The SolidWorks Blog

SolidWorks Enterprise PDM 2012: Integrated Search in Windows Explorer

A great new feature has been added to SolidWorks Enterprise PDM 2012 that allows for searching inside of Windows Explorer.  Not only does this eliminate the need for a separate Search window to be opened on the desktop, it also adds searching to any Windows Open dialog.  SolidWorks users can search in the Open dialog when inserting a file into an assembly or any other operation that presents you with the Open dialog.  This improves your efficiency by searching instead of browsing around in the vault or going to a separate dialog.

TIP: Using Enterprise PDM’s ability to easily create customized search cards, you can create a slimmed down card to use in Windows Explorer and Open dialogs.  Here’s an example of one that will search on file names, configuration names, and variables using only one input string.  The input string uses the History Text variable name field.  Setting the default value for Search folder to look in the entire vault, eliminates the need for the user to specify a folder path. Note: search times could be increased using these settings since the system is looking at the entire vault and at several data fields at the same time.

If you want to learn more about all the new features for 2012, watch the video below, then visit the SolidWorks 2012 website to learn more about what's new in Enterprise PDM.

SolidWorks World 2012 Partner Profile: Barry-Wehmiller International Resources

One of the things we've heard from SolidWorks World attendees over the past few years is that you'd like to learn more in advance about the SolidWorks partners who set up booths in the Partner Pavilion. So now through SolidWorks World 2012, we'll be posting a series of blog entries about some of the partners you might think about checking out, and the people who will be representing them. Today we hear from the good folks at Barry-Wehmiller International Resources.

1. Tell us a little bit about Barry-Wehmiller International Resources.

Barry-Wehmiller International Resources Limited (BWIR) is part of the consulting group of Barry-Wehmiller Companies, Inc., a diversified company founded in 1885. BWIR is a global technology provider specializing in the creation, development, and integration of the industry’s most advanced PLM/EPDM technology and engineering solutions. With headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri, and over 55 offices worldwide, BWIR offers world-class, cost-effective business process analysis, industrial machine design and engineering, new product development, and PLM/EPDM services.

 

2. What products do you sell that might appeal to SolidWorks users?

BWIR offers manufacturers a full suite of engineering and information technology services, bridging these two core areas with product life-cycle management solutions.

In Engineering services, BWIR helps manufacturers to maximize their output in areas such as product design, industrial automation, sustaining engineering and value engineering.  BWIR also assists manufacturers in identifying effective strategies for integrating their engineering functions with the rest of the company.

In the PLM space, BWIR provides EPDM implementation, integration, data migration, and customization. BWIR provides integrations with ERP platforms, such as Oracle, SAP, MAPICS, Syteline, and others. We also provide data migration for Pro/E Intralink, DBWorks, AutoCAD, SAP, Oracle, and others. Specifically, BWIR will provide the assessment, design, implementation, training, and customization for global and multi-site EPDM implementations.

 

3. How can your products or services help make a SolidWorks user’s life easier?

As part of continuous project innovation and sustained research and development (R&D) efforts, BWIR's PLM team has developed various SolidWorks EPDM add-ins to cater to the manufacturing industry. Christened as “BWIR Pro+ Services for EPDM” it is a set of ready-to-use add-ins that can fix the most teething problems faced by EPDM users. Our Enterprise Product Data Management (EPDM) experts have identified six functions that address these challenges across the product development cycle through custom-built packages that can help many engineering organizations to unleash the complete potential of the Enterprise Product Data Management (EPDM) tool.

4. Why should SolidWorks World attendees visit your booth? What will be special or exciting?

In spite of advances in the product data management technology, the constant market pressures to decrease product development time and to utilize better the potential of product design engineers have led us to introduce EPDM add-ins that would increase productivity multi-fold.

Experience “BWIR Pro+ Services for EPDM”– Multi-fold productivity a set of ready-to-use add-ins that can fix the most teething problems faced by EPDM users.

• Remember the instance where you released the assembly documents for the next stage of your development cycle when someone was still updating a part model?
• How many times you would have been keen to know the status of your document on the overall work cycle?

Many such small setbacks can drag the team’s productivity leading to repetitive tasks, unorganized execution and un-synchronized development ultimately resulting in the delay of the product’s launch.

Please feel free to drop in by our booth # 105 and experience the power of “BWIR Pro+ Services for EPDM”– Multi-fold productivity that will increase the productivity multi-fold and you can connect with our EPDM experts to learn more about its features and functionality.

SolidWorks World attendees who drop in at our booth can also take advantage of benefits that include free basic engineering audits for the spot purchase of add-ins.

5. How can customers learn more about your products:

SolidWorks World attendees can find us at booth #105 in the Partner Pavilion. You can also contact us at 

Phone: 1 (800) 862-8020

Website: www.bwir.com

Email: marketing@bwir.com

Facebook page:

Twitter:

YouTube channel:

Build your business case for PDM with our new cost savings calculator!

I’m sure you already know the major design and engineering benefits of product data management (PDM). A solution like SolidWorks Enterprise PDM gives your team a secure digital vault for product data, with full version control and instant search, delivering better collaboration and workflow, cutting design time, and minimizing file errors. Sounds good, right?

So while you may be sold on the big benefits of PDM, how do you build the case for it with senior management? To justify the investment, you need to convince them that PDM should be a priority for your business – and that it will deliver more than just an easier life for your team!

Here’s the good news. SolidWorks customers are telling us that PDM delivers huge cost savings and agility advantages for their whole business. They’ve found that their new PDM solution is up to 50% cheaper to run than their old file management system. Some have halved their design costs. Others are bringing products to market twice as fast as before, and delivering profits sooner.

But management always want hard numbers – what will the specific savings be for your business?

With SolidWorks’ new PDM cost savings calculator, you can easily quantify the financial benefits that PDM could deliver. You can also create and download a persuasive PDM cost savings report, personalized for your company in minutes. It’s an easy and effective way to help get your message across to the big suits – and get your PDM implementation started.

Try the PDM cost savings calculator now.

Thoughts On Collaboration: What Challenges Do *You* Face?

I’m a Product Manager in the data management group at SolidWorks, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about collaboration.

When I talk with customers about collaboration, it can seem so simple on the surface:  “I’m working on a project, and I need to involve someone else.”  Easy, right?  Well… not really, no.

The thing is, ten people could utter those same words and mean ten different things.  Maybe the need is to keep a group of people working from the same, up-to-date CAD data.  Or it could be to get and manage feedback about a design from a domain expert.  Or the need may simply be to share a design with a customer for their approval.  The number of distinct needs that are forms of “collaboration” can be staggering.  But a common theme seems to be that collaborating is hard – harder than it ought to be.  To me, that says we have an opportunity to make life easier for our customers.

In digging into the feedback we’ve received over years of customer visits, I’ve found it really helpful to break down what I’ve heard into two categories, based on the relationship that exists between the parties that need to work together:

• Is the collaborator a trusted “insider?”
• Or are they an “outsider” with whom only so much can be shared?

For customers working with trusted “insiders,” we can apply one set of assumptions about how close those users can be to your design data, and can think about collaboration capabilities delivered inside of the design tools.  But for situations where you’re working with “outsiders,” we need to assume you want greater protection of your intellectual property, and provide collaboration capabilities that are more about selective sharing and discussions than close cooperation.

There are plenty of other factors we’ll need to consider too, of course.  For example, what are the technical backgrounds and skills of the different groups of collaborators?  And what are the most effective means of capturing and managing feedback from a few or even many participants?  And how can I make the collaboration process more social – increasing the number voices in my organization that I’ll hear from, and providing greater visibility to the challenges that exist within a project?  But understanding the relationships that exists between collaborators is crucial to getting collaborative capabilities right.

I’ve introduced this topic because I’m interested in making sure we provide great collaboration capabilities.  Do you think of your collaboration needs this way?  Are there people you trust a little bit and people you trust a lot, and do you want to work differently with one set vs. the other?  I’d love to hear your thoughts, and I’ll look forward to sharing more as I dig into specific customer needs in this area.

New in SolidWorks EPDM 2012: Improved response time with large data sets

In SolidWorks Enterprise PDM 2012, system performance has been improved for users working with large data sets and users working remotely with Copy Tree and template-created documents.

In previous versions of Enterprise PDM, long delays or system stoppages could occur when users worked with large data sets with many parent/child relationships. Affected functions included viewing the information on the Contains tab in Windows Explorer or in a CAD add-in when the Archive refresh rate is set at a low value, for example, five seconds.

When creating new documents from remote replicated sites with high latency connections to the SQL Server, it now takes less time for users in remote offices to create new documents using templates and the Copy Tree tool. Combining the queries that save card variables has made the creation of documents from templates as much as three times faster. Improved query methods have optimized WAN traffic for the Copy Tree operation, making the new response time up to ten times faster.

Want to learn more? Just visit the SolidWorks 2012 website to learn about the rest of the updates for our 20th release.

Configurable PDM

Part of my job as Product Manager at DS SolidWorks Corp is to visit customers and see how they are using our technology. I love to ask how they did things before implementing our software, what productivity gains they have made, what pros and cons they could speak to and how things have changed overall.

I was blown away in one of my last visits where a customer had been implementing a competitors PLM solution for the past two years, but still had not moved into the production roll out phase. Whenever they wanted to make a simple change to the PLM system, they had to call the PLM vendor and schedule a service call which would take about two (2) weeks. Once the consultant was on-site, they would spend about two (2) days programming and customizing the PLM toolkit in order to fulfill the request.

 

Last year they decided to try SolidWorks Enterprise PDM (EPDM) as an alternative to the never-ending PLM project and were able to get this system into production in less than 6 months. The time would have been even less, but this project was combined with a re-engineering initiative.

The most startling difference between the two systems seems to be in the approach of building up a PDM system with simple and highly configurable administrative tools versus a PLM toolkit approach that requires very specialized, expensive and time-consuming customization. The customer told me, “changes that took 2 weeks to schedule and 2 days to accomplish with our failed PLM implementation, now take less than 10 minutes 95% of the time for me to change myself”.

We take this customer feedback to heart and will continue to provide easy-to-setup and configure tools to enable our customers to get into production quickly with new solutions, achieve fast returns on investment (ROI) and increase productivity over time with additional changes that can be made in-house. If you have any feedback or stories on the concept of configuring versus customizing (programming) we would love to hear from you.

 

New in SolidWorks Enterprise PDM 2012: Expanded Full User Name Display

Sometimes it's the small improvements that make the biggest difference. For example, in SolidWorks Enterprise PDM, user names are displayed to indicate who has checked out or created files, sent or received mail messages, or initiated actions performed on files. If your company creates users with truncated user names, for example, by importing users from Windows Active Directory, it may be difficult to identify individuals just by their login names.

With SolidWorks EPDM 2012, you can now modify your user settings in the Administration tool to specify that the full names of users are displayed throughout the user interface.

Compare these examples of the Checked Out By column in File View in Windows Explorer:

To display full user names:

1. In the left pane of the Administration tool, expand Users.
2. Right-click your user name and click Settings.
3. In the left pane of the Settings dialog box, click Explorer.
4. Under Miscellaneous, select Show full user names.
5. Click Apply.

Want to see more? Just visit the SolidWorks 2012 website to learn about the rest of the updates for our 20th release.

New in SolidWorks 2012: Enterprise PDM Highlights

The SolidWorks 2012 release brings a lot of new enhancements for SolidWorks Enterprise PDM. Some of the news things you can do include the ability to:

• Track “where used” information for every version of every file
• Preview any document
• Manage your project data and workflow for improved productivity
• Quickly find, share, and reuse data with the integrated Windows^® Explorer search tool
• Streamline your user interface with fully customizable toolbar and right-mouse menus

Watch the video below, then visit the SolidWorks 2012 website to learn more about what's new in Enterprise PDM!

Matti Technology AG uses SolidWorks to shorten design cycles by up to 20%

They may not be a household name, but Switzerland's Matti Technology AG is a major player in the development of printing presses, finishing lines, drying techniques, and digital printing technologies. They provide high-speed solutions to support a variety of business printing needs, and have successfully integrated a thousand different digital systems

More on SolidWorks n!Fuze, and how to sign up for beta

Two weeks ago at SolidWorks World 2011, we showed off SolidWorks n!Fuze, our newest data and file sharing application. If you couldn't make it to San Antonio, here are a few more details about the product.

SolidWorks n!Fuze is a new Web-based offering that lets you share and collaborate on files and ideas. It outperforms traditional approaches for sharing files, such as email and FTP sites, because it integrates with your design tools to facilitate the way you work, uses familiar social networking concepts to engage with others, and avoids costly IT infrastructure and administration. SolidWorks n!Fuze is quick and easy to get started with, simple to use, and accessible from anywhere.

Access anywhere, without costly infrastructure

SolidWorks n!Fuze gives you a home on the Internet for your designs and related materials that you need to collaborate on or work on from multiple locations. Every n!Fuze user gets 15GB of storage space, and an unlimited ability to create workspaces in which to share design materials with others.

Share with colleagues, customers and suppliers

SolidWorks n!Fuze offers a social approach to sharing your designs with colleagues, customers, suppliers – really anyone who you need to collaborate with. With n!Fuze, you create a network of people you want to work with, and invite them to join the SwYm social networking platform and the workspace(s) where you’ve loaded content you need their input on. You can have an unlimited number of other SolidWorks n!Fuze users in your network, and invite up to five guests at a time who are not n!Fuze subscribers.

Control your content

SolidWorks n!Fuze lets you decide how to share. You decide who is invited to a workspace, and what they can do there. Can they just read your files and comment on them? Can they upload their own work to your workspace? Can they edit the work you’ve put up there? You decide! There are many scenarios that make sense for collaborating on designs, and the flexibility built into SolidWorks n!Fuze means we have them covered. We even track versions of SolidWorks files, so that if changes from your group don’t work out the way you’d hoped, you can revert back.

Get and track feedback about your designs

SolidWorks n!Fuze has a great commenting feature, which allows collaborators to post comments about your designs. Rather than having comments lost in email, they’re directly associated with your work, right inside n!Fuze.

Work in a browser or inside SolidWorks

SolidWorks n!Fuze offers two ways to work. People who need to be able to work directly with CAD files can use an add-in to SolidWorks, and people who just need the ability to view your designs or post non-CAD files can use a Web client. Either way, they get access to the information you’ve shared, and can participate in the way you’ve envisioned.

Work from a PC or (soon) a mobile device

Advances in mobile platforms (iPhone and iPad, and the Android phones and tablets) have made mobile collaboration in design work a practical possibility. SolidWorks n!Fuze will support PCs initially, but we will be adding support for mobile devices soon.

Use independently, or complement your SolidWorks PDM solution

SolidWorks n!Fuze is designed to meet the needs of individuals who need to share and collaborate with others, but don’t necessarily need or want to invest in or administer a centrally-managed, network-based system for collaborating on designs. Its social approach means that each user administers their own list of contacts and their own workspaces, and invites others to collaborate on an as-needed basis.

If you have already invested in a PDM solution, SolidWorks n!Fuze can still be a great addition to your suite of SolidWorks data management products.  Since SolidWorks n!Fuze is hosted on the Web, it offers a great way of collaborating with suppliers, clients and partners outside the walls of your organization. Customers of all sizes, both with and without PDM solutions can benefit from the simple and easy collaboration that SolidWorks n!Fuze can provide.

SolidWorks n!Fuze is a great way to share and collaborate online, in ways that are uniquely tailored to the needs of SolidWorks customers.  We're excited to bring this new solution to you, and are looking forward to hearing how you use it, what you like about it, and what you'd like to see us add or change.

You can also sign up for the public beta, which is scheduled to start in the next few weeks. Just send your name, company name and contact information to nFuzeBeta@solidworks.com. When the beta program is ready to start, we’ll contact you with program details and instructions.