Hi,

I am hoping you can help or offer advice. I am working in industry and at the moment do structural/FEA work on cranes. I get handed production CAD assembly models from the DDM to undergo FEA analysis and to date they are impossible to tweak for FEA analysis without having to remodel the assembly as a single component which from production drawings (side plates etc) and FEA is fine. However, this is time consuming, and ideally we want to be able to integrate CAD production models with CAE/FEA such that should we wish to move a stiffener it would iteratively update in CAE/FEA model for analysis without having to manually redraw and model a part. Easier said than done. Issues I have been having are: production CAD model is mated with in Place mates on a virtual outline part, there are zero thickness instances and interferences due to overlapping touching/non-touching faces and model is relatively complex with assembly having numerous parts. Attached is image of CAD production model. 

Advice on this most welcomed. Thanks. 
G