SW explained in few words.
100% this.
Admins tools are also so bugged I had to make mine.
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This is where in Solid Edge you just select the Ordered features and say, “Move to Synchronous” and then make your change. Problem solved 
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Ok, I have been off the forum for too long, synch is a term I am unfamiliar with. What have I missed and what is this? Is this something with the Cloud version that we have avoided so far?
Ohhhh, ok, I’ll take it.
Synchronous Technology is a set of tools found in Solid Edge and NX, although it’s implemented differently in the two.
There are a lot of ways to describe it, but it is essentially a set of tools and techniques that allow you to edit solid models in the same way that you edit sketches - select and move. Or you can add/change dimensions or relationships.
So it’s NOT a history-based way of working, just like sketches aren’t history-based. There is no sketch driving the 3D geometry, you just edit the 3D directly.
Yes, it can technically be called a Direct Edit way of working.
The big advantages are:
- no feature tree/history
- no parent/child mess
- no cascading red feature failures in the tree
- no rebuild times
- you can edit faces without regard for how they were made
- feature order does not matter
- works with dimensions/relations, so it’s still parametric
- it allows you to edit imported data directly, even put dimensions and geometric relations directly on a part and make changes without the stupid hoops that you have to jump through in history-based software
- You can make this type of change inside assemblies - so select faces from two different parts and drag them to a reference point of another part.
A couple of weaknesses:
- things like extruded text are still better to handle with history-based features.
- in SE works best on prismatic stuff (not complex surfaces)
- most people don’t understand it even though it’s much simpler than history-based CAD
Essentially, if you are doing machine design, you are wasting a lot of time working with history-based CAD. You should probably be using Synchronous unless you work with complex shapes.
I have only really worked with the Solid Edge implementation. Somebody showed me Synchronous in NX, and it does a lot of stuff. I really don’t know if it’s super powerful or just overly complicated, or perhaps just too involved to describe easily.
I wrote a (big long) white paper on SE’s Synchronous if you are interested and want some of that style reading.
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Thank you.
That explains what I was missing.
In Japan we have Fujitsu as the main competitor against SW for 3D CAD with their iCAD SX
It is basically a history free CAD, it claims to be very fast (well with no parametric modelling you can achieve the same with SW and imported parasolid data), but the big draw back is that is a chunky Japanese software that seems to be stuck in the 90s, it comes with like a 1000s pages manual for the basic operations and administration (a pure wall of text with little to no pictures) . NO API like SW, you can automate and customize it working with them
It uses their COLMINA PDM system, but their CAD format is basically used by Fujitsu alone and I am not aware of any third party tool able to open their native files.
I’ve noticed an epidemic of maintenance-dumping among clients for awhile now. Liquidity is king.
I’m even picking up some work now down-converting 2023 stuff to 2022. Lots of people without 2024, let alone 2025.
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We have to deal with ICAD files as well. Although I’m pretty sure it does have an API? In Japan our company has a lot of customizations. But anyway, my biggest problem is that it exports parasolids poorly. At least with the way our colleagues in Japan make their ICAD models, if we export them to Parasolid, every single part/body exports as a unique file. So every M6x12 fastener in the entire model imports into SW as a different .sldprt file. The only way to fix this is to perform some extra manual step in ICAD before exporting. For every single item in the assembly.
Well, ICAD has the old MX (an 1990 autocad) and SX, and the toyota CAELUM2 based on it.
Proprietary format aside for both native 2D and 3D it is a quite chunky piece of software, drafting is probably so unfriendly that everytime I joined a ICAD related event, their implementation just avoided drafting at all costs… pushing for a drawing less implementation.
Our main crux in SW is drafting and its data slowness. The environment itself is quite user friendly to be honest and I think it is pretty good. slowness aside…
this is what it looks like in icad sx to make a single view.
ICAD has its own PDM system, COLMINA, but I have never used.
As for the automation, the cad iteself seems to be based on a miriad text files, very old school unix like. Even licensing is not even close to Flexlm, icad licenses are like a “program startup autorization” so you cannot optimize them like flexlm since you have no heartbeat and timeout: according to their manual you must physically shutdown icad on the workstation to close the license use, so they have this flag in one of their ini files, that performs a batch close saving the opened files after X minutes of PC inactivity and I suspect nobody uses it…
We have some piece of automation for our team using icad, but it is mandated by our customer and it looks like something that export a miriad of csv files for BOMS, nothing I would call peak automation. I was told they have an harness wiring software that links to 3D, but it is more some optional icad component not even close to a macro with user forms, that the final user can make. It seems that you need a department dedicated to develop on top of icad.
As a side note, many Japanese software development seems to be stuck in the 90s. I have a theory for it, do not take it for the truth™. IMHO once the software was in a usable state, they simply stopped to improve it and focused on sales, but since sales in Japan are poor for professional CAD compared to a worldwide user base there was never the incentive to expand the software and make it more user friendly, let alone make a development ecosystem for the final users.
icad customization looks like very primitive, 90s like user menu, forms to input data and batch processing to export lists.
The video below is quite painful to look at, but it is basically the state of Japanese CAD.
Since 2023 we saw some additional annoyances, 2024 and 2025 have their fair share of bugs and SW does not seem to get better anytime soon. Hope that 2026 will bring back a more stable and less bugged branch of SW.
As a side note, many Japanese software development seems to be stuck in the 90s. I have a theory for it
I have noticed this too… My guess is that it’s more related to the tendency to not make waves, to keep your head down and just do your job. If your tools suck, they are hard to use, difficult to understand, just work harder. Ganbatte kudasai! It is fascinating to me, because as hard as the work to kaizen, optimize, and increase efficiency for manufacturing, when it comes to business systems or office workflows nobody considers the possibility that things could be better. They just work harder to succeed despite the difficulty.
Unfortunately there is a cultural thing. It is a sort “maximize your efforts for whatever task you need to accomplish”, even the simplest one. When I dig some issue, I notice that there are many related problems, but almost nobody speak or bring them up, they just lower the head and do their stuff with absurdly long workarounds instead of taking on the main issue or ask for assistance.
Once I solve their problems or streamline the workflow in a efficient way they are very happy, but you have to dig a lot.
e.g. We use SW in the shop floor for some piping works.
I worked close to the shop person, he was working around a lot of issues with SW, EXCEL, the bending machine files: I made a macro that cut more than 10% of his design workload, and still improving the techniques to make a good use of SW for his dept. design.
The process is almost optimized and what took minutes with excel and semi manual job is just a button click and we added a lot of checks to avoid mistakes along the way.
Another part of the issue is money.
I noticed that once a piece of software reaches a “usable” state the development is basically stopped. At that point the sales try to maximize the profit while keeping the development costs at near zero… icad is basically updated to keep it afloat with the new windows OS, but it is the same 1990 feeling all around. On the same logic there are a lot of companies still relying on internet explorer 11 based applications nobody wants to update.
You will be surprised how many companies butcher my name since their databases cannot handle more than 5 characters for the name and the surname.
And they include also payment systems… To give you an idea imagine your BANK registering your name in their app as “jo” instead of “josh” telling you “well, we have an issue with long names, but at the end of the day it is the same as josh right” 
A big bank, not the mom and pop shop that sells daikon at the corner of your street.
And this is a real story since I have a payment app that cannot handle more than 13 characters for name and surname combined so you needs to truncate on purpose your name when registering. Note that it is not a workaround, but the OFFICIAL procedure on their support web site.
I have not a complex or very long name, and still my name apparently makes some application behave in a funny way, and you can tell it looking at the post envelopes with the name truncated or random line breaks in the middle of the name.
Compared to me people with a middle name in Japan are just screwed for many paperworks, even government official ones.
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Give your kids same name as some rich people. Make sure the bank mix it up.
It is a sort “maximize your efforts for whatever task you need to accomplish”
That’s also why other admire Japan. The effort they spend to make everything great.
For most things, yes, when everything worked according to the plan… when you make one step outside the path, brace yourself for an hell of spinning around departments, hotlines, like bounced on a rubber wall and people running away from you.