Engineers love acronyms, and they admit it freely. They should; their lives are filled with them. On the engineering technology side alone, there's CAD, CAM, CAE, FEA, PDM, PLM, and those, of course, are just the beginning. Three-or-more-letter acronyms can be a way of simplifying the world. Who wants to use long phrases to describe commonly referenced ideas that could be rendered in understandable shorthand—or be made maddeningly obtuse. "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," said John Krouse, editor of Engineering Process Journal, a management-oriented industry newsletter that covers CAD, CAM, and PLM. For the record, CAD stands for "computer-aided design," CAM for "computer-aided manufacturing," and PLM for "product lifecycle management," which are all software applications used by engineers.
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