U.S. Digital to increase sales by 30 percent

If you go to visit any designer you will notice one thing in common on the shelves around their desks. That’s stacks and stacks of component catalogs. These are the parts you buy to build your products. Often you spend time “reverse engineering” the parts from outdated catalogs to see how they will fit in your designs. What a waste of time.

US Digital is an example of how companies are moving to provide more of their components online, in 3D formant, to make life easier for their customers. Why redesign it when you can configure and download it.
https://www.solidworks.com/pages/news/viewrelease.html?prid=331

Along that same line, 3D ContentCentral is a great site where designers can go and find 3D content from many of the vendors they use in their designs today. 3D ContentCentral also has a large repository of models contributed by other designers, potentially a model you may need.
https://www.3dcontentcentral.com

Check it out and if you find something you can use why not contribute one of your own models to the community.