabling unified electromechanical design. This integrated multi-capability approach extends across the lifecycle. Within Fusion we also leverage specialized CAM kernels to power capabilities for milling, turning, cutting, and additive operations. The result is a tool that enables teams to more fully represent their product in one experience, where engineers and manufacturing specialists can easily access a wide array of capabilities throughout the development cycle.
Product development and manufacturing is a team sport. To enable many users and services to act on data in a secure and coordinated way, Fusion employs a flexible data model that reshapes how data flows across the platform.
Unlike traditional systems that lock data in rigid, file-based structures, behind the scenes Fusion’s data architecture represents complex products in discrete, manageable components. This approach efficiently and flexibly organizes design, manufacturing, simulation, lifecycle, and other data into an information graph. The data structures are not bound to hierarchy or inheritance. Components are defined by the entities they contain. This allows aspects of the model to be modified independently with fewer fixed dependencies. For example, an engineer in Los Angeles can update the geometry of a component in an assembly while a manufacturing specialist in Shanghai can start working on toolpaths without data conflicts or locking issues. This is a fundamental shift away from traditional file-based paradigms. Teams are free to collaborate seamlessly across disciplines, locations, and devices.
This data model runs on a distributed hybrid architecture to further expand flexibility. It uses processing ‘at the edge’ plus an array of scalable cloud services for compute and collaboration. Interactive modeling work utilizes local computing power. Meanwhile, AI automation, simulations, and multi-user collaboration scale to cloud workers for large-scale computing and data exchange orchestration.
An advanced data model can’t deliver its full potential if it puts the data in a silo. From the beginning, we’ve made Fusion more open and extensible as a platform. This approach makes it easier to create apps and connections with other tools. On the cloud side, we opted for a graph-based API to organize data efficiently. This architecture enables precise and targeted read/write access to the exact data needed, exactly when it’s needed. A quality engineer can access specific properties without wading through unrelated geometry data. A purchasing manager can extract material specifications directly from the design without requiring CAD expertise. A manufacturing engineer can integrate toolpath strategies with the original design intent. This query-driven approach enhances performance and enables intuitive access to API capabilities across Fusion. It simplifies building custom apps and facilitates seamless data flow within Fusion and exchange with third-party systems.
These choices in kernels, data model, and API have enabled Fusion to dramatically simplify collaboration across the product development lifecycle, and across broad teams. Fusion has experienced rapid growth in recent years due to its flexibility and ease of use for mechanical and PCB design. It also boasts powerful subtractive and additive manufacturing and simulation capabilities. It offers teams a simplified solution for collaboration with built in access control, automated check in/check out, and approval flows. And Fusion can be wherever they need it to be, with clients on Windows, Mac, web browser, iOS, and Android and options for offline access. Over 2M users run Fusion today, owing to the power and agility it brings as a cloud-enabled platform for product development and manufacturing.
While Fusion already has a lot of data capability built in, we’re continuing to expand it to address the needs of ever larger and more distributed product development teams. Our current work boils down to three main areas (1) data management, (2) lifecycle management, and (3) intelligent automation and insights.
Product development teams need a flexible system of record. It should simplify collaboration as they bring products to life. Fusion has long delivered an easy to use yet powerful experience for individuals. However, it is increasingly used by larger teams seeking more administrative control. These teams require expanded properties to represent their complete product. Additionally, they need improved search tools to find what they need, when they need it.
To address these needs, projects will gain new roles, group management, and access controls. Product development teams can store models in folders, setting permissions for different groups of stakeholders at various levels. Models can be re-used across projects via direct reference, or stored in a read-only folder where copies can be made as needed. Managing data in the cloud allows teams to move models between folders on the fly without breaking relationships within CAD assemblies.
Teams will be able to represent their products more fully with expanded properties and an updated history of changes. Manufacturing, costing, supply chain, project management, and other metadata will be included by default. There will also be options to customize and add additional data via the API. When working with these new properties, you are directly interacting with the data in real time, with a continuous history of changes logged. This means the experience is similar to other modern web-based spreadsheet apps. People across the team will be able to read and edit these property values concurrently, from clients on the desktop and web.
This property information will also be surfaced in the Bill of Materials (BOM) and contribute to a more complete representation of the product. To date, Fusion’s BOM has represented the CAD structure, capturing internal and external components, their quantities, and their release states. It’s also fully automated and easily shareable via a link, viewable in a browser, and exportable to CSV and Excel. However, to get the full benefits of a cloud based BOM, we know it needs to go beyond representing the design model alone. That’s why we plan to expand Fusion’s BOM to include additional project and physical properties, flat views, and restructuring options including handling phantom components and non-CAD items.
It will incorporate live editing capabilities. Those involved in bringing the product to market can work directly from the BOM, reviewing contents and contributing to it. The experience will be modern and fully concurrent, available in the desktop client and in a web browser with no translation needed. The aim is to enable your entire team to work from a live representation of the full product. This avoids the pitfalls of dealing with separate BOMs spread across CAD, PLM, and other tools, where teams struggle to coordinate changes. By having everyone working on the exact same data and making it available everywhere, Fusion aims to dramatically simplify how they collaborate on product development from concept to production.
Agile teams need flexibility when it comes to their approval processes. They also follow specific methods for tracking quality issues and managing changes. This is why we’re building PLM into Fusion in an integrated, more adaptable way than traditional ‘old iron’ PLM tools that have a lot of power but are difficult to adapt to changing needs over time.
Today, Fusion Manage Extension gives users simplified release and change management. Running on the same underlying tech as our full PLM product, Fusion Manage Extension is a lightweight revision control tool that requires no initial setup and is available from directly within the Fusion experience. The ease of setup is great, but we also know that companies also have PLM needs that evolve over time. We’ve seen the benefits a fully configurable workflow engine can offer to larger companies that need a modern PLM to be adaptable without heavy customization or consulting involvement.
Fusion Manage Extension will begin offering configurable release coordination and change management that’s centered on Fusion design and manufacturing. This will allow teams to easily automate and log work across their teams, helping them not only build repeatable processes, but also optimize the flows themselves over time as they become more agile.
Imagine, for example, that you’re a small product development company with a team of five. As you start out with a small team, you set up a release process to easily approve and track revisions. As the company grows you bring in more people and are expanding your product line, securing ISO compliance, tracking system requirements, and logging quality issues discovered in the field. Fusion Manage Extension will allow you to add approvers, insert workflow steps, and orchestrate checks, approvals, and tracking of changes throughout the product lifecycle—from early conceptual design all the way through delivery and servicing. We’ll do this through an integrated experience that makes it easy to begin taking advantage of cloud-native PLM from within Fusion, without the high cost and expense of traditional PLM systems.
You can automate a wide variety of analyses and tasks within Fusion and through its open and extensible APIs. Fusion’s generative design capabilities automatically explore a broad range of design alternatives considering a blend of performance and manufacturability constraints. Automated drawings and AI-driven sketch constraints can dramatically reduce the amount of time and effort spent on common tasks. And for more specific needs, Fusion has a powerful API that allows you to take automation further.
Over 400 apps are on our Fusion app store, providing a wide collection of scripts, add-ins, and other applications that automate common design and manufacturing tasks. Our cloud platform offers access to both the Design Automation for Fusion for cloud side compute, as well as Fusion data via our data model API. These make it possible to quickly set up projects, read and process Fusion data, read data into other systems, and write data back to the Fusion model all entirely via the web without the need for a desktop client.
Fusion’s open and extensible data APIs will open the door to more possibilities in the future. The graph-based structure of this API is ideal for agentic AI experiences. It creates opportunities for natural language inputs to enhance search and task automation. We also recognize manufacturers use multiple systems for process coordination. As a result, we plan to expand the API with BOM and property data for integration with other IT/OT metadata. This unlocks more potential to create a comprehensive view across the value chain through digital twins and other assets such as those powered by Autodesk Tandem Connect. We’re building Fusion data APIs not only to automate work within Fusion but also to harvest more actionable insights that can help businesses improve their performance.
Traditional tools have served companies well for decades, but they’re not built for quickly evolving collaboration needs in today’s world. We’re building Fusion’s cloud data capabilities and APIs to help teams iterate more quickly and bring better products to market faster. We’re excited to deliver an even stronger Fusion realizing the benefits of agile, and more importantly helping you design and make great products.
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