CONCORD, MA -- Armed with a major new release and an ongoing campaign to enhance the user experience of its mainstream CAD customers, SolidWorks Corp. used its annual press and analyst event -- held at its headquarters here -- to detail the company's accelerating trajectory nearly a decade after being acquired by France's Dassault Systemes SA.
While most 2D CAD products and top-tier 3D CAD offerings are facing declining growth cycles of under 10% annually, SolidWorks is growing at a consistent 20%-plus rate, and accounts for 20% of parent company Dassault's annual sales, which in 2005 tipped the scales at €934.5 million, according to John McEleney, SolidWorks' CEO. SolidWorks' ability to make 3D capabilities affordable and accessible to mainstream manufacturers -- companies purchasing between five and 10 CAD seats -- has propelled the CAD provider's metamorphosis from a $7 million vendor when acquired by Dassault in 1997 to a $250 million outfit today, McEleney said in an interview with Managing Automation.
"3D CAD tools have been too hard to learn and too expensive," McEleney continued. "Now, because of our business model, we're able to reach out to companies with one or two engineers and make them successful -- not just in how they use the product, but in how they're trained and supported."
Making sophisticated 3D capabilities accessible to the masses was the event's reoccurring theme. It permeated customer and executive presentations, and was continually cited as the driving force behind most of the 250 enhancements in SolidWorks 2007, which made its official debut at the meeting.
McEleney said 3D is a must for manufacturers large and small that need to meet the escalating requirements of global design teams and also leverage product innovation as a competitive advantage, take cost out of development and manufacturing processes, and achieve ever higher quality standards.
"As people need to communicate and share information, clearly it's much easier to do so from a 3D perspective," McEleney said.
The Skip Barber Racing School, a 30-year-old leader in automotive education and entertainment, was on hand at the conference to attest to the benefits of 3D CAD. The racing school, which also develops custom-built cars, was previously using 2D design tools and had less than 10% of its parts inventory in CAD format.
One year after implementing three seats of SolidWorks, the two engineers at Skip Barber said they have migrated 50% of the company's parts inventory to 3D models without requiring any additional overhead.
Furthermore, the company has achieved a 20% reduction in time to market, improved communication of design intent to its field operations and vendors, and bolstered the production quality and repeatability of its cars.
"All our cars and racing services have to be equal so it's up to the driver as to how well they do," explained James Achard, Skip Barber's lead engineer. "At the end of the day, the CAD package is a communications tool."
The new SolidWorks 2007 includes a number of features designed to help 2D customers like Skip Barber easily migrate to 3D. The software includes the DWGSeries for accessing and updating legacy 2D data, new features for conceptualizing in 2D before creating in 3D, and the ability to save any file in Adobe's new 3D PDF format, among other capabilities.
The new SolidWorks Intelligent Feature Technology (SWIFT) lets users perform many of the more challenging and mundane CAD operations automatically, allowing them to focus on their designs instead of mastering the tool. PDMWorks Enterprise, a new version of the design data management tool for multi-user, multi-site customers, offers a "Google-like" search function for finding any type of information in the CAD system.
COSMOSXpress, SolidWorks' integrated analysis tool, has also been enhanced with features to help customers work more efficiently, save valuable parts materials, and improve overall performance, officials said.
To enhance the customer experience, SolidWorks took a number of steps around support. They include the introduction of a new self-service portal, a culmination of over two years of building a knowledgebase of common support problems, and the announcement of a premium-priced service offering for larger customers needing 24X5 global support, set to debut this fall.