What’s New in SOLIDWORKS Inspection 2022

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Quality control and planning often involve the creation of documents such as drawings with balloon callouts and inspection reports. These time-consuming tasks are usually the responsibility of designers or quality inspectors who can spend hours every day manually creating all these documents to ensure that the parts they designed are manufactured according to their specifications.

SOLIDWORKS® Inspection 2022 is a First Article Inspection (FAI) and in-process inspection solution that simplifies and automates the reporting process. SOLIDWORKS Inspection is integrated with SOLIDWORKS CAD and is also available as a standalone application for working with other CAD systems.

Whether you’re working with in-house or outsourced manufacturing, monitoring and verifying critical geometry is key to ensuring consistency among your products. Let’s see how SOLIDWORKS Inspection 2022 continues to simplify and automate quality control operations.

Import Native SOLIDWORKS Files

The standalone version of SOLIDWORKS Inspection has historically relied on 2D PDFs and image files to start the ballooning process. Support for additional 2D and 3D CAD files was added a few years back. Now in 2022, NX and native SOLIDWORKS drawings are also supported.

One-Click Smart Extraction

Now you can start a project by importing a SOLIDWORKS drawing directly into the standalone SOLIDWORKS Inspection application and then extracting relevant part information such as part descriptions, part numbers, and current revisions. The same one-click smart extraction method is used to gather dimensional and tolerance characteristics needed for reporting. SOLIDWORKS Inspection also identifies the GD&T symbol, precision, and geometric tolerance indicators, which are all carried downstream into your first article or in-process reports.

Hole callouts and geometric tolerances are ballooned and remapped to the project’s bill of characteristics. Repeating these simple steps for the required tolerances and dimensional callouts is a breeze—no manual data entry required.

Improved Support and Performance for SOLIDWORKS Part Files

SOLIDWORKS Inspection 2022 has dramatically improved the performance and support for SOLIDWORKS part files, which can be directly added to an inspection project alongside a current 2D sheet. The extraction process is the same as for a 2D drawing (pulling in and identifying the geometric tolerance and positional information) but now ballooning onto a 3D part.

During the assembly of the above bracket, a few critical welds and some surface finish requirements require inspection. Inspection 2022 now fully supports importing SOLIDWORKS assemblies to ensure proper fit, form, and function with all manufactured and assembled items.

With the bill of characteristics created, this package can now be saved with all the associative 2D and 3D data without accessing any of the drawn parts or assemblies inside SOLIDWORKS CAD. You can generate the inspection reports and include 2D and 3D PDFs and the necessary Excel documentation.

API Support

SOLIDWORKS Inspection is also available inside SOLIDWORKS itself as an add-in, and new in Inspection 2022 is full support for API. This highly requested enhancement helps automate the creation, ballooning, modification, extraction, and exporting of first article and in-process inspection reports.

Learn More

To learn more about all the new file type support and increased automation in SOLIDWORKS Inspection 2022, contact your local reseller.

Mathieu Fourcade

Mathieu Fourcade

Matt is a Product Manager for SOLIDWORKS Inspection and new initiatives. CSWE. He previously worked as a Technical Support Engineer and Product Marketing Manager for SOLIDWORKS, Simulation, Plastics and Electrical.
Mathieu Fourcade

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