One of my hopes for this site is to give CAD Admin types somewhere to connect with their own kind. I know when I did that job I felt very isolated, with a lot of responsibility, little authority, and no resources. It would be cool if other people didn’t have to feel that way.
So, if you do the CAD Admin job formally or informally or even just in part, stop in and describe your duties and your challenges. Get something off your chest. Ask a question, and we’ll bounce it around.
Go!
I’m a CAD Admin where I work. It started when I took care of the transition from 2D to 3D. Lots of tasks, most of them are small ones but important ones nonetheless. Off the top of my head:
I took care of developping the part numbering and make sure everyone follows the guidelines.
I took care of creating the link from SolidWorks to our ERP so that we could push info from an assembly to our ERP.
I implemented SSP inside the company, but a very basic one. A coworker then pushed it much further.
I take care of every Software update to ensure that everything goes right.
I manage our database to try and remove what’s useless.
I take care of training new users inside the company
I am the official troubleshooter when people have issues
A co-worker and I attempt to manage PDM and CAD related issues. Our in-house department consists of 10 designers/engineers/drafters.
Hello group. My name is ben and i’m a CAD admin.
I am a PDM administrator and am always interested in learning about how other people use PDM. I’m looking forward to the discussions that will get started here.
Is this like a CAA meeting? (CAD Admins Anonymous)
Hi everyone, my name is Jason, and I am a CAD junky. I started my CAD admins duties going back to the late 90’s in CATIA by volunteering to setup the then unused library function at the time. Later I helped lead the evaluation to replace Catia, and SolidWorks come out on top.
For several year after I did double duty as a mechanical designer, CAD administrator, mentor, trainer and also acted as a human PDM system that my coworkers called Jason/Works. I left the company for a few years, picked up some NX, then came back to the previous company as a full time CAD manager. I brought in PDM shortly after as the team had grown quite a bit across several locations and manually managing files on network drives was no longer feasible. Now 13 years later, the company is going to Windchill for all global units which unfortunately closes the PDM chapter of my life. It will be a sad day when we finally turn the PDM system off after all the work we did on it 
. I’ve truly enjoyed tinkering with PDM and trying to make it jump thru hoops…Windchill however, that’s another story… 
Here’s my story as CAD Admin.
(tl;dr = I liked it, but worked hard)
I was an applications engineer at a reseller, and realized that most resellers thought a “promotion” was to make tech guys into salesmen. Anyway, that didn’t go over very well.
I had a favorite customer and they wanted help transitioning from Acad to SolidWorks. So I took the job (Engineering Services Manager, also had technical writing, the doc change process, and some overflow CAD people). It was a company that made optical and laser test equipment.
They had all their autocad files organized by semi-sequential part number (part of the number was sequential and the rest was intelligent part number, so we could identify what kind of part it was by looking at the number, but the numbers would always be unique). They were trying to do the same thing with SolidWorks, which obviously was a disaster because they broke all the links between parts and assemblies and also between drawings and whatever was on them.
So my first task was to come up with a numbering system that fit their existing numbers but worked with SolidWorks. We took the common sense approach with numbering parts and assemblies the way they went into erp. Separate numbers for top level assemblies, and subassemblies that were made and kept for stock or used in multiple products.
Next we had to come up with a way to store files so everyone could find stuff, and SolidWorks didn’t get confused. So we stored them by project unless parts were shared, then they’d stay in the parent project folder or under a library folder if they were truly generic, like screws.
We had to evaluate and implement a PDM system. We had demos come in, and some management along with a colleague from the IT department. I was immediately accused of nepotism because one of the groups that came in to do demos were my friends from the reseller. You gotta let this stuff roll off to an extent. Explain what your plan is, and then follow your plan.
We narrowed it down to a couple, so the IT guy and I went for training. Paying for training we didn’t need was less expensive than screwing up the PDM selection/installation.
We picked WorkCentre. Not Autodesk’s WorkCenter CNC software, something different which I think was bought by Cimatron, and exists no more. It was a bit of a risk, because it wasn’t one of the big names. But, they had the features that we needed at a much lower cost, and the support was really good. The company used their own software for internal CRM sales and support records. That said a lot to me. Anyone who eats their own dog food knows what they are talking about.
Implementation was like most implementation. Lots of tears, crying, yelling, name calling, accusations, etc. But we first rolled it out to a couple of our brightest and most adaptable users. They did a project. Then we rolled it out to the design engineers, then to manufacturing engineers. We got the viewers in place for purchasing and management. We implemented the workflow to handle the document change process.
All in all, I think that went pretty well. We had to convert a couple of people, and I had to bring in upper mgt to resolve a couple of disputes. Key to success was partnership with IT, and in particular, a db guy. Without the db expert, the outcome might have been different.
We could see the end of the project, but it was a lot of work. Eventually 9-11 happened, the first internet bubble burst, and we had several layers of layoffs. I lived through the first 3 or 4, but eventually also had to leave.
Overall, I really loved that job. I annoyed some people, but I never did it intentionally. I think some people get annoyed regardless of what happens, especially if it isn’t exactly what happened yesterday. Dealing with people was probably the biggest battle. Getting involved in all of the various aspects of the technical operation of the business was really a lot of fun.
I have been known to dabble in CAD Admin duties…
Like to equate it herding cats!
Never boring and my users keep me on my toes.
jcapriotti I would be interested in knowing how the transition to Windchill goes. I have a bad feeling that our global company is also going to force us to abandon our beloved PDM.
I have been a PDM admin since right after the company went live with it (we went live with PDM in April 2014 and I joined the company in May 2014). When I started, we had three Archive servers in the US (Wisconsin, Illinois, and Louisiana). Now we have 8 Archive servers (California, 3 in Germany, and Sweden). We have a large vault with more than just SOLIDWORKS files in it.
This should be interesting! 
VicFrauenfeld Windchill is big, expensive, and much harder to work with. You definitely need a larger team with a range of skills.
Overall it does a lot more than PDM (for a price, lots of modules). I haven’t used Manage but from what read, it comes closer to Windchill in functionality. Some functions when dealing with part structure and different kinds of BOM is nice. There are however some legacy interface issues in places that make the software hard to navigate. The file management, especially CAD files with their "WGM (Workgroup manager) is very temperamental. We are constantly dealing with local cache corruption. That’s my biggest headache with it at the moment and with most users working at home over VPN its worse.
Sorry, that’ might have been my fault. Couldn’t really put much more together at the time, but liked Matt’s idea and appreciate his initiative.
I accepted CAD admin role a couple years ago, when we were on Solid Edge, no PDM system. I had written a couple of CAD related tools that helped automate a couple processes and more recently indexed our cad files (~600,000 of them) on the network share so we could have a fast where used tool. Those endeavors were like side projects that were on the clock, as I was still primarily doing design engineering stuff. I was in the late planning/pseudocode stages of adding some common file management functionality through a different GUI that would incorporate the fairly well accepted fast where used as much of the mundane was doing where used updates or checking scope of change impact.
Then we got our annual call from the SE VAR with maintenance updates which lead our Director of Engineering to ask if we’re still using the best solution for our needs. We had been trying to figure out if/how Teamcenter could help with file management but there were many obstacles that we just couldn’t find answers to. We were impressed with the PDM dog and pony shows as it looked straight forward (compared to other PDMs) and it could do what we thought we wanted. We looked at Solidworks as growing into the more common CAD system (outside automotive and aerospace) and thought it might have a more predictable future than Solid Edge; many of the last few years of Solid Edge improvements didn’t provide us much improvement in value.
Fast forward ~24 months:
There’s a head on brick wall emoji somewhere.
I guess I’m the CAD admin person at my job, since until very recently I was the only user, and during the last 12 years I’ve completely trashed the system that was set up when I started (I had no previous CAD experience; I was on the construction crew before my current job).
It’s been working well now for quite a while, but our IT department is talking about moving our files from the network drives to Onedrive. That isn’t making me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
I am “sort of” a CAD Admin. I have all the responsibilities except the IT side of things. I stepped into the role because absolutely no one else was doing it. I kind of forced CAD standards and common settings on everyone and then started to control templates as well.
Now I am in charge of rolling out PDM for the building (in addition to the design and fixture management roles). Not complaining…just letting you know that I am a “CAD admin lite”, if that is a thing… 
Good luck Dan, I think most of us were in your position in our past lives. You know where to come if you have questions…3dswym 
Hello everybody.
I’m also such an admin thing … 
I administrate CAD and PDM in a medium-sized company and have around 320 PDM users and 40 CAD users under my control. 
Please excuse my bad english, but I promise, I will do my very best …
Cheers
Mario
Welcome Mojo,
Your english is better than mine, I think we can get through each other’s poor grammar, its the correct use of jargon that that goes over my head. Sarcasm is sometimes lost but Matt graciously added the “SARC” buttons for us.
That’s a large spread of clients to CAD users, are the other 280 users all contributor type users or are some read only (shop floor/data consumer only)?
Hi Ben,
we have 155 PDM-Editor Server-Licenses.
These are distributed among the 320 registered users.
Many of these users only have read-only permissions, but since we map company processes in PDM like:
Change Management (ECN)
ERP interface (Infor)
ECAD interface (EPlan)
and some more…
it is necessary to include such a large amount of users.
An average of 150 users are online in the PDM every day.
Use a bowl of milk! Works everytime! Try pizza for engineers and designers!
I’d be fascinated to see how all this works. It has to be quite the task to manage such a large userbase.
“Manage” is a strong word…I think the keyword is herding.
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