In this blog Jeroen van der Burg, Applications Engineer at Design Solutions,discusses hisexperiences at DriveWorks World 2018 and what he learnt during the event.
In this blog Jeroen van der Burg, Applications Engineer at Design Solutions,discusses hisexperiences at DriveWorks World 2018 and what he learnt during the event.
“During DriveWorks World 2018, Glen Smith, the proud founderand CEO, presented the 16th version of DriveWorks, the design automation tool specially developed around SOLIDWORKS. With his typical Manchester accent, Glen told us about the new possibilities of the latest version. Further on you will find the highlights of the ‘What’s New’.”
“Geert Hendrikx and I have been going to DriveWorks World for a number of years to catch up on the latest applications and possibilities.
This year our Belgian colleague, Kurt Ponjaert, also joined us at the event. Kurt can now also call himself a ‘Certified DriveWorks Professional’, the third at Design Solutions!”
“During the many user presentations, it became clear how diverse the DriveWorks applications are. You can let customers configure your product via user-friendly web forms, including 3D previews of the chosen configuration.
The products during the customer presentations ranged from the configuration of support soles and scientific glassware via a web browser, to architects who in a few days made a new bridge design that used to take months or years.”
“During the three-day event, it became clear to me again how passionate the DriveWorks team are to get in touch with their customers. The team sincerely wants to find out how they can make their product even better.
Of course, there was room for a comical note in this time. The DriveWorks team told in a presentation how one of their developers brewed his own beer (‘automation IPA’) and how they set up an online 3Dbattleships gameusing the latest technology.”
“DriveWorks is primarily a tool with which you can design everything from nothing, but DriveWorks now also has a template that allows you to set up a web shop quickly so that you are up and running fast.
Via this CPQ template (Configure Price and Quote) you can easily add more functions to the web interface in DriveWorks 16.The template offers the flexibility you’re used to from DriveWorks and is fully customizable to your needs.
Atdriveworkslive.comyou can test the possibilities of CPQyourself.On the online help pagesyou will find an overview of the possibilities of the CPQ template.”
“An interval option has been added to Specification Macros with so-called Specification Timers.This means you no longer have to press a button to do an update.
For example, you can set an interval to update your battleship screen and see if your opponent has already made a moveor you can use it to play an animation in your 3D preview on your website.”
“Generation tasks are small configurable macros that you can run during the generation.This can vary from adding BOM balloons to a drawing view, to assembling a chain of parts.It goes too far to discuss all the newGeneration Tasksin DriveWorks 16 in this blog, so click on a specific task in the list below if you want to know more:
“It has now become a lot easier to apply logic to the execution of Specification Macros.A completely new system makes it clear how information is passed on and actions follow each other (which was a nice puzzle with traditional programming).”
“When DriveWorks forms are displayed in a web browser, you can use the DriveWorks 3D Preview.This function has also been improved and expanded.One of the most striking is an extra viewport on the 3D model, so that you can always keep an eye on the top view of furniture, or have three orthogonal views of a part on the screen.”
Aus Pits are an experienced precast manufacturing company, headquartered in Victoria, Australia.
They specialise in the supply of custom designed products to all facets of the construction industry, from small subdivisions to major road and infrastructure projects nationwide. These include: electrical and communication pits, trade waste, storm water drainage and covers.
At DriveWorks World 2018, we were joined by their Systems Developer, Daniel Prusac, who told us more about their project and future plans.
Aus Pits have recently started using DriveWorks and were currently in the development phase. We plan to completely automate our design process using DriveWorks and then integrate the software with our quoting package.
The project that were developing enables us to extract data from an Excel spreadsheet and bring it in to DriveWorks in order to drive our SOLIDWORKS models.
In order to do this, were using a mix of DriveWorks features, including:
Variables (Assembly List Item and Assembly Specifications List).
Constants (Specification Tabs Visible).
Specification PowerPack (Assembly Depth).
Specification Macros (Run Specification Form and Select Specification).
Specification Host Control.
Were also using a mix of Constants and Variables to pass data between Parent and Child Specifications. This allows our Child Specifications to automate different sections of our SOLIDWORKS models. explains Daniel.
Daniel Prusac, Systems Developer at
Aus Pits, presenting at DriveWorks World 2018.
For more information about Aus Pits and their products, visithttp://www.auspits.com.au/
In June Heather Hasz, who helps to run the SWUGN sponsorship program here at DriveWorks, is on the road again! This time, she’s heading south to present at two SOLIDWORKS user group meetings in North Carolina.
One of the groups she will visit is the Burlington Alamance County SOLIDWORKS User Groupwhichis led by James Adkins.
James won the DriveWorks Award for SWUGN Leader of the Year at SOLIDWORKS World 2018 due to his commitment to education.
James is the Head of the Mechanical Drafting Program atAlamance Community College. He teaches CAD to students of all ages and he’sbeen spreading the word about our training and certification program to help his students add to their CAD skills.
He was one of the first SWUG leaders to become a Certified DriveWorksXpress Associate!
Heather will also visit the Piedmont Triad SOLIDWORKS user group meetingand she will present to both groups about DriveWorksXpress.
DriveWorksXpress is the free design automation tool included in every educational and commercial license of SOLIDWORKS. Heather will also show the attendees how they can enhance their CAD skills and add to their certifications by becoming a Certified DriveWorksXpress Associate.
If you’d like to attend the meetings, registration is free but you’ll need to sign up to secure your place. Don’t forget to look out for Heather and say hi to her!
Founded in 1981, Thom Micro Systems Cadcentre (TMS)have been relied upon by companies across the UK to increase their efficiency, productivity and profitability for more than 35 years.
TMS are the leading provider of CAD solutions in Scotland, with offerings including the SOLIDWORKS range of products. As the only Scottish based CAD reseller, they have a large portfolio of customers working in a wide range of industries, from multi-national oil companies, leading architectural practices through to industry leading design and manufacturing organizations.
Were pleased that TMS are now selling and supporting DriveWorks too.
Welcome to the DriveWorks community,TMS!
Heather has returned from another great DriveWorks SWUGN Tour of Canada! Last week she travelled from Toronto to Ottawa, where she visited with four SOLIDWORKS user groups.
The first two stops on Heather’s tour were at the Toronto SWUG and the Western Ontario SWUG. These two meetings occurred at colleges, which were great venues for the evening. Heather showed users how easy it was to start automating their designs using DriveWorksXpress – the free design automation tool included in every licence of SOLIDWORKS.
She also discussed the DriveWorksXpress Training and Certification Program and explained to the groups how they can enhance their CAD skills and add to their certifications by becoming a Certified DriveWorksXpress Associate.
At these two meetings, Heather also had the opportunity to catch up with a couple of DriveWorks customers – Florica Tudora from Fortress Technologyand Chris Zona from Blue Giant Equipment Corporation.
Later in the evening Lee Herron, Applications Engineer atJavelin Technologies,told the attendees a little bit more about DriveWorks Solo and DriveWorks Pro.
The next morning, Heather hit the road and headed northeast toward Ottawa. Along the way, she made a stop in Peterborough to join Chris White for lunch. Chris is the user group leader for the Eastern Ontario SWUG. He is also the SWUGN representative for Canada that helped coordinate Heathers tour by working with her and group leaders. Thanks Chris!
The final stop on Heathers SWUG tour was in Ottawa with the Ottawa SWUG.
This group was small but was full of great energy and lots of questions about both DriveWorks and SOLIDWORKS certifications. The group engaged in a discussion on future meeting agenda items and how they can all contribute.
It was also time for the annual Canadian Tulip Festival held in Ottawa a great end to the week!
Special thanks to Richard Laflamme, Desiree Villeneuve, Chris White and Scott MacDonald for hosting us at your meetings.Heather enjoyed visiting your user groups and we look forward to seeing you again!
BKW Instruments are a four generation, family run company based in Manchester, UK. They provide several types of equipment linked to pressure, temperature, level, flow, valves and analytical instrumentation solutions or services to several industries in the UK.
They were looking for a software solution that would help them to meet the following business objectives:
1. To quote and despatch instrumentation within 24 hours.
2. To design, assemble, test, fill, calibrate and despatch within 3-5 days.
3. To automatically replenish stock within a set of parameters based on stock turn.
At DriveWorks World 2018, we were joined by BKWs Operations and IT Manager, Adam Baker, who told us more about their DriveWorks project.
We use DriveWorks as a web based platform that allows our company to interact with our SYSPRO ERP system securely from any device, anywhere in the UK. The application weve developed enables us to organise and speed up every day business processes and tasks.
These include:
Logging enquiries and orders.
Creating quotes and following up with them.
Approving stock re-orders.
Retrieving information related to a job or sales order.
Sending invoices automatically.
Logging incidents, IT support tickets and returns.
Ordering our Friday breakfast!
With DriveWorks, we have met all of our business objectives, resulting in significant time savings and increased productivity.
At BKW, our people are our most valuable asset and all of our internal team use DriveWorks. Its very easy when training employees to use the system as it only takes a matter of days.
Sales enquiries are logged and entered into the system within 30 minutes. This process used to take around 3 hours to complete. Our internal sales team also create quotes twice as fast as before, resulting in a 100% increase in productivity!
We now design, assemble test, fill, calibrate and despatch a range of core products, such as Diaphragm Seal Assemblies and Differential Pressure Transmitters, within 5 days, a process which used to take 35 weeks to complete. Stock items can now be shipped in 24 hours and all quick stock is automatically re-ordered by utilising workflow for approval.
Our DriveWorks system greatly benefits our customers as it enables our internal sales team to log enquiries and produce quotes quickly and efficiently. This leads to a faster order turnaround and a quicker delivery of products, whilst providing exceptional customer service and maintaining our professional appearance.
For us, the most important thing about DriveWorks is the ability to create custom bespoke software utilising visual wizards rather than heavy coding.
This allows our company to build and customize the application weve created quickly and easily. We now have more time to focus on our workflow and business analytics rather than programming heavy code. explains Adam.
Adam Baker, Operations and IT Manager at BKW Instruments, presenting at DriveWorks World 2018.
For more information about BKW Instruments and their products, visit:www.bkwinstruments.co.uk.
It’s only two weeks to go until the next UK SWUG NW meeting which takes place duringthe Liverpool John Moores Product Design Show in the James Parsons Building.
Last year they had a fantastic turn out with over 100 members attending the meeting. The UK SWUG NW’s annual event at LJMU is a great opportunity to meet this year’s graduates before they join the industry as professionals.
The group want to help you to share ideas, to take away new SOLIDWORKS skills and connect with other engineers in the pursuit of innovation.
As well as meeting some of the up and coming students, attendees will also have the opportunity to meet and talk to many SOLIDWORKS experts that regularly attend the meetings.
The group leader, Adam Green, has some great presentations lined up and will be giving away some fantastic prizes that have been donated by their sponsors.
Designer to Analyst by Andy Deighton, Territory Technical Director at SOLIDWORKS.Andy will be walking members through different tools available from SOLIDWORKS which help turn designers into simulation specialists.
The Simulation of 3D Printing, the Benefits and How We Go About It by Clint Davies Taylor, Director of Academic Programs at SIMULIA.Clint will discuss the different SIMULIA tools available to help simulate and perfect the manufacture of 3D printed components.
Student Presentations.Details to be announced soon!
The event is free to attend, but you need to register to secure your place!
On Sunday 6th MayLaura, Danielle, Millie and Rosie from the DriveWorks team took on the Warrington Pretty Muddy 5k!
Pretty Muddyis a 5k muddy obstacle course that women of any ability can climb over, crawl under and charge throughto raise money forCancer Research UK.
The team took part in the event at Victoria Park in Warrington and it was a lovely sunny day – perfect running weather!
Their training leading up to the event really helped as they completed the very muddy obstacle course in 40 minutes.
In total, the DriveWorks Divas raised 贈463 for Cancer Research UK!
Well done to the team and thank you very much to everyone who sponsored them.
Here’s a few photos from the day…
In this blog Paul Gimbel, Business Process Sherpa atRazorleaf, discusses hisexperiences at DriveWorks World 2018 and what he learnt during the event.
“My trip to the UK for DriveWorks World 2018 resulted in all participants (from 17 countries around the globe) walking away with a pre-release copy of DriveWorks 16. There is so much more that I can, and am raring to do, with the ton of new functionality.”
“With the latest release of their suite of tools forDesign Automationfor SOLIDWORKS and CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) out of the proverbial cat bag, I am honored to be able to let you in on the excitement.
The two biggest themes in DriveWorks 16 (DW16) seem to be 3D Interaction and CPQ. While DriveWorks has always been quite capable of serving all of the needs of the CPQ community, DriveWorks 15introduced a CPQ template (such an inadequate term for as much as it does).
This flexible, ready to go solution has been turbo-charged in DW16. DriveWorks CPQ (not a separate product) provides full CPQ functionality for catalogs, configuration of standard products, creating proposal outputs and even full support for eCommerce, including PayPal integration.
Whats Important about the CPQ solution is that it never requires you to go under the hood and develop your own DriveWorks projects. CPQ is an easily and massively configurable tool (who knows better than a company that runs their business systems with DriveWorks?). CPQ allows you to build catalogs, outputs, manage security, and everything you need through a highly intuitive dashboard.
But me, Im all about power and pushing the limits of life itself, so long as I dont need to leave my desk. DriveWorks 16 delivers to DriveWorks nerds, like myself, in a big way. The biggest goal of configurators has always been full, 3D interaction with no limits. The Barley Store (DriveWorks headquarters) has taken a massive step forward in version 16 by providing the ability to directly manipulate 3D models in their proprietary (and revolutionary) 3D Preview platform.
Users can manipulate the view to look at every angle of their product, select individual components and evenwait for itdrag parts in real time. You can limit the travel to enforce design rules and manipulate aspects of each component from size to position to appearance.”
“The most powerful capability lies in the new ability to create 3D preview entities on-the-fly with a single click. This provides the ability for complete pick-and-place 3D Layouts. You could build a conveyor system or pipe routing or cable or more by simply clicking the end of one section to add another attached to it, and another, and another, and another. You can customize your users experience by specifying how you map mouse buttons, scroll wheels, and even single/double touch and pinch on touchscreens and mobile devices.
Parent-child relationships make it very easy to keep parts together and DriveWorks administrators have the ability to write a wide variety of rules to work with immediate feedback and to access full information for building BOMs, output documents and SOLIDWORKS models and drawings.”
“When it comes to SOLIDWORKS, DriveWorks has the horsepower to back up the 3D interface. With full master model AND generative model creation functionality at your fingertips, you can create infinitely large assemblies (or whatever you can get SOLIDWORKS to handle) creating, adding, mating and even modeling parts using a multitude of iteration-enabled tasks.
And those tasks extend to SOLIDWORKS drawings, too. New generation tasks give you even more control to tidy up and even enhance production-ready and proposal quality drawings. Power packs are available free to subscription users providing automation to render with PhotoView360, create SOLIDWORKS MBD 3D interactive documents and even automate manufacturing with SOLIDWORKS CAM.
What more could DriveWorks 16 add? Lots. More than I can list here, but I will add that one of the most popular reveals of DriveWorks World 2018 was Automation IPA. Yes, a hand-crafted and quite refreshing pint (or few) of happiness from DriveWorks own Brewmeister Ben turned the Laskey Farm home of the DriveWorks offices into a pub in its own right.”
“Couldnt make the hop over the pond or across the continent or farther (Australia was proudly represented!)? Then clear your calendar for DriveWorks World 2019 when it will return to the states!”
Check the DriveWorks blog for updates about Driveworks World 2019!
In DriveWorks 16 weve built on our extensive Design Automation capabilities, greatly enhanced our 3D capabilities and made sure DriveWorks is positioned as a powerful configurator and CPQ solution company-wide for manufacturing companies.
This release focuses on enhancements to stability and performance, scalability and usability alongside new features.
We hope the improvements we have made will further meet your configuration and Design Automation needs to benefit your company.
Every Thursday the DriveWorks Tech Team share their knowledge and expertise in 30 minute value added webinars exclusively for DriveWorks Reseller AEs and DriveWorks Pro customers on subscription support.
In May, Mike Loftus, our Technical Specialist, will host a 3-part webinar series totake you through all of the new features and enhancements in DriveWorks 16.
Don’t miss out!
You can register for each session below:
