Case Studies

PLM solutions need to accommodate collaboration, as well as providing markup and visualization capabilities. The PLM process involves many tools besides the PLM solution itself: e-mail and IM for collaboration, CAD tools and viewers for visualization, and various solutions for markup in 2D and 3D. But ideally, a PLM solution should be all-in-one, a single, comprehensive solution that integrates all PLM activities and users.

3D Content Central web application is a community of users and suppliers that features millions of manufacturer-certified part and assembly models of commercial, off-the-shelf components. These can be downloaded for free in all major 2D and 3D CAD formats, including SOLIDWORKS, DraftSight, Autodesk Inventor, and AutoCAD. One of the key factors determining the success of this application is the availability of models for all possible needs. In order to encourage users and suppliers to upload models, the application requires a user-friendly interface that allows the simultaneously uploading of models of all degrees of complexity.

SOLIDWORKS Enterprise PDM does an outstanding job managing SOLIDWORKS designs, but today's global businesses need more. Companies need additional functionality for business needs at the enterprise level, and control over processes that extend beyond engineering to encompass the entire company, while still retaining core product design functions and capabilities.

Deployment of Aras Innovator based PLM system (or any PLM system) can be challenging, because the functionality needed for the business processes of a particular company may not be available when the system is installed out-of-box. But because Aras Innovator is a highly customizable platform, it is possible to fine-tune its functionality to make the system cover 100% of company processes. Customizing the system to fully address specific needs is a challenge that most companies face during deployment of an Aras Innovator-based PLM system.

As engineering software modeling capabilities have matured, the focus of CAE software development has shifted to providing more advanced design optimization tools. Engineering calculations such as the optimization of stresses, loads, structure or flow, have become significantly more sophisticated. However, cost optimization has lagged. Existing solutions provide only post-process cost calculation. This means that cost determination and evaluation requires repeating the design process for each model. Such full-cycle iterations are both expensive and time-consuming.

SOLIDWORKS has been providing SOLIDWORKS Workgroup PDM (PDMW) application for years, which was successfully serving needs of small-to-medium size engineering teams, with a relatively straightforward workflow and processes. For reaching bigger clients, with large amount of data, dozens of users accessing the data management application concurrently, as well as clients with offices distributed through multiple locations, a strategic decision was taken to introduce new generation of the data management application, which was called SOLIDWORKS Enterprise PDM (EPDM). The challenge was to be able to continue developing and maintain PDMW and at the same time allocate development resources for building SOLIDWORKS EPDM solution.