Scanning can be very beneficial in every stage of your design; it can greatly decrease your design time in the early stages or help you through quality control in the latter. Let me give you an example. Say you made a prototype part and you’re ready to create CAD? You could quickly scan your part, start surfacing the data and have your scan as reference to make sure it’s accurate to your real model (imaging surfacing the part above +/- 0.05mm with out any scan data.).

Mid-way through the process hand changes where made to the part/tool. How would you justify the change? You could CMM a few points or quickly scan the object (the part above took 5min) with billions of points it can accurately show what has changed when compared back to CAD.

Oh and the billions of points makes it really nice to see what going on with your part. Hopefully this has been a good intro to implementing scanning in to your product design. The part above took me roughly 2 hours to scan and generate a cad model (Not bad for +/- 20 microns).