In a small engineering team, you know each other's work. You know that one designer maps their PDFs slightly differently than the other, that the bill of materials for that one order looks different, and that the iProperties are sometimes only half filled in. It all works out fine, you think. Until a new colleague starts, until production calls for the umpteenth time about a missing material in the bill of materials, or until a customer asks why two drawings of the same project do not look alike.
Standardizing in Inventor sounds like something for large departments with their own CAD manager and a hundred-page manual. It is not. With a small team in particular, you can capture agreements smartly, without it turning into bureaucracy. In this article you will read how to get everyone working the same way by putting the standard into the tools instead of into a document that nobody reads.
Why standardizing in Inventor is hard for small teams
The paradox of a small team: you need standardization the most, but have the least time to set it up. With five or six designers there is usually nobody doing full-time CAD management. Everyone draws, everyone delivers, and the agreements live mostly in the heads of the people who have worked there the longest.
That works as long as the team is stable. But engineering never stands still. Someone retires, you hire a temporary worker for a busy period, or the company grows from four to eight people. That is the moment it becomes clear how much knowledge was implicit. The new colleague does not know which iProperties are mandatory, what a bill of materials should look like, or in which formats production wants the files. And the people who do know are too busy to explain it.
The classic response is to write a work instruction. A Word document or a page on the intranet with all the agreements. The problem: such a document becomes outdated within a month, nobody reads it while working, and it enforces nothing. An agreement you only put on paper is an agreement you hope people will follow. An agreement that is in the tool is an agreement that happens automatically.
The standard belongs in the tools, not in a manual
The difference between a paper standard and a built-in standard is the difference between hoping and knowing. If the right way of working is also the easiest way, you do not have to convince anyone. People naturally choose the path of least resistance. That is not laziness, that is common sense.
Take the export of production documents. As long as each designer decides for themselves which formats are generated and where they end up, you get variation. One delivers PDF and DWG, another forgets the STEP, a third puts everything in their own subfolder. If that entire export sits in a single standardized action, the variation disappears. Everyone gets the same set, in the same place, in the same structure. Not because it is in a manual, but because there is no other button.
This is exactly what Thundercad aims for: capturing the agreements in the tool you already use anyway. Not as an extra layer on top of your work, but integrated into Inventor itself. Below we walk through the components that make the biggest difference for a small team.
One data card for iProperties per document type
iProperties are the metadata that feed your entire administrative chain: drawing title block, bill of materials, export names, ERP integration. If they are not correct, the error drags itself through everything. And yet in practice they are often the weakest point, because filling them in is manual work and manual work produces errors.
With the iProperty Menu you manage metadata through one configurable data card per document type. You decide once which fields exist, which are mandatory and what they are called. From that moment on, every designer sees exactly the same screen. A part, an assembly and a drawing each have their own card, tailored to what that document type needs. The freedom to do it "a little differently" disappears, and with it the inconsistency.
For a small team this is probably the most important step. iProperties are the source from which your bills of materials, your exports and your ERP data draw. Get that source in order, and everything downstream benefits.
Standardized exports with Batch Publish
The delivery step is where standardization pays off most visibly. Production, suppliers and customers expect a fixed set of files. With Batch Publish you generate all production documents in one step: PDF, DWG, DXF and STEP. It works together with Autodesk Vault, so your version control stays tidy too.
The effect is twofold. First, time savings: instead of exporting file by file, you do it in a single action. Thundercad shows this with "1 click instead of 12 steps" and "48 PDFs in 6 seconds". Second, and at least as important for standardization: everyone delivers exactly the same set. No forgotten formats, no deviating folders, no surprises for production.
Want to see how quickly your whole team delivers the same, complete set of production documents? Test Batch Publish and the other tools yourself in your own Inventor environment.
Try 30 days freeBills of materials in a fixed template with BOM Export
Bills of materials are notorious. Every receiving department wants them just a little differently, and without an agreement a proliferation of formats appears. With BOM Export you export bills of materials to Excel in a fixed template. Set up once, after that always the same columns, the same order, the same formatting.
That is worth its weight in gold for work preparation and purchasing. They know exactly what they will get and do not have to puzzle out per project where the material or the quantity is. And because the bill of materials draws on your iProperties, the circle closes: get your metadata right and your bill of materials is correct automatically.
Standardizing in Inventor via the Dashboard
So far this has been about individual tools. The Dashboard is the place where you manage them as a team. Here you activate and manage the tools, and connect them to your ERP and other software. The Dashboard is thereby the pivot point of your standardization: the central place where you record how the team works.
For a manager that is exactly what you want. You set up the way of working once centrally, and every designer works within it. You do not have to visit everyone at their workstation, you do not have to email instructions around. The agreements are in the system, not in individual heads. And if you want to adjust something, you do that in one place instead of on six workstations.
The ERP integration completes the picture. Engineering and business operations often drift apart, with double entry and retyped data as a result. By connecting Inventor to your ERP via the Dashboard, the data you already capture flows through to the rest of the company. Less retyping means fewer errors, and it means your standard does not stop at the drawing office.
Scalability: standardization as a foundation for growth
A small team is rarely a permanently small team. Either you grow, or you absorb peaks with temporary workers, or you increasingly collaborate with external designers. In all of those scenarios, a built-in standard is the difference between scaling smoothly and chaos.
Think of a busy period in which you bring in two extra people. Without a standard that means days of onboarding: explaining how the exports work, which iProperties are mandatory, what the bill of materials should look like. With a built-in standard, those new people see the same data cards from day one and use the same export and BOM actions as everyone else. They can hardly deviate, because the right way is the only obvious way.
Let's run through an example. Suppose a designer delivers ten projects per week, and that manually exporting and checking takes ten minutes per project. That is almost two hours per week, per person. In a team of six that adds up to well over ten hours per week. These are assumptions, and your numbers will be different, but the order of magnitude shows where the gain is: not in one spectacular saving, but in dozens of small repetitions that you eliminate.
That trade-off is also easy for a manager to make financially. Thundercad costs EUR 30 per user per month, or EUR 300 per user per year (that is two months free), per seat and excluding VAT. Weigh that against the hours you recover per person, and the calculation is quickly made for most teams. Moreover, the license is purchased per seat, from 1 to 99 users, so you pay according to the scale at which you work and not for seats that stay empty.
More important than the minutes is predictability. A standardized process is a process that you can hand over, can expand and can trust. That you do not have to monitor anew with every new order. Companies like Little Giant Europe, Van Egten, Banzo and Mannen van Staal already work with Thundercad to streamline this kind of repetitive work in Inventor.
Onboarding without a thick training document
Onboarding is the litmus test of your standardization. If a new colleague delivers correct documents independently after a day, then your way of working is well put together. If it takes weeks and the first deliveries are full of errors, then too much knowledge was in other people's heads.
Built-in standards shorten that onboarding time drastically. Your new colleague does not have to remember which fields are mandatory, because the data card shows it. You do not have to explain which formats production wants, because Batch Publish delivers them all. Nobody has to reproduce the right bill of materials formatting, because BOM Export uses the fixed template. The knowledge is in the tools, so the learning curve is about Inventor itself, not about your house rules.
That also spares the existing colleagues. Onboarding always takes time from your best people, precisely the people you can least afford to miss. The more of the house rules that sit in the tools, the fewer pats on the back and correction rounds are needed. Your senior designers stay on the real work, instead of answering questions all day.
Standardizing without bureaucracy
The biggest fear with standardization is that it stifles. That you trade freedom and craftsmanship for a straitjacket of rules and forms. With a paper standard that fear is justified: rules you have to remember and follow manually feel like ballast.
But standardization in the tools works differently. You do not standardize the thinking, the designing, the solving of engineering problems. There all the room remains. You standardize the boring, repetitive part: the administration, the exports, the metadata. Exactly the work where variation adds no value and only produces errors.
Good standardization is therefore not a brake, but a liberation. It removes the mind-numbing chores and gives your designers their time back for the work they are good at. And for you as a manager it brings peace of mind: you know that what goes out the door is correct, regardless of who made it.
Frequently asked questions
Isn't standardizing in Inventor overkill for a small team?
Quite the opposite. The smaller the team, the greater the impact of one departing or new colleague. In a small team a lot of knowledge sits implicitly in the heads of a few people. By capturing agreements in the tools, you make your way of working independent of who is at the controls. That is not overkill, that is spreading risk.
How much work is it to set this up, and what does it cost?
You set up the standards once: the iProperty data cards per document type, the BOM template and the export settings. After that everyone works within them without further effort. Start small, with the iProperties, because they feed your bills of materials and exports. You do not have to do everything at once. As for cost: Thundercad is EUR 30 per user per month or EUR 300 per user per year, per seat and excluding VAT, and you can try it free for 30 days first.
What do I need to use Thundercad?
Thundercad runs on Windows 10 or 11 with Autodesk Inventor 2025 or newer and an active Autodesk account. It works together with Autodesk Vault and can be connected to your ERP via the Dashboard. You can try it free for 30 days without a credit card. You can read more in the knowledge base.