Visiativ are a SOLIDWORKS and DriveWorks reseller. As part of their ‘Les Bonnes Bouffes de L’indus’ or ‘The Good Food of the Industry’ events series, Visiativ are holding three DriveWorks events across France.
Join us in Nantes, Lyon and Paris for these events where Visiativ will be sharing their technical knowledge on how you can solve some of your CAD challenges with a DriveWorks configurator.
Along with great food, each event will also include:
Visiativ industry awaits you to share a moment of conviviality and technical knowledge
Visiativ industry vous attend nombreux pour partager un moment de convivialit辿 et de conaissances techniques
More details about the events and how to register are below.
Photos are a key part of any event and it’s often not until the event is over and it’s too late that event organisers realise they don’t haveenough photos, or they are poor quality.
After hosting DriveWorks World for over 6 years, we’ve learnt a lot about taking good event photos.
We’ve put together our top tips for making sure you get great photos that capture your event well. Whatever event you’re planning, we hope you find them useful!
1. Prepare Your Camera
Even if you’re just using your phone you need to prepare, make sure it is fully charged, the lens is clean, and you have plenty of storage.
2. Create a List of Photos
Plan ahead what you need to take photos of e.g. a guest speaker mid presentation, winners accepting their prize, audience clapping.
3. Assign a Photographer
As the event organiser you’ll be really busy at the event so assign someone else as photographer so you don’t miss any important photo opportunities.
4. Think About Setting
Try to have a plain photo backdrop and use as much natural light as possible. Take some practice shots before everyone arrives and make adjustments if you need to.
5. Follow Photo Best Practices
Avoid using the flash or zoom, use natural lightand move closer to the subject instead. For clearer images, you can also tap on the screen where you want the camera to focus.
6. Make Photos Interesting
Move around the room and shoot from different angles so your photos don’t all look the same. Try using props and make the room look fuller by avoiding photos of empty seats.
7. Focus on People
Try to takea photo of every single person who attended, then they will share your photos. Remember to avoid photos of people eating.
Group shots are usually easier to get.
8.Take More Photos
Take more photos than you actually need so you can choose the best.
Take multiple photos of the same thing in case someone has their eyes closed or it turns out blurry.
9. Check Every Photo
Where possible check every photo immediately and re-take if necessary, it’s much easier than gathering everyone together again or realising too late that you didn’t get the shot.
In DriveWorks you have complete control over customizing the workflow of your DriveWorks project. You control Who, What & When.
Specification Macros are one of the ways you can customize your workflow. They are a series of tasks that run when triggered, based on rules. They can be triggered from a variety of places, including buttons on your input form, Specification Flow, Specification Timers and more.
In DriveWorks 17 we added more ways to control your workflow by adding more status output navigation connection points to Specification Macro Tasks.
So, what are status outputs and why would you use them?
When a Specification Macro task is triggered, its status output reports on the task. In the past they would appear in a Specifications Report as a green, amber or red entry depending on the success of the task.
when the Task was successful
when the Task was successful, but warnings were raised
when the Task failed
By adding status outputs to each Specification Macro Task node, as navigation connection points, you can use the status output of each task to have an impact on what happens during a Specification and go on to trigger more tasks.
Lets look at one way these new status outputs can improve your implementation.
If you have a Release Documents task being triggered inside a Specification Macro, you can use the Status Outputs on the tasks node to trigger two different emails.
If the task is successful, you can send a successful email. This could be to you, the administrator, informing you that everything has worked as expected.
If the task is unsuccessful, and a manual check may be required, you can send an email telling you to check the specification.
Using these Status Outputs to build some manual reporting will improve the reliability of your implementation. This is just one advantage Status Outputs can bring to your implementation.
Status Outputs have now been added to many Specification Macro tasks.
The DriveWorks Pro Online Help File is a great resource to find out if a specific task supports Status Outputs and what the Status Outputs for a task will be.
Look through the tasks in the Specification Macro toolbox to see how you can use Status Outputs to improve your implementation.
The following Help File topics provide more information on Task Status Outputs in DriveWorks Pro:
Learn more about the technology in DriveWorks Pro that lets you design an automated workflow that meets your company standards and procedures, provides reports and feedback and generates a companywide audit trail. Control users and group security, permissions and triggered actions.
Earlier this month, Devin Martin an Application Engineer from US reseller TriMechvisited DriveWorks HQ in the UK.
Devin came top of our 2018-2019 reseller Application Engineer leader board through theDriveWorks Continual Professional Development Program, winning a trip to the UK to spend a week with the DriveWorks team boosting his technical knowledge and sales techniques around DriveWorks!
Throughout the week Devin spent time with different members of the DriveWorks team learning more about our software and our company.
The week was a great opportuinty for Devin to work closey with our Technical Team, completing various training and learning how we can help TriMech in the future.
Devin also got involved with some of the fun things that were going on at DriveWorks that week.
Here are some of the things Devin joined in on:
We had our annual Charity Bake Salewhile Devin was in the office, raising money for local hospice St Rocco’s and national charity, Bliss for Babies born premature or sick.
There were lots of cakes and tasty treats to enjoy on the day and Devin even won a coffeeliqueur in our bake sale raffle!
This year the DriveWorks team have built our own games, and lots of them are inspired by our trips to the US so Devin was a natural and enjoyed playing Shuffle Board, Cornhole, Splat the Rat and many more!
Devin joined us for our weekly game of badminton after work and also an evening of soccer at our local astroturf pitch!
Of course we headed to the pub afterwards for a well-deserved drink!
Devin’s last evening in the UK was perfectly timed with our end of month drinks too! It was a lovely sunny evening and we all enjoyed sitting outside together with a beer and playing more games of shuffleboard!
The DriveWorks CPDprogramme ensures Reseller AEs keep their technical knowledge up to date and rewards them for the work they do to maintain their skills. AEs log their CPD activities through a DriveWorks project and they win prizes when they reach points milestones. The top prize for the year is either flights to DriveWorks World or flights to DriveWorks HQ.
Last week we held our annual DriveWorks Charity Bake Sale.
In previous years we have raised money for charities such as Macmillan Cancer Support, Cancer Research UK, the Alzheimers Society and even funded for a defibrillator to be fitted on site!
This year we decided we would raise money for a charity chosen by the team at DriveWorks.
In May, we set up a suggestions box in our reception so that everyone had the chance to add their suggested charity to the box before we put it to a company vote!
With a very close vote between local hospice St Roccos and Bliss for babies, we decided that this year wewould raise money for both charities and split the total of our fundraising equally.
On the day, we had an amazing selection of cakes, biscuits, muffins, scones and even sausage rolls!
As well as the DriveWorks team we served family and friends, neighbouring businesses on Laskey Farm and our visitors from The Cheshire Grange, a care home specialising in Dementia care.
We also had Devin Martin from TriMech visiting from the USA. Devin was more than happy to test some British baking.
Luckily there was plenty of cake to go around!
To help us raise as much money as we could for both charities, we also held a raffle.
We had a fantastic range of prizes kindly donated by the DriveWorks Team and generous businesses. A huge thank you to everyone who donated prizes and bought raffle tickets!
Prizes included a selection of American candy supplied by Heather from the DriveWorks team who is based in Boston, a 3D mouse, toiletries, toys and lots of alcohol and chocolates!
We also had the following fantastic prizes up for grabs:
贈50 Experience Days Voucher
Afternoon Tea for Two at The Village Hotel
Gift Voucher for our local bakery Sextons
Free Blow dry at RedHairdressers
This was our biggest bake sale total yet. Beating last year’s total of 贈500 and 2017’s total of 贈450! A huge thank you to everyone who contributed to the bake sale by baking, donating and enjoying the cakes!
After speaking to our visitors from Cheshire Grange Care Home during the bake sale, we learnt that their residents would really benefit from a special projector that can be used by dementia patients to interact with and keep their minds active.
Cheshire Grange do a great job in our local community and they have always supported our bake sales by attending and donating. We would like to give something back to Cheshire Grange and help their patients by donating the cost of the projector to them.
The bake sale was a great reason to bring outour shuffleboard, cornhole and splat the rat games too! These games were all made by the DriveWorks team, we spent our lunchtimes building, sanding, sewing and painting in time for our summer party this year.
At the bake sale we also had a guess the number of sweets in the jar game. As you can imagine our engineers had some complex calculations to try to guess correctly and win the sweets!
Our bake sale was held just days before the Laskey Farm Gardens were opened as part of the National Garden Scheme. The open gardens scheme also raises money for charities. Howard and Wendy Platt very kindly allowed our guests to look round the beautiful gardens on the day of the bake sale.
We also had a special visit from Warrington South MP Faisal Rashid.
Faisal dropped by to congratulate us on our recent High Sheriff of Cheshire Award for Innovation and our two Queens Awards for Enterprise for Innovation and Internaional Trade and enjoy some of our bake sale cakes!
While we were enjoying all the sweet treats, local dental practice Eagel Browreminded us about the importance of brushing our teeth by kindly providing us with lots of tooth paste to go with the cake! Thanks Eagel Brow!
A huge thank you again to everyone who contributed to the bake sale and everyone who came along on the day to raise money for some great causes!
DriveWorks Solo offers the ability to take complete control over the naming and location of your generated files.
File naming is an important consideration when planning an implementation, and DriveWorks provides complete flexibility in how files are named.
Your file names can be as simple or as complex as you require, with the ability to suffix, prefix or even ignore a files original name.
In this case we are going to use intelligent file naming to allow DriveWorks to re-use a file that has been previously created.
The top-level assembly will still require a unique name, if not, nothing at all could be generated. But all sub-assemblies and parts can be assigned an intelligent naming convention.
Intelligent file names combine parameters within your Project that impact the outcome of the model into the file name. For example, the length or color of a component.
For this to work, a components file name rule will need to include the values of all the parameters being driven within the component.
Every time DriveWorks is used to generate new files, the file name rule will be evaluated and if the file name has already been generated, DriveWorks will re-use the existing component. This reduces the number of components being generated and improves model generation time.
Lets look at an example to see how this works in practice.
In this DriveWorks Solo Conveyor Project we use intelligent file naming to re-use parts within the conveyor assembly.
As previously mentioned, this improves generation time but also allows us to create a library of parts for this assembly. This also helps easily identify files without having to open them in SOLIDWORKS.
Within Model Rules the rule shown below determines whether the file name of the Conveyor Assembly uses Intelligent File Naming. This is controlled by a Check Box Control on the form.
If intelligent file naming returns TRUE, then this rule will use the return of numerous Form Controls along with text strings to identify each value to create a unique file name.
In this example the parameters being used are the Length, Width, Height and whether side rails are required.
If I enter the values 600, 870 and 680 for Length Width and Height, the resulting file name is:
CONVEYOR FRAME ASSEMBLY-600L X 870W X 680H.SLDASM
You can see the result of the generated file names below.
Learn more about Intelligent File Naming in the DriveWorks Solo Online Help File
Many businesses have already started investing in their digital transformation journey.
According to the 2019 Automation Survey, 73% of respondents have already deployed technology to automate their business tasks and processes, with another 20% planning to deploy automation technology within the next 12 to 18 months.
The survey found Workflow Automation Software, Business Process Management Software and Robotic Process Automation are the top types of automation being introduced.
Through automation, complex business processes are being made smarter.
Business Process Automation (BPA) is enabling businesses to become more streamlined, using information and data to manage routine processes and reduce costs, increase productivity and improve efficiency.
By using technology to automate key business processes, organisations aredriving a positive change and already being rewarded.
Advances in artificial intelligence, software robotics, machine learning, and innovative technology platforms enable businesses to redefine processes, with automation expected to provide a significantopportunity for improvements in performance and efficiency in the workplace.
Digital manufacturing requires data to flow through a business. DriveWorks is an important part of that process.
Using DriveWorks software, companies can quickly and easily display configured products online, in 3D, and generate accurate quotes and sales documentation.
What is particularly innovative about our software is that it also automates the creation of all the downstream manufacturing drawings and production data too. Production can begin as soon as an order is placed, and customers then benefit from shorter lead times.
DriveWorks customer BKW Instrumentshave successfully integratedDriveWorks software in to their business proccesses and are already seeing the benefits.
Using DriveWorks as a web-based platform allows BKW to interact with their SYSPRO ERP system securely from any device, anywhere in the UK. The application they developed with DriveWorks software enables them to organise and speed up everyday business processes and tasks.
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.
– Adam Baker, Operations and IT Manager at BKW Instruments, presenting at DriveWorks World 2018.
Industrial Magnetics is an industry leader in permanent magnets and electromagnets for work holding, lifting, fixturing, conveying and magnetic separation.
Already usingSOLIDWORKS 3D CADsoftware, IMI wanted to take an integrated approach to improve operations, with tools to accelerate product development, reduce the cost of custom designs and orders, enhance product quality and provide fast responses to customer requests.
With DriveWorks at the core, the company has integrated its CRM and ERP system, creating a centralized platformto support day-to-day operations.
As a result of the integration of DriveWorks and SOLIDWORKS with the companys ERP system, IMI cut the task of creating a Bill of Materials down to a single click from within SOLIDWORKS.
A step that used to take up to four minutes and was conducted by all eight engineers multiple times per day is now auotmated and requires no manual intervention.
Everyone in the process stream customers, sales, engineering and manufacturing can now see the same information. DriveWorks serves as the interface to all our business systems, tools, models, terminology and users.
– David Dewey, Engineer with Industrial Magnetics.
This is the fifth blog in our new digital transformation series. Each week we will be sharing our insights about the importance of embracing digital transformation and automation. Keep reading to learn more!
We have always worked closely with the SOLIDWORKS User Group Network all over the world.
We really enjoy supporting the community and getting involved in any way that we can – our own team at DriveWorks consists of many SOLIDWORKS power users!
At SOLIDWORKS World 2019, we were honoured to receive the SWUGN Partner of the Year Award in recognition of the work we do to help support the community.
Working with user group leaders over the last few years, we have helped with things such as finding presenters for meetings,sending boxes of giveaways and best of all getting the chance to attend the events ourselves.
SWUGN Partner of Year Award 2019
Were excited to announce the details of our next DriveWorks SWUGN Tour.
In September, Heather from the DriveWorks team hits the road to visit five SOLIDWORKS user groups in California.
While on the road, she will present on DriveWorksXpress as well as the DriveWorksXpress Training and Certification.
See below for more details of our California SWUG Tour and the groups we’ll be attending. We hope to see you there!
We would love to see our customers and resellers while on the west coast – join us at your local group!
San Diego
SWUG
Wednesday,
September 11th
Inland Empire
SWUG
Thursday,
September 12th
Kern County SWUG
Tuesday, September 17th
Fresno
SWUG
Wednesday,
September 18th
Laney
SWUG
Thursday,
September 19th
