I’m curious as to what possesses people to decide to change CAD systems. To me the process is extremely painful and the advantages would have to be REALLY significant to make the move.
So for instance in this forum we have people moving from SE to SW and from SW to SE. You can use any system switching as an example but clearly someone along the way in this case decided that one was better than the other and better enough to go thru the pain of switching. Are there specific gains IE one package can do something the current one can’t that is very beneficial, maybe moving to the same software that other departments are using or is this one of those “Well that line is moving faster so I’m jumping to that one” type of things?
It’s called looking ahead. If you’re riding a train that is already suffering from a lack of maintenance and corporate TLC, and you see a cliff coming up…it might be time to jump. The only question is when. It really doesn’t matter how many people are on the train, when the fecal matter contacts the revolving blade they’ll have to get off too.
It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see the not-so-distant future of Solidworks Desktop.
There are a lot of factors in SW’s favor, such as a larger user base, bigger marketing presence, ubiquitous in schools and training programs. And when companies merge, and they have different systems, someone has to change.
I think you have to look at not only the products, and the public reputation, but also the parent companies, and the history of decisions they’ve made. A company that isn’t really aware of what’s been going on the last 15 years might make a choice in favor of a more glamourous product. I know if I had to purchase one for a company to use for the next 10 years or more, the choice would be easy.
Brand recongition is the primary driver. Next would be the “safety in numbers” factor. Lastly, people tend not to do benchmarks anymore because you have “all the data” online now!
Take those 3 factors out, evaluate company strategies, really see who is driving technology in the design world and you might find yourself asking the same question of others.
That is how we ended up where we are. I had never used SW, but I knew NX was out of our budget. Others in the company had used it, and it was the defacto industry standard. Even if I knew that SE was better (which I didn’t at the time) there was a lot of inertia pushing us to SW. And as recently as 2018 I probably would have said it was a good decision.
Your initial statement is very true. The change can be painful. So why, go through the change at all? That’s a health question..here it is a business health question.
This rapid pace of change has already surpassed the business’ ability to adapt and change. There is no doubt about that. The next logical question is when and what do I change so that I can see my organization still doing business (competively) in the next 5-10 years.
Then you can ask yourself what tools are available to make the change less painful (not painless). How can I “future-proof” my data so that it can be used and leveraged by others and make it easier to move to the next system..always, always, “have an out” for your data!
PDM used to be painful, then PLM was painful and could be lethal if not managed and implemented correctly. But over the last 20+ years these tools have changed and are less painful. The painful part is the self-assemement and business mapping you have to do while implementing these types of systems.
CAD is a tool. That has been the mantra for years now…but really it is the CAD data that drives the business. You need tools that allow you to enrich and reuse your data- 3D models and all that metadata associated to the model. If you are not seeing your software partner bring you these tools then you really should be looking elsewhere. 3D models need to be enriched, the data can then be pulled out or accessed using other software tools and then data is used downstream or to help you make smart decisions now.
@matt knows I could go on and on about this topic.
There’s a bunch of motives that can cause people to change CAD Systems.
For instance, we decided to move from AutoCAD 2000 to a 3D program, the main reasons were the following.
AutoCAD 2000 was getting closer to becoming obsolete
We wanted to accelerate drawing production to increase our production output
We also wanted to reduce the risk of errors both for the draftsman and the production line
Now, why we chose SolidWorks over Inventor or SolidEdge, the main reason was that SolidWorks was the program that was covered the most at school at the time. All the engineers knew how to use SolidWorks and I was the only Draftsman who knew what SolidWorks was back then, so I went and got advanced classes and then I trained everyone inside the company.
Now, we’re on SolidWorks, if we were to move to a different program eventually, the main reasons would most likely be lack of reliability from the program, lack of direction, lack of support, and again, the program becoming obsolete.
I wouldn’t be surprised for the company to hold off on the upgrading until Windows 10 becomes obsolete lol
We wanted PDM and thought it would justify the change. At this point in the process I’d say we were wrong. Remodeling all the CAD data is so terribly expensive. Being convinced that we could use dumb solids compounded the expense as now we are rebuilding assemblies and fixing drawings due to replacing dumb, imported, solids with real models. I suppose many companies don’t need their old files, for them CAD really is just a tool and can switch more easily.
ugh. I’m going to get jumped on here, but that’s ok. Probably good, they can correct me.
Well there’s Teamcenter, which contains PDM and some portion of every other three letter business management acronym. The price tag is… well we never could understand exactly what it would cost us to just manage data, be that us or the SE VAR at the time I don’t know…
Previously there was, what did they call it?.. Something based on SharePoint. I don’t know, we never jumped onto that. We looked at it back around 2017. I’m very glad we didn’t try to implement it because a few years ago it was disbanded and SE told customers they would need to buy Teamcenter ($x10 give or take) for the same functionality. This was due to SharePoint community going away if I understood correctly.
Now they have BiDM (Built in Data Management) if I’m not mistaken it does not use a database and the metadata is all on the file. File indexing is all done through Windows Indexing service. That was an awkward conversation when I asked IT about moving all of our CAD files from the NetApp file share to a Windows share…
Thing is we just didn’t trust them to not keep mucking around with it from one release to another, we favor stability over disruptions when it comes to our product data. Sad thing is we may have jumped from the kettle into the fire… <()>
They have a decent Document Management that runs on Windows Explorer. If you want summat more…Teamcenter Rapid Start. Seriously. It’s not as bad as you think. TC-RS has full TC capability but much more of a plug-and-play procedure (experience? ).
The install pricing for TC-RS is about 30-40% higher than a third party but year over year is actually a few bucks less (not counting the SQL licensing).
We went from Catia V4 to SolidWorks in '98. Reasons…mostly cost. For 5 seats of Catia v4 we could by 25 SolidWorks so all of engineering could use it and not just the drafters. 1 Catia seat was shared amongst the engineers. Also, the IBM AIX(Unix) workstations cost like $25,000 each.
So we started an evaluation of SolidWorks, Solid Edge, Mechanical Desktop, and Pro/E. We got trials of each software and built an assembly of our product. PTC made one of us go through training before giving us a copy. It was thrown out early for cost and difficulty to use. MDT was thrown out for really lagging behind the others on functionality, even though Autodesk was almost giving it away.
It came down to Works and Edge and at the end of the trial if was pretty much the flip of a coin for us. We liked SE sheet metal and we liked SWX assemblies. In the end it came down to SolidWorks just felt snappier than Solid Edge and a little smoother. We also like that Works didn’t try to “walk” you through the steps so model creation felt faster with less steps. So that’s how it went down.
In today’s world, I wouldn’t recommend switching between SolidWorks, Solid Edge, or IV for most common tasks. They are all so close in functionality I don’t believe you will see a huge gain and instead will have a lot of pain. If we did mostly edits to imported models all day, I would consider SE, but imported models edits are rare for us so SWX is fine. If you had IV I might say switch due to cost over time as they are subscription only now, so there may be an ROI there.
If you look at the numbers it takes a LONG time to “Pay more” and it really depends on what level of the other packages you’re using. IV offers one package that is somewhere between Professional and premium in function. However it has no up front expenditure because it is subscription only. Last time I looked I think the difference in annual maintenance was something like 2-$300 dollars between SWX and IV. So you spend 5-7K up front with SWX and then pay $200 less a year…well, long payback.
OTOH if you’re only using standard you pay 4K up front and have an annual payment almost 1K a year cheaper so the payback is pretty quick, but the up front capital payment is still painful.
You mean Teamcenter X now. PLM in the cloud with a quick setup.
The history of PDM solutions started with 2 different paths…there was the Solid Edge (we are going to be an independent tool) path and then the Solid Edge (management saying, no you are not path). Then you had SQL say: “Sorry to everyone using SQL Express. You need to change.” SE needed to pick a path and SharePoint was the next big “platform” of choice. Then Microsoft decided to take SharePoint in a bit of a different direction (Teams).
So to be honest, I have to give Siemens and the Solid Edge kudos for being able to quickly adapt to the changes caused by the underlining tool (SQL and SharePoint).
These days there are still 2 paths to follow for data management for Solid Edge. There is the no-cost MS based tool that acts pretty much just like PDM Pro without the overhead and licensing costs (will be interesting to see if this works with Windows 11!). Next is the Teamcenter route. To be honest, I’d go the Teamcenter route- more specifically the Teamcenter X route! Temacenter has been the most stable direction and it is continually updated to keep up with technology. Heck, Siemens even used their low-code tool Mendex and ported the traditional server-based Teamcenter to the cloud in under a year (as I recall). Now we have Teamcenter X. Just goes to show that with proper strategy, planning and execution you can bring your customers along with you as technology changes..I don’t think you can say that of Dassault Systems..sorry to say that but look at its history…
I’ve seen more than a few CAD switches driven by managers that liked their last job’s CAD. That, and scleraotic, overly-vocal, underly-talented users that prefer one devil to the next.
For 96.83% of firms, you could throw SW, SE, Inventor, and Creo in a hat, pick one, and be just fine.
Oh, I just spew crazy $#!+ some times.
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