Free SolidWorks Training - Upgrading SolidWorks Workgroup PDM to 2013

Join us on April 22, 2013 from 2pm-3:30pm Central Time for this virtual training event.  There is no cost to attend this presentation.

This is a lecture style class covering how to upgrade your SolidWorks Workgroup PDM server, web viewer, and clients.  Also, you will learn some basics regarding the Workgroup architecture and get an opportunity to ask the experts questions about your Workgroup implementation. 

Space is limited - Register NOW

The following items will be covered:

• General review of the Workgroup PDM architecture


• How to download the correct software components from the web


• Preparing for your upgrade


• How to back up your Workgroup Vault


• Upgrade Process (Server, Client, and Web Viewer)


• How to move the workgroup vault to a new server

When:
Monday April 22, 2013
2pm - 3:30pm Central Time 
Where:
WebEx 
Register NOW 

 

Jim TeDesco
Marketing Manager
Computer Aided Technology, Inc. 

Ten Strategies for Becoming an Effective CAD Leader - Part 8

Strategy 8: Manage product design data efficiently

Using CAD tools to design innovative, error-free products
will get you only partway to your goal. An effective CAD leader realizes that
creating solid models is only the beginning. How well you manage, leverage, and
utilize product design data will determine the overall productivity of both
your development process and manufacturing enterprise.

In the past, product data management (PDM) was more product
document management. Engineering organizations managed documents—paper
drawings—within large cabinets using elaborate sign-off systems for approving
and releasing design revisions. In today’s 3D realm, the sheer number of links,
references, and associations between parts, assemblies, and configurations
precludes a manual approach to data management. Fortunately, you have access to
integrated PDM systems to manage data, control revisions, safeguard intellectual
property, and unleash the power of 3D to the extended enterprise.

PDM allows you to formalize and automate workflows inside
and outside of your department. Because modern PDM systems are easy to
administer, you can control the level of access to design-related information
that you grant to technical and non-technical personnel. Within product
engineering, you can set user rights for the players involved, including team
members, partners, vendors, and suppliers, so that contributors can access and
alter the only information related to their specific function. And they don’t
necessarily have to be on-site to access design data because some PDM systems
support web browser access.

You can also administer, manage, and control access by
colleagues outside of product development who can benefit from leveraging
design data but cannot edit or change it. With PDM, you can provide
nontechnical personnel such as managers, purchasing agents, marketing
professionals, and service technicians with access to product design
information—and control how they can use it. Moreover, they often don’t need a
CAD system for access.

Read past articles:

Strategy 1: Embrace best practices and new technologies

Strategy 2: Develop skills and retain talents

Strategy 3: Maximize integration and automation

Strategy 4: Foster collaboration and innovation

Strategy 5: Focus on continuous quality improvement

Strategy 6: Leverage design data throughout the enterprise

Strategy 7: Document and analyze productivity

Strategy 8: Manage product design data efficiently

Strategy 9: Communicate effectively with business personnel

Strategy 10: Demonstrate product development contributions

Download the Whitepaper - Ten Strategies for Becoming an Effective CAD Leader

 

*This article is an excerpt from the "Ten Strategies for Becoming an Effective CAD Leader White Paper", published by  DS SolidWorks Corp.

Ten Strategies for Becoming an Effective CAD Leader - Part 5

Strategy 5: Focus on continuous quality improvement

Continuous quality improvement is the mantra of many
manufacturing organizations. It is also a primary focus of effective CAD
leaders. Your CAD system can have a significant impact on the quality of the
products that you design, the efficiency of your development processes, and the
ramifications of your work on downstream operations. How well your CAD tools
help you eliminate design errors, maximize productivity, and foster innovation
will determine the size of your group’s contribution to continuous quality
improvement.

Everyone involved in product development wants to eliminate
design errors, and with the right mix of CAD tools, you can pinpoint errors
during design and avoid the delays and costs that occur when errors make their
way into production. Are you using an integrated analysis/simulation
application to identify potential performance issues? Are you ensuring
sufficient clearances in your moving assemblies through the use of collision
detection capabilities? Are you conducting draft analyses on injection-molded
parts to ensure production of molds of consistent quality? Are you assessing
the manufacturability of your machined parts? If not, there are integrated tools
that can help you.

A focus on continuous quality improvement also applies to
your development processes. How do you complete tolerance stackups: manually or
using an automated CAD tool? What about prototyping? Do you conduct physical
tests or take advantage of virtual and rapid prototyping technologies? Do you
have an integrated PDM system that gives you tight revision control and allows
you to reuse designs that perform particularly well?

Sustainable design is an emerging area of focus for
achieving continuous quality improvement. As consumer awareness of
environmental impacts and preference for “greener” products continue to rise,
assessing the sustainability of your products and processes becomes
increasingly important. To get out in front of this trend, you can use CAD
tools that evaluate the sustainability of your designs.

Read past articles:

Strategy 1: Embrace best practices and new technologies

Strategy 2: Develop skills and retain talents

Strategy 3: Maximize integration and automation

Strategy 4: Foster collaboration and innovation

Strategy 5: Focus on continuous quality improvement

Strategy 6: Leverage design data throughout the enterprise

Strategy 7: Document and analyze productivity

Strategy 8: Manage product design data efficiently

Strategy 9: Communicate effectively with business personnel

Strategy 10: Demonstrate product development contributions

Download the Whitepaper - Ten Strategies for Becoming an Effective CAD Leader

 

*This article is an excerpt from the "Ten Strategies for Becoming an Effective CAD Leader White Paper", published by  DS SolidWorks Corp.

Ten Strategies for Becoming an Effective CAD Leader - Part 4

Strategy 4: Foster collaboration and innovation

A rising challenge for many design and engineering managers
is how to supervise interaction among the growing number of players in today’s
product development environment. Because innovation has become an increasingly
critical factor for manufacturing success in a global economy, more and more
contributors, each bringing different areas of specialization, are now becoming
involved in the process. While manufacturers once handled the bulk of product
development—both design and manufacturing—in-house, many now work closely with
strategic partners and vendors.

And even within a single product development group, the need
for industrial designers to collaborate with mechanical engineers, and
designers to work with analysts, and mechanical engineers to work with their
electrical and manufacturing counterparts, can test a manager’s ability to
guide this interaction into a collaborative, yet productive, workflow. The
effective CAD leader needs to consider CAD tools in the contexts of collaboration,
communication, and control.

By using an integrated suite of CAD tools, which are fully
compatible with each other, you can streamline the various interactions among
designers, engineers, partners, suppliers, and vendors. An integrated system
establishes a single design data language for all contributors.

Combined with an integrated PDM system that supports
automated workflows, integrated tools enable you to control and manage a
diverse, collaborative product development approach. By facilitating
communication among players and establishing standard workflows, you can
promote innovation in an efficient manner.

You should also consider the roles that design visualization
and data access will play in a collaborative environment. How difficult is it
for you to illustrate innovative concepts using 3D visuals and animations? Can
you easily share design ideas by email? Can you administer and control access
to sensitive design information? By carefully considering the demands of
collaboration, you can bring structure to potential chaos, and produce the
innovations your organization needs to succeed.

Read past articles:

Strategy 1: Embrace best practices and new technologies

Strategy 2: Develop skills and retain talents

Strategy 3: Maximize integration and automation

Strategy 4: Foster collaboration and innovation

Strategy 5: Focus on continuous quality improvement

Strategy 6: Leverage design data throughout the enterprise

Strategy 7: Document and analyze productivity

Strategy 8: Manage product design data efficiently

Strategy 9: Communicate effectively with business personnel

Strategy 10: Demonstrate product development contributions

Download the Whitepaper - Ten Strategies for Becoming an Effective CAD Leader

 

*This article is an excerpt from the "Ten Strategies for Becoming an Effective CAD Leader White Paper", published by  DS SolidWorks Corp.

Ten Strategies for Becoming an Effective CAD Leader - Part 3

Strategy 3:
Maximize integration and automation

Rooting out redundancy, duplication, and waste is the
clarion call of effective CAD leadership. No single product development
operation should be performed more than once, and no one should ever have to
rebuild an existing model. Any time that design data has to be converted or
translated creates opportunities for error. You can minimize the potential for
costly errors and eliminate redundant processes by maximizing your use of
integrated applications and leveraging automated approaches that fit your development
process.

Exporting and importing design data typically occurs
whenever you need to move a CAD model into another engineering application,
such as an analysis/simulation package, a computer-aided manufacturing (CAM)
machining system, or a product documentation publishing application. You may
even have to manipulate a model’s data format for use in some product data
management (PDM) systems. Each of these data translations and/or conversions
takes time and creates an opening for error.

You can completely eliminate these issues by using an
integrated suite of tools to address analysis/simulation, CAM, documentation,
and PDM requirements. To achieve the greatest benefits, make sure that your
integrated tools operate on the actual CAD model, rather than through an
import/export paradigm. That way, you can rest assured that you have removed a
major source of redundancy from your operations.

Design automation tools can also help you to minimize
repetitive steps. For example, you can use design configurations, which build a
complete set of models with varying attributes (e.g., size, weight, length),
from a single base design, to create product families and maximize design
reuse. CAD-integrated Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) systems can help you
automatically create models of engineered-to-order designs. If you use a CAD
system with an open Applications Programming interface (API), you can even
automate routine, repetitive CAD tasks.

Read past articles:

Strategy 1: Embrace best practices and new technologies

Strategy 2: Develop skills and retain talents

Strategy 3: Maximize integration and automation

Strategy 4: Foster collaboration and innovation

Strategy 5: Focus on continuous quality improvement

Strategy 6: Leverage design data throughout the enterprise

Strategy 7: Document and analyze productivity

Strategy 8: Manage product design data efficiently

Strategy 9: Communicate effectively with business personnel

Strategy 10: Demonstrate product development contributions

Download the Whitepaper - Ten Strategies for Becoming an Effective CAD Leader

 

*This article is an excerpt from the "Ten Strategies for Becoming an Effective CAD Leader White Paper", published by  DS SolidWorks Corp.

Discussion - The role of the CIO

CATI aims to provide solutions that reduce cost and provide time and material savings for our customers.  Often times, our solutions are pretty easy to justify:  If it takes someone a week to design and document a product using SolidWorks versus 4 weeks in traditional 2D tools...well, it's easy to see how this will pay for itself in time.

One of the more difficult items on which to put a price tag is risk...how does one assess risk?  A customer of ours in St. Louis recently told me this when asked why they planned to implement PDM:  "It's one of these things that just feels like the right thing to do to protect our data."  As hard as it is to come to terms with that statement, it is often true.  Sometimes, it is critical to wrap your arms around your intellectual property before something goes wrong.  Murphy's Law doesn't bat 1.000, but it certainly frequents the All Star Game.

In that spirit, I wanted to share an interesting article regarding the role of the CIO in today's organization.  While I don't agree with every point, it certainly lends some insight as to why CIO's should care about solutions such as Enterprise PDM:

1. Reduce of risk


2. Improve cycle times


3. Reduce Cost

One would be hard pressed to find a VP of Engineering, a key customer of any IT department, that isn't challenged to improve in all 3 of those key areas.  Our solutions are simple to use and to deploy, improve SolidWorks performance (this is an older article, but still relevant today), and certainly automate the process of finding and re-using product development files/data...and by managing the data in a secure vault with configured revision control, we can certainly reduce the risk of manufacturing to the wrong revision or losing one's data.

I am curious to know your impressions of the article:  http://www.zdnet.com/why-cio-success-comes-down-to-just-three-things-7000006850/

SolidWorks 2012 Enhancement - SolidWorks Enterprise PDM Integrated Search

Enterprise PDM Integrated Search gives you the option of searching from within your current Explorer window—no separate dialogs needed. Access favorite searches or open the full search tool for all options.

Benefits:

Reduce screen clutter by streamlining the number of open dialog boxes.

SolidWorks 2012 Last Release to Support Windows XP

With the upcoming release of SolidWorks 2012 another one of the questions that we get a lot is how long will SolidWorks continue to support the Windows XP operating system.

Last week we did see the official word go out that SolidWorks 2012 software (including CAD, Simulation, Sustainability, and Enterprise PDM) will be the last release that supports Windows XP.  The reason for this to follow up to Microsoft’s retirement of the Windows® XP operating system in April of 2009. So when SolidWorks 2013 is release this time next year it will not install on a system that is running Windows XP.

If you would like any additional information you can always refer to the System Requirements page on the SolidWorks website.

http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/SystemRequirements.html

 
 

Josh Altergott

CATI Support Team Leader