Manage Your Projects With 3DEXPERIENCE Dashboards

When talking to engineers around the world I hear a common complaint, we are all trying to get too much done with too little time. As an engineer you are juggling multiple tasks over multiple projects. You are designing, sourcing components, prototyping, testing and commissioning products. You spend way too much of your time balancing priorities and not enough doing what you enjoy, designing great products.

So how can the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform help? Put simply the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform is an engineering and business enabling tool. Within the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform there is the 3DDashboard, which delivers a powerful yet easy way of collecting project and task information into one online 30,000 ft view of your work, so you are not drowning in information overload.

Below is an image of a typical 3DDashboard, a completely configurable online view of the important information required to move your design projects forward.

In this case the dashboard has multiple pages (highlighted in yellow in the image) that can deliver both internal platform metrics (company sales, marketing and financial) and external news feeds using standard widgets. It can also deliver external website feeds such as 3DContentCentral and MySolidWorks which can help designers in their day to day work.

But how can a 3DDashboard help you manage multiple design projects? Looking into the “Design Projects” tab in this 3DDashboard we can see (below) the two main widgets that will allow you to judge if a project is progressing or not. On the left hand side is the blog feed and on the right hand side model feed. The blog feed simple list all the latest discussions on a project while the model feed widget allows users to monitor and view the designs created with any particular project

When starting a new design project it is good practice to create SwYm Communities (shown below) and Collaborative Spaces even before you put mouse pointer to sketch (the modern pen to paper analogy). The SwYm Community is an online social collaboration tool that enables all project stakeholders to discuss and comment upon the progress of the project through blogs. A Collaborative Space is an online design data storage that enables multiple designers to work on a single design project.

Now the blog and model feeds on a 3DDashboard can read from these project locations and it is easy to monitor the activity in each project. If there isn’t much activity this could be seen as a warning sign of a stalled project.

In summary a 3DDashboard provides a robust easily configurable dynamic view of the design projects you are involved in as well as other engineering or business-centric metrics you need to get your job done. Allow the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform to lift some of the weight from your shoulders so you can concentrate on designing.

To learn more about SOLIDWORKS Conceptual Designer, download the white paper “Connecting Conceptual Design.”