SOLIDWORKS World 2018 General Session Recap: Day Three

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Day three of General Sessions at SOLIDWORKS World started off with Mike Puckett, Senior Manager of the Worldwide Certification Program, who gave the audience a glimpse of the workforce of the future. According to Mike the SOLIDWORKS certification program, which celebrates its 20th anniversary, initially took 16 years to reach 100,000 certified users, but over the last two years it’s doubled in size with 200,000 new users now certified. In 2017 alone, the program added over 52,000 new certified users. In fact, every 10 minutes another SOLIDWORKS user becomes certified. Bottom line: if you want to be part of the workforce of the future, get SOLIDWORKS certified.

Mike also introduced two new, industry-focused exams to the program. Want to get schooled in additive manufacturing? There’s a new Certified Additive Manufacturing Associate exam coming in April on MySolidWorks, and there’s a new Mold Making Associate exam now available. To mark its 20th anniversary, the CSWP exam has been redesigned with new content, new models and new challenges.

Next Mike introduced everyone to future engineer Jason Ledon, who passed his first SOLIDWORKS certification exam at the age of 15, reached expert level by 16, and wants to pass all customer-facing certification exams by the time he graduates from high school. The future and the present can all benefit from being certified on the tool that everyone is using to innovate.

Next up on stage was Kishore Boyalakuntla, Vice President, Portfolio Management, Brand UX Leader at SOLIDWORKS, who introduced Ryan Kraft, an engineer from Arrivo, a company focused on the goal of eliminating traffic. Kraft told the crowd that people who live in the larger urban areas of the country spend an average of 100 hours a year in traffic and as a nation we lose billions of dollars as a result of traffic.

The company is using SOLIDWORKS and 3DEXPERIENCE solutions to design a high-speed super urban network to move people around cities. The Arrivo network would be composed on a magnetized track that parallels existing freeways. The system could support existing vehicles as well as cargo sleds and its own specially designed vehicles.

When asked why the company selected the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, Kraft said that they are first and foremost a company of builders, and their strategy for CAE, CAD, and PLM must support that. The company selected the minimum set of tools and processes to enable quick but accurate manufacturing and testing, and will add in further toolsets and processes as they move to a production mindset in the coming years.

What’s next for these pioneers of the brave new world of transportation? The company will spend the next 18 months to two years focusing on moving forward with technology, partners and customers, and it is actively seeking engineers to join the company, with hopes of doubling its engineering staff. The company also has plans to build a test track in Colorado and if all goes well, construction of that will begin in 2019.

Milos Zupanski, director of Product Portfolio Management, was up next introducing SOLIDWORKS 3DEXPERINCE PLM Services. As products are getting more complex and time to market is getting shorter, there is a growing need to take control of your company’s data and protect IP. SOLIDWORKS 3DEXPERIENCE PLM Services provide an affordable data and lifecycle management system regardless of company size and does not require investment in or hosting on your own hardware infrastructure.

Due to the fact that 3DEXPERIENCE PLM Services are hosted in the cloud, there is nothing to install, no hardware requirements. According to Milos, it was designed for SOLIDWORKS users in mind as a way to facilitate collaboration by enabling users to provide access to data for everyone on your team, even if they don’t have a full license.

Whether people are using SOLIDWORKS Desktop or xDesign and whether their needs require PDM or PLM, SOLIDWORKS 3DEXPERIENCE PLM Services enable users to take the steps they want to take and grow at their own pace. As their needs increase, they can scale up and add additional capabilities with a click of a button. Users can start with xDesign today and can have full PLM capabilities connected to SOLIDWORKS by the end of the year. Click here to learn more about this announcement.

Stephen Endersby, director of Product Portfolio Management, was next up to introduce Tarso Marques, owner and founder of Tarso Marques Concepts and a former Formula One driver. Design is a very personal expression of your vision, Tarso said, however, being able to communicate that vision was an issue early on as he made his transition from driver to custom car designer. He admits that when he first started designing, his initial sketches were not great, which made explaining his ideas difficult and clay modeling was too time-consuming.

Fortunately Tarso’s experience with SOLIDWORKS changed the game for him. He said that SOLIDWORKS literally changed his life, making it much easier and faster to get his vision on the road. Once parts are created, the company’s designers must focus on performance so they have begun using the new Topology Optimization features in SOLIDWORKS Simulation, which he calls “truly transformational” and has resulted in stronger, lighter parts that deliver high-end performance.

The company has now changed the way it designs its car parts and components, starting a design using topology optimization, which enables them to create organic parts that not only look cool but can be 3D printed, something that would have been impossible with any other means.

Kurt Lundstedt, director of Product Portfolio Management, was next to cue up yet another amazing customer success story. ENVE is a company started by a small group of cyclers with an interest in carbon fiber technology. The company uses SOLIDWORKS and SOLIDWORKS Simulation to create high-strength components, such as molds and fixtures.

As the company grew, storing data on network folders was causing issues with version control and lost files. Back in 2012 the company implemented SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional to help them better manage its design data. The company is now using SOLIDWORKS Manage, which includes powerful project, process and item management tools along with interactive dashboards and reports. ENVE will use the project management capabilities to track their new product development activities and are considering creating their spare part orders using the item capabilities and reporting tools. They will also connect SOLIDWORKS Manage to their ERP system using the built-in data import and export capabilities to pull relevant data into Manage and send product information back.

Another cool customer, Gilo Industries, and its founder Gilo Cardoza, was next on the main stage to share how his company is using SOLIDWORKS to design the Mako jetboard. Cardoza said that while the concept of a jetboard has been around since the 1930s, no one has ever done it really well. It needed to be lightweight, like a surfboard and travel fast. The Mako goes 35 mph and has a 12-horsepower engine and goes from zero to 35 in a blazing 2.8 seconds. Using SOLIDWORKS the company went from art to finished product in 12 months.

One of the highlights of any SOLIDWORKS World is Model Mania, which also marked its 20-year anniversary. Mark Schneider came on stage to announce this year’s winners. The customer winners were: third place: Kam Smith, CACI, Inc.; second place: Jeremiah Feist, Omnetics Connector Corp. and first place: Tom Smith, Victaulic. The winners among the Resellers were: third place: Krystof Pluta, DPS Software, second place: Tobias Schnaars, Fisher; and first place: John MacArtuthur, DASI.

For the day’s Keynote Address Joseph Hiura and Robert Andrew Johnson, both art director and set designers, spoke about how they use SOLIDWORKS to design movie sets for films such as Oblivion, Passengers, Tron Legacy, and Batman Versus Superman. Robert said that movies are very collaborative in nature, with many parts that must come together to make the final product, which requires them to be fast and agile to meet the short deadlines they are commonly faced with. SOLIDWORKS is what enables them to meet this challenge.

Gian Paolo closed the show by telling the audience that we all share a big dream and that most importantly, we have the knowledge, talent, character, determination to make it happen – let’s make a better world for everyone.

See you in Dallas next year for SOLIDWORKS World 2019. In the meantime, you can relive the action here at SWW18 with on-demand video at live.solidworks.com. Thanks for making 2018 the best SOLIDWORKS World yet!

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