As trustees of your SolidWorks
investment, we believe it’s our job to help you solve the real
engineering challenges that you face every day, and those can’t always be
solved with an enhancement request. It’s our job to think about the tools and capabilities
you will need five, ten, even fifteen years down the road to keep you
competitive. We owe that to you.
To make that happen, our plan is
to leverage the strength and capabilities of the Dassault Systèmes 3DExperience
Platform and build a new experience that is as intuitive and easy to use as the
SolidWorks tools you use today. Today, I want to share the first example of
this new approach, which we are calling SolidWorks
Mechanical Conceptual.
SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual
is a tool for conceptual mechanical design that is complementary to the
products you use today. It allows you to capture ideas digitally, quickly
create 3D concept models, get feedback from internal and external stakeholders,
and easily manage multiple concepts before committing engineering time to
build.
Why Conceptual?
- 31% of project time is spent on conceptual
mechanical design
- 3 out of 4 engineers are engaged in conceptual
mechanical design
- On average there are six conceptual and four
design iterations in a typical project
- There can be more than three internal and two
external stakeholder groups involved in the concept phase
Today, SolidWorks is the best solution for detail design,
but it limits your creativity for this key conceptual step. SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual fills in
these gaps and allows you to:
- Capture ideas digitally
- Manage multiple concepts
- Collaborate and communicate
Instinctive Design
Evolving a concept is where SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual
really begins to speed the design time.
Most systems force you to think about product structure in order to
capture ideas. Our single modeling environment is about ease of use,
creativity, and ease of change – with amazing flexibility. Capturing concepts
digitally is quick and easy with familiar tools and concepts so the focus is on
ideas -- not on the software.
SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual merges the benefits of
history, parametrics, and direct editing into a single interface. As a concept evolves, you can make any change
necessary to a design while respecting the design intent you previously
created. The Single Modeling Environment allows you to evolve from layout
sketches to 3D geometry, to separate parts and assemblies, without taking
product structure into consideration.
SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual lets you evolve your design’s
organizational structure as you evolve the idea and have a better understanding
of where the design will go. This
eliminates wasted time because you never have to start over or drastically
rework designs to make an underlying change.
In our single modeling environment, as we evolve our product
structure into assemblies we have familiar tools and intelligence that improves
with use as components learn how they were used previously. You can also
automatically apply previous intent to new designs. And SolidWorks Mechanical
Conceptual always saves the design, as well as various iterations, so it’s very
easy to get back to a previous idea and develop it further.
As we get to more of a 3D concept, we can use motion
simulation to better understand the real world interaction of parts and
identify key concerns early on, before getting to detail design.
Social Innovation
When you feel that sufficient concepts have been captured,
then it’s key to be able to engage stakeholders (both internal to the
organization as well as with customers and vendors) to get feedback on the best
path forward.
SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual has social innovation
capabilities built into its foundation.
At any point, the designer can engage stakeholders by posting concepts
to their private communities. Stakeholders are notified that there is a concept
to review and can provide feedback using simple and familiar Web concepts. The world is becoming more social every day,
and at SolidWorks we believe in collective intelligence. SolidWorks Mechanical
Conceptual truly brings these capabilities to concept design. This type of participation will allow you to
better engage with your customers and differentiate yourself from the
competition. After stakeholders are
done, the designer is automatically notified and can continue to evolve the
concept with this feedback.
Connected
SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual is always connected to the
design database and to other users. This
gives us the ability to secure your data, prevent data loss from any crashes,
and automatically save iterations of each concept.
You are also connected to other users both working on your
project and also in the wider SolidWorks community. You can participate in live chats with other
users to get feedback on a question or a design challenge. Users are always working together on the same
design so that there is no time wasted, or confusion as to what is the latest
version. When a team member makes a
change, all users are updated in real time with the latest version so the
concepts will always progress forward.
Being connected provides access anywhere at any time to your
concepts. SolidWorks Mechanical
Conceptual even allows users to take designs on the go for design reviews, or
even for sales and marketing using mobile applications.
We are very excited about the progress we have made with
SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual. This
product will be a great complement to companies using SolidWorks today. We believe the product delivers on a new
approach to conceptual design by incorporating the flexibility of a single
modeling environment, social innovation, and the benefits of being connected
online.
In May of this year, we will be working with select customers to
validate these principles of conceptual design in their production environments. Once we are confident in the benefits these
customers are seeing we expect to make SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual
available to all users in the Fall of 2013.
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