Our company is going to integrate Net-Inspect https://www.net-inspect.com/ in our manufacturing work-flow. I’m hoping to get feedback from people who are familiar with this process as nobody at my company has any experience with this or MBD. I have a high-level idea of what needs to happen, but there is more than one path and the details are complete unknown.
The biggest question is regarding the method of passing MBD info to Net-Inspect. My suspicion is that we will need to add Annotations to parts, then export them as STEP AP242 files using the SolidWorks MBD Add-In. Net-Inspect will take it from there. Is it that simple.
Another factor will be on the inspection side. Our inspector currently records dimensions from balloned inspection drawings and stores that in a file cabinet (DUMB, I KNOW). My understanding of where we should end up is that we will use SolidWorks Inspection to add balloons to a drawing to create in inspection drawing. SW Inspection will also provide the interface that will allow the inspector to type in data that Net-Inspect will use. I don’t really see a compelling reason to use SolidWorks Inspection for these tasks since there doesn’t seem to be a proprietary advantage of using a SolidWorks product for both the Designing and Inspection activities. What do you think?
Another package that has been suggested could be part of our workflow is CapVidia MBD. Given what I have described above, I don’t see how that would integrate into our scenario.
One more factor to consider is our company is heavily invested in MasterCam and VeriCut. Is there any interaction of potential advantages of considering this when choosing our MBD and Inspection tools.
Thank you for sharing your experience with me.