I am calling for your feedback on the migration of a design office from AutoCAD to Inventor and Vault or Solidworks and EPDM.
I would like to know the dates of the change, your stages, milestones, difficulties, contributions, equipment, techniques, support, ...
In short, aware that this information can be confidential or difficult to explain, I am also interested in meeting you and exchanging directly on this subject.
So don't hesitate to contact me if you have had this kind of experience or simply explain yourself in a few lines.
- What is the status of the decision to switch to 3D (the management has decided, the head of the design office wants to switch to it but has to convince his management, ...)
As our company is part of a group, we do not have the choice of the reseller with whom we have framework contracts. So we have an Inventor reseller and a Solidworks reseller.
I'm going to download the document and watch it all by the fire;)
Our design office has been working in 3D for 15 years with the development of very advanced LISP programs on AutoCAD.
I am in charge of the migration project, I have been working on this project for 6 months with the IT manager.
We have already presented the project to the management, which is in complete agreement (the main request comes from the latter) and who have budgeted the investment for 2016.
So I'm doing research about our product, our way of getting plans, interactions with other services or software (SAP, Excel, windows environment, ...)
We switched from Autocad to Solidworks in January 2014 and I have to say that personally, being a pro-solidworks, like flegendre, I am generally satisfied with it despite the fact that for our application, it is not really suitable.
Afterwards, being more objective, given that we work on large buildings and complex assemblies, I must admit that Solidworks is not really optimal for this application, as soon as the files are a little large, the software is extremely long and tends to crash for a yes or a no. File exports are very good, but the imports are never perfect and greatly contribute to slowing down the Dassault machine a little more.
If you want to draw and set up a few machines in a building that is not too big, it can be very good but you can quickly see the limits of the software when it comes to slightly larger structures (especially, especially if you work with imported non-native SW files which are for me the biggest black spot of the software).
I took the liberty of doing some research on your company to better visualize your work and you seem to be working on very big projects... It's up to you to see but in any case, with us, the choice of software was not very wise for the application we make of it and I lose a lot of time crashing, loading, recording... Etc... Oh yes, and if you have drawings to go out, it's fine for mechanical parts and small plans but as soon as you work on large buildings, it becomes much more complicated.
On the other hand, we don't use EPDM and I've never tested Inventor so I can't give you a fair review.
@flegendre: I just got the information from the group, our Solidworks reseller is Axemble.
I also watched the EPDM presentation which gave me a lot of information, knowing a little more about Vault, the tools seem, at first glance, quite identical.
@Joss: Thank you very much for this rich testimony! For our part, we don't deal with buildings at all (at least in my branch of the group). We are mainly in the mechanical field, the large boiler work, the metal structure and some industrial piping.
By whom and how long did it take to make the change? And how big is your B-E?
@Aurélien, we have a small design office of 8 people and the transition was quite complicated, let me explain.
My company had always been working in 2D on autocad and they decided to get into 3D when they saw the number of calls for tenders that imposed 3D. So they recruited me as the company's first 3D draftsman. The problem was that I had never worked before, this is my first job in the field and I wasn't crazy about Solidworks either, I had just practiced for 4 years in studies and I have a member of my family who is a mechanical engineering teacher on Solidworks (he helped me a lot)... So there you have it, my company started 3D a bit on a bet since I found myself on my own to manage business as a designer and no one to guide me on how to proceed to release a good quality 3D.
So without any help, just my head and Lynkoa's tutorials, I set up 3D in my company. After 4 months of self-training with tutorials and forums, we were able to take on our first 3D business which amounts to 1.2million for our lot. So in the end it was quite quickly... After that, if there are more of you, it will necessarily take more time, the time to agree on which drawing procedure to put in place so that everyone can take over the other's project...
I was in a big BE (100 people in the BE alone), I arrived (in 2009) when the change from 2D (Etell) to 3D (SW) was made. I wasn 't personally in charge of the 2D to 3D transition, but I can maybe find you the contact details of one of the people in charge of that. That way you can exchange with him.
Personal experience of migrating from autocad to solidworks with EPDM.
We are a design office of 8 manufacturers and work in the watchmaking field.
It took us about a year with the invaluable help of Axemble (Switzerland) to put the management of our files in place.
For our database, we decided to take our standard 2D files as new designs are made and integrate them into Solidworks and PDM, I don't know if it's the best solution because somewhere we charge our customers for the time spent rebuilding our parts...
We also raised the idea of hiring an intern to train him on Solidworks and watchmaking by giving him all the plans to take over. Too expensive solution ...
We have all been working in 3d for 6 years now, I can say that our old software has been running in parallel with the new one for about three years. The manufacturers would not go back in the world for anything in the world.
@gt22, @flegendre, @stefbeno, @Joss.G, @Pierre.marie.ferry, @g.leluyer, thank you for your precious testimonies !
Your completely different backgrounds are very interesting.
I note several times the importance of the support of the reseller (and as a reminder, Axemble on our side).
I think I will come back to you personally by PM to have other information or possibilities of meetings on this subject.
However, I am leaving this discussion open for the moment in the hope of having new testimonies in order to prepare this migration as well as possible.