Well, I celebrated 19 years working for the same company last month. That also means that I have officially spent half of my life working at the same place. Not that it’s a bad thing – quite the contrary actually. I really enjoy the company and people that I work with. And even though I haven’t changed employers over the last 19 years, it doesn’t mean I haven’t seen my share of changes. In fact, one of the biggest changes that I’ve had the privilege of being a part of was the the switch to SOLIDWORKS/EPDM as our official CAD software (we’re former NX users). And since this is my first ever blog post, I thought I’d take a few minutes to talk about it (and the software) from my perspective.
TL;DR SOLIDWORKS is a capable CAD package that is easy to learn and can be very productive. In fact, most new hires already know how to use it. The move to SOLIDWORKS was the right decision, but it wasn’t [isn’t] without it’s difficulties.
The decision to change design software was not taken lightly by management. After all, we had been using NX since long before it was called NX. In fact, it would be more appropriate to describe how long we used it in decades rather than years. We had an established relationship with NX support, sales, and product managers. They knew our requirements and did their best to provide for our needs. It was a proven product that did what we needed it to do.
NX wasn’t without it’s issues however. Because it is an incredibly large and capable piece of software, it would often take new employees weeks or more to ramp up enough to be productive in it. To make matters worse, local training in the greater Spokane area is almost non existent.
SOLIDWORKS on the other hand makes on-boarding new employees much easier. Because there are so many companies and universities using SOLIDWORKS, many designers and engineers already have experience with it. As a result they can hit the ground running and start learning our products and processes instead of learning yet another CAD package.
In the event that we have a good candidate who hasn’t used SOLIDWORKS before, we are lucky enough to have a local VAR – Quest Integration – within 15 minutes which can handle technical questions, issues, and training.
Another big reason for the move was simply the cost of the product. I won’t belabor the point, but suffice it to say that a high end cad package is going to cost a lot more. When the cheaper software provides almost all of the required functionality, it’s kind of obvious which is more cost effective.
The move to SOLIDWORKS was no small feat though. We have years worth of automation built into NX that needed to be ported into SOLIDWORKS. This automation is mostly in the form of what we call “seed models” which are parts, assemblies, and drawings which embed logic and design intent for our products. Using one of these seed models, a designer can complete a design in 3 to 4 days which could take a month or more without it. This embedded logic automatically handles many of the design details, thereby ensuring a good and correct design. This was an area where we had the most difficulty making the switch. SOLIDWORKS seems to be far more optimized for a good end user experience than it is for full tilt design logic. No doubt, logic can be embedded into SOLIDWORKS files, but you can only take it so far before you start incurring major performance hits. We’ve worked around many of these issues by rethinking how parts are structured and linked together, but it’s taken a few iterations to find good workable solutions that fit our needs. Now that we have, productivity is almost on par with NX depending on the product being designed.
All things considered, I think moving to SOLIDWORKS was the right decision for us. We had more reasons for making the switch than I brought up here, but being able to hire people who already know the software and having a great local VAR for support (Quest Integration in our case) were pretty high on the list.
One last thing. Please don’t mistake me for a SOLIDWORKS fan boy. I am far from it. As you will see in future posts, I’m actually quite critical of SOLIDWORKS and it’s opinionated way working. Stay tuned…