3DEXPERIENCE and SOLIDWORKS: the invisible connection
26-11-2020 | Posted by Principia
Well, you are a design engineer or responsible for a team of advanced SOLIDWORKS users, familiar with the CAD environment that this tool offers. And probably also used to some product data management system (PDM), mainly oriented to managing and controlling updates of 3D models, drawings, etc.
Why not advance one step further, going from document management (PDM) to the product lifecycle management (PLM)?
The implementation of a product life management system (PLM) is a huge step forward for a company, as it allows the collaboration of all the company’s design and development processes, accelerating the commercialisation, but may be disruptive for design engineers if it modifies substantially their working environment and routines.
Thus, it is of great importance that the integration of the new PLM with the existing CAD / PDM environments be as discrete and seamless as possible, maintaining the designers’ routines while ensuring the success of the implementation.
In this context, we tend to think that some tools, such as the 3DEXPERIENCE platform that offers the PLM integration, are associated to specific design tools, such as CATIA, and incompatible with others, like SOLIDWORKS. Nothing further from the truth.
3DEXPERIENCE can be integrated, almost undetectably, with SOLIDWORKS to provide its users with all the advantages without affecting any of their routines, through a connector specifically designed for this purpose.
Indeed, it is hard to differentiate between integrated and non-integrated users, since the 3DEXPERIENCE options for managing the SOLIDWORKS models and drawings are integrated in the desktop management system; hence, users can simply store their files on hard disk, as if they were managing the files manually, and the associated processes would be automatically executed in the background.
The 3DEXPERIENCE platform is not just a PLM system in which designers can manage the data and the life cycle. It also allows people from other departments, with other backgrounds (not necessarily technical), to access relevant information that the CAD generates. The idea is to generalise the 3D language in the different environments involved in project development.
The company does not need to choose between improving performance or keeping its design capacity, because the data management functions frequently used by SOLIDWORKS users are integrated in a simple and familiar way, and design engineers are not overwhelmed with the change, which is barely noticeable.
If your CAD tool is SOLIDWORKS, we at Principia can help you to integrate it with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to reap all its advantages, without affecting the design rhythm and capabilities.
