PartSupply—the One-stop Shop for All Your Reusable Part Needs

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If you’re like me you can certainly appreciate a one-stop shop, especially when it comes to Christmas shopping. Thankfully, 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace PartSupply has you covered (on the work front) for all your reusable parts needs.

I highly recommend taking advantage of “PartSupply,” a free online parts catalog with ready-to-use, source-able 3D parts from more than 1,700 providers.

It’s a quick and easy way to find reusable “standard” parts, you know the parts that can be reused across all your design projects and assemblies, such as fasteners and brackets. That way you can spend more time being creative and doing things that need more attention and get products to market faster.

PartSupply makes it simple to:

  • Access hundreds of catalogs containing millions of qualified supplier components
  • Quickly search by filtering with part categories, semantic search, or searching by a 3D shape
  • Easily compare similar configurations side-by-side
  • Add 3D models into active design environments for fast validation

It gets better. Did you know that you can access PartSupply directly from the 3D Creator parametric design role? Yes, you can insert, replace and open a part directly from PartSupply by dragging and dropping it to your 3D Creator design environment.

Here’s how it works.

Just set up a free PartSupply account and launch it from 3D Creator by clicking on the 3D 3DEXPERIENCE Compass, then select the As a Business Model tab, then grab Part Supply Component as a Service and simply drag and drop PartSupply to your dashboard.

Voila! You’re ready to start searching.

Easily access PartSupply from 3D Creator and drag and drop parts right in your design environment and validate them.

 

From PartSupply you can access the public catalog. Finding parts is fast as you can use the main search field to pull up the type of part you want to find, Let’s take a fastener as an example. To narrow down your search even more, you can click on the little tag/ticket icon next to the search field to filter your search by things such as who, what, when, where, etc. For instance, using the “where” filter will enable you to find parts to source from the U.S. or China, or wherever you may be based. Or if there is a particular brand or supplier you like, you can also search that way.

You can also search for a particular 3D shape.

Once you find the part type you are looking for, just select it and you can right-click it and choose options like “find similar” and the closest one will come up at the top of the list. Additionally, you can set it to search for “identical.”

You can also use the Compare feature in PartSupply to compare it to the original part in your model to see if it will be a fit.

Simply, drag and drop the part to your assembly and if it doesn’t fit you will get an error alert. If it’s a fit and you want to go with the part you’ve chosen, just click on the Import button.

Easily drag and drop parts from PartSupply directly to your design environment to add to your model.

 

If your company does not have the part in your inventory, you can contact the supplier by quickly filling out the Component Request form right in PartSupply.

The process is simple!

Why reuse standard parts?

The counter question is why not? Why waste time recreating what’s already been done? You know the saying, you don’t’ have to reinvent the wheel.

Engineers spend a lot of valuable time searching for and re-creating parts. These non-value-added search efforts slow new product time-to-market and thus bring low-quality data and duplicate parts into the company ecosystem.

Reusing standard parts ultimately helps with improving design speed and efficiency and frees up time for new designs and creativity, so you can do what you love – design!

90 percent of engineers spend an average of 30 minutes per day searching for parts on other public data catalog websites or recreating parts. What if you could use that 30 minutes to focus on being innovative? PartSupply makes that possible. Give it a try!

I think you’ll find that with direct integrations with many of our solutions, such as 3D Creator, SOLIDWORKS, and CATIA, reusing parts is faster and requires less steps than other catalog websites on the market.

Go custom – access your company’s internal parts catalog right from PartSupply.

Get even more productivity gains with the option to add your company’s personal component ecosystem into PartSupply. Ask your local reseller how and watch the video below for a demo.

And while PartSupply is going to come in handy for your day job, sorry, you’re on your own with the Christmas shopping. I’m in the same boat. Good luck and Happy Holidays!

 

Vivek Allu

Vivek is a Computer Science graduate of Arizona state University. He works as the Product Manager for PartSupply and Sourcing and Standardization Sub-domain Roles in the 3DEXPERIENCE WORKS Portfolio with a focus to drive growth and manage retention for 3DEXPERIENCE WORKS Community worldwide.