Technology Students Visit DriveWorks

Earlier this week we welcomed nine students from local University Technical College, UTC to join us for a day of work experience.

Based in central Warrington, UTC is a state-funded, purpose-built technical college, that focuses on preparing students for careers in STEM by bringing together the best of education and industry.

The day was organised by The Pledge Partnership, a European Structural Fund (ESF) funded programme that connects local businesses with educators to provide young people in Warrington with the resources, skills and experiences required to succeed in the working world.

As a software development company, we had a lot of insight to share. We’re committed to supporting education. We work closely with students and academia to help support and nurture the future of STEM, enabling students to gain the right skills and knowledge they need to succeed.

Students came to DriveWorks as part of the 5 Days of Digital work experience programme being implemented by The Pledge Partnership.

5 Days of Digital has been designed as an updated version of the traditional work experience programmes. Students spend their week visiting digital companies in the North West to gain industry experience and learn more about the opportunities available in STEM.

As soon as the students arrived at DriveWorks HQ, they began an exciting day of digital work experience.

At the start of the day they were divided into two teams and given a brief;

‘To put themselves in the shoes of a DriveWorks customer and design a configurable product ready to present back to DriveWorks VP and Co-founder Maria Sarkar’

The students then began brainstorming some ideas and coming up with thier own unique product.

Throughout the day, Bridie from the DriveWorks team, took the students through a range of different activities, providing them with skills to ensure they were fully prepared for the final task.

Starting with a lego team building activity to highlight the importance of communication and working together.

“We learnt a range of skills, developing teamwork and initiative, and also learned about the DriveWorks business.”

After lunch, the students heard from different members of the DriveWorks team, all working in different areas of the company, talking through their roles and responsibilites.

First, Wesley, DriveWorks Principle IT Administrator,  introduced the students to the variety of tasks he’s responsible for. He talked about the necessity for a digital company like DriveWorks to keep our systems constantly updated in the ever-evolving digital sector.

Next, Lucy from the marketing team demonstrated the importance of marketing in the digital world. Lucy showed the students the many techniques and tools we use to deliver consistent and effective marketing campaigns to our global network.

Then Tom, who is on placement with DriveWorks showed the students a demo project he’s been working on, created using both SOLIDWORKS and DriveWorks functionality.

Next,  Amer who is on placement in the technical team demonstrated the capabilities of 3D printing as a manufacturing tool and how DriveWorks and SOLIDWORKS can be used to create products ready for printing.

Finally, Colin delivered a talk on Software Development and the relevance of coding in all aspects of our daily lives, from websites and games to household appliances.

“Fun day that enlightened us on the company whilst helping us with skills for the future.”

From each diverse presentation, the students learnt about the variety of roles and skillsets required in a successful digital company. It also gave them a further understanding of the importance of teamwork and communication within a digital company and how we all work together to achieve one goal; to create innovative and exciting software.

“My day was interesting and enjoyable learning about the various different parts that help to make a software design company successful.”

With this new wealth of knowledge, the students got to work on their final presentations.

Working together to not only design an innovative product, but think about how they would market their product in a way that sets it out from the crowd and considering any limitations of taking the product to market.

“I enjoyed the making of a product the most and meeting different people from different areas of the company, it was useful to then allow me to get an insight into each role.”

We saw eco-friendly toothbrushes, designed to be suitable for everyone; from children to adults, to those with disabilities such as blindness and hearing problems.

There was also another eco-friendly design, a reusable water bottle that could be fully customised and avaliable in a variety of sustainable materials.

It wasn’t all work however, as the students had the opportunity for some downtime in our dedicated rec room, playing pool, video games and of course meeting Ruby!

The day was a great success and the feedback from all the students reflected this. Having worked with this inspiring group of students, we’re excited to see the future of digital!

“My day was very eventful, I really enjoyed the activities that we were given, and I would love to visit again.”

Wanting to pursue a career in digital?

We’re always on the lookout for talented people to join our team.

Visit our Careers Page to learn more about the opportunities avaliable at DriveWorks.

Learn More About DriveWorks at 3DEXPERIENCE World

If you are attending 3DEXPERIENCE World in Nashville, take the opportunity to improve your productivity, work smarter and improve customer experience by joining the DriveWorks design automation and CPQ sessions.

Hands-On DriveWorksXpress Training Session

Discover more about the time-saving Design Automation tool you already have inside SOLIDWORKS.

Presented by DriveWorks Technical Specialists: Tom Wormald and Oliver Basma-Lord

Learn from DriveWorks Technical Specialists, Tom and Oliver, how to:

• Create DriveWorksXpress forms linked to your models
• Automate SOLIDWORKS geometry
• Configure model variations based on your rules

See how automation can improve your work, create your own DriveWorksXpress configurator and learn how to get certified to become a CDWXA.

Session Attendee Benefits: We are all busier than ever. If we automate some of our repetitive tasks, we can save time to innovate and be more productive. See how automation can help in your day to day work. Learn how to create a DriveWorksXpress configurator and take the first steps to becoming certified in DriveWorksXpress.

Tuesday, 11^th Feb 2:45pm – 3:45pm

DriveWorks – Configure & Automate

Learn How you can Start to Automate and Configure With DriveWorks

Presented by DriveWorks Brand & Community Ambassador: Heather Hasz

DriveWorks Community & Brand Ambassador, Heather Hasz will be presenting in the Certified Partner Theatre.

DriveWorks rules-based software is proven for automating repetitive tasks, improving productivity and reducing errors.

Find out more about DriveWorks Solo and learn how DriveWorks customer Detroit Stoker first started learning about DriveWorksXpress at a SWUG meeting and are now applying DriveWorks Solo to benefit their product line.

Exploring SOLIDWORKS Design Automation 

Presented by Computer Aided Technology Sr. PLM Consultant: Derek Lawson

This session will explore “out-of-the-box” functionality in SOLIDWORKS and SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional to help users automate portions of their design process without using API. Topics covered will be DriveWorksXpress, Pack and Go, Copy Tree, Treehouse, Equations, and more.

Monday, 10th Feb 4:15pm – 5:15pm

Find us in the 3DEXPERIENCE Playground at booth 412 where we will be showcasing our techonology, previewing What’s New in DriveWorks 18 and talking all things digital transformation, design automation, CPQ and configurators.

See you there!

We’ve specialised in design automation for SOLIDWORKS and helping engineers to work smarter since 2001.
What is design automation and how can you benefit?

Achieve More with Design Automation

Create and Configure Custom Products, Fast.

Offering customized products is a great competitive differentiator. It often leads to more sales, higher revenues, and happy customers. However, with more and more companies offering customization, you need to work smarter than your competitors.

Design automation enables you to turn around proposals quickly, design and manufacture efficiently and deliver on your promises consistently, all whilst maintaining a healthy profit.

Why Use Design Automation?

Companies offering custom products are often putting their engineers under pressure. They’re squeezed to create proposal documents and drawings as fast as possible. This leads to best guess costings, for orders that aren’t guaranteed.

Engineering departments are wasted on tasks that could be automated. They have less time to re-engineer existing designs, update drawings and carefully check every detail. Jobs are then left open to errors, rework, backlogs and delays. All of this can affect profit margins and damage reputation.

By automating time-sensitive and often repetitive upfront activities, you will reap the benefits. You have more time to innovate and add value to your products, improving your position in the market. You increase throughput and improve quality, enabling you to win more business.

Design Automation and Knowledge Capture

Design practices often evolve through years of industry experience. Companies need capture and re-use the combined knowledge of their most experienced engineers. However, storing and sharing this knowledge with others is difficult.

Inside 3D CAD systems, expert users can add geometric relationships and equation-driven dimensions. This saves time but issues arise when making changes, or adding additional products. Unravelling the complex design references created by others is difficult and time-consuming.

DriveWorks uses a different approach, simple and straightforward rules and decision logic. You can easily capture and reuse your design, manufacturing and cost knowledge to truly automate your business.

Automate Your Business One Step at a Time

With DriveWorks, you can automate as little or as much as you like, and at your own pace.
Start in engineering and add design rules to drive your 3D CAD models. Automatically create detailed drawings and generate Bills of Materials for manufacturing.

Give your engineers more time to focus on improving product quality and developing new products.

Then extend the benefits of automation to your sales department. Give sales a set of custom product options to choose from with guided selling.

Reduce errors and save time with automated quotations and cover letters.

With automation, sales teams become more proficient, customer inquiries are dealt with faster and throughput is increased. This leads to more orders, reduced operational overheads, and better customer service.

Easy to Set Up, Manage and Use

A DriveWorks design automation project is easy to create, maintain and use. No programming skills or consultants are required.

Create and manage your own custom configurator that suits your business needs. You can easily change and grow your project as and when you need to. Create a set of 3D models, design rules, forms and document templates once and use them over and over again.

DriveWorks projects work anywhere on any device – on desktop, mobile, tablet, and inside SOLIDWORKS.

Design Automation and Online Sales Configurators

Add your DriveWorks project to your company website as an online sales configurator. Enable your sales teams, distributors, dealers and customers to configure and order customized products anytime, anywhere, on any device. Connect your configurator to your other business systems, such as MRP, ERP, and CRM.

With DriveWorks you can create a full CPQ configurator solution. Cost custom products, determine customer-specific pricing and schedule deliveries based on available resources, inventory levels, and lead times.

Automate for Free

If you’ve got SOLIDWORKS, you’ve already got design automation. DriveWorksXpress is the free design automation tool, installed inside every licence of SOLIDWORKS. Find it in the tools menu, activate it and start automating.

Take design automation even further with DriveWorks Solo. Download a 30-day full feature free trial of DriveWorks Solo to see what you could achieve.

Here at DriveWorks we enjoy being part of the local Thelwall and Warrington community and we believe that it’s really important to support others in the community whenever we can.

We are proud members of Cheshire & Warrington Growth Hub and the Warrington Business Exchange. We work with local schools, colleges and universities to inspire the next generation and help them with work experience opportunities, careers advice and certifications to help them get ahead.

Over the years we have completed lots of fundraising activities to support our community too. Our annual charity bake sales raise money for local charities, we’ve fundraised for a defibrillator to be fitted on-site for public use, supported a local dementia care home, planted trees and now we are supporting Thelwall Parish Hall.

Thelwall Parish Hall

Restoration

In recent years, the Parish Hall has had a significant investment to keep the hall operating so that the community can continue to enjoy it in the future.

The Parish Hall Management Committee embarked on a programme of works to modernise and regenerate the structure and facilities.

Early in 2019, the Parish Hall Management Committee received planning permission to resurface the Parish Hall car park.

Thelwall Parish car park currently

Plans for the resurfaced car park

The project will cost the Parish Hall a total of £62,000 of which they are £15,000 short. We want to help them raise the remaining funds they need and encourage other local businesses and the local community to help too.

Once finished, the resurfaced car park will provide spaces for 72 cars with no more puddles or bumpy surfaces.

Supporting Our Local Community

We have donated to the cause and will be continuing to work with Thelwall Parish Hall, local businesses and the community to raise the funds needed to finish the car park.

Every year at DriveWorks, we raise money for charities and the local community. Previously, we have raised money for charities such as local charity St Rocco’s, Bliss for babies born premature, Macmillan Cancer Support, Cancer Research UK, the Alzheimer’s Society and even funded for a defibrillator to be fitted on-site!

This year we will be helping Thelwall Parish Hall with fundraising for their car park resurfacing project as well as some physical activities such as tree planting at the Parish Hall during the spring.