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A company to transition from Solidworks
digitalcarbon
Member Posts: 57 PRO
in General
I will be getting a job to take over all the Solidworks projects for a company...
They understand Onshape and know that I will be slowly converting all Solidworks files they have into Onshape & OpenBOM
There is no rush.
So what is the best approach?
I'm planning on sharing dropbox to have access to the SW files.
Then have their laptop running SW so I can do the proper export when needed (Pack and go?)
What about drawing sheets? Do I need to redraw those? Maybe a non-issue since their fabricator has Onshape public.
Comments?
They understand Onshape and know that I will be slowly converting all Solidworks files they have into Onshape & OpenBOM
There is no rush.
So what is the best approach?
I'm planning on sharing dropbox to have access to the SW files.
Then have their laptop running SW so I can do the proper export when needed (Pack and go?)
What about drawing sheets? Do I need to redraw those? Maybe a non-issue since their fabricator has Onshape public.
Comments?
0
Comments
Your Customer Success representative will be reaching out to you to see what we can do for you.
Congratulations!
I'm doing the same thing, work with Philip, he's a great resource and has helped me.
I'm fear exposing what I do, these are my opinions.
-I parasolids out the model from solidworks. If you don't want to open solidworks, you can zip stuff up and OS can handle this without SW.
-Importing into OS, I always put everything into a partstudio. (I flatten it)
-I see no value in SW assemblies and would rather build them inside OS making them more organized & efficient.
-I then refeature make parts and add them to a new part studio.
-Those parts that have features relating to each other go into the same part studio. (This is a Philipism)
-Those parts that stand alone, I tend to include them inside the same part studio, this is a bad habit. (non-Philipism)
-This is a great time to figure out how to deal with common parts and establish a library.
-I then re-feature make parts from imported dumb solids.
-I take this time to properly construct proper datums and clean-up poorly constructed solids.
-Here's a link from aug 2014, re-featuring a dumb solid, https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/comment/156#Comment_156, this is really old and probably useless.
-insert new featured parts for old dumb solids in assy's. I'm not doing in-context, so no assy references get broke.
It doesn't take that long to create the conversion and it's a great opportunity to clean things up. Take Philip up on laying out a road map.
In the end, you'll be much better off, it's not that hard to do,
Thank you
Do Onshape or any other vendor really expect a company to recreate all their drawings?
The idea is to have one seat of Solidworks on one computer. Use that to release / pack and go legacy projects that don't really come up very often.
Any new project you would start in Onshape, either import from a old solidworks model and add onto it, or start from scratch. It's up to your company to decide what works best for the project. Our company still has legacy drawings that require mechanical desktop 2004 & solidworks. Once we get a repeat order for one of those projects, we will decide if we are just going to update titleblocks on the 2D, or remodel the whole project and bring it up to date.
This is nothing new. Every software package will require you to do this type of work flow. Even switching from Quickbooks to a ERP system will suggest you slowly phase out Quickbooks over the period of a year or so.
The mentality is "It's a dimmer switch, not a light switch"
In a parametric system, you need to have an internal ID on every entity (Face, Edge, Vertex) in order to attach a dimension or mate. Without these internal ID's you would be left with a "Dumb Solid" which is typically the only way CAD packages communicate with each other.
Unless there is a good reason for competing companies to make it easier for people to leave them, they (all software suites) want to lock you into their system by making it harder for you to move on to other software.
Videos like these showcase how easy / hard it was for them, to help people on the fence have some peace of mind before buying into a new system
That is exactly how thousands of companies have transitioned to Onshape!
Everyone had tons of paper drawing sets and now they had a cad system...
I'm sure that they did not tackle the whole thing at once but did the "dimmer switch" thing...
New projects were started in cad while legacy projects were still done on paper...
If you think about it, that is how people currently handle yearly releases for desk top cad...new projects are started in the latest version and already existing projects are kept in last years version...(because of fear of updating might have new bugs that will introduce chaos while trying to hit a deadline) At least that is how we did it in the Architectural firm I worked for.
I come from architectural cad (20yrs) with roots going back to paper mechanical drafting...while Onshape is not for Architectural it IS the future of Mechanical cad...well done. Also OpenBOM is the way to go also...but that is another topic...
it is not a simple case of "start a new project and work forward". Starting a new design can require use of existing parts or modifications of existing parts (currently saved as configurations). So if this was a switched system environment we lose all that linked data built up over years, not to mention the scope for error in recreating drawing data.
Genuine question. A company has 10 licenses of SW, average cost on subs is £900 a year. The business has a 40MB fibre line shared over 40+ users. Why change to a system that has less functionality, requires greater bandwidth, costs more and total retraining of all design staff? Then they have to rework their entire CAD database and retain at least 1 seat of the old system on maintenance?
What drives that decision? I am being serious here. I was an early tester of Onshape, but chose not to switch. I totally get the use case for a contractor, a start up or company needing multi cad capabilities. What I don't get is the reasoning for changing in the scenario above, which is quite typical for the customer base I deal with.
If Onshape is missing a critical assembly feature (configs for example) than you may need to wait a bit until you have the minimal toolkit available before switching. If Onshape is missing a critical part studio feature, well then ask the community or Onshape for a feature, and it is very likely someone can make it for you.
It sounds like you're going to be all or nothing if you switch. So you would need to migrate everything. You should talk to @Don_Van_Zile, he has been tasked with migrating all the old data from his company to Onshape. He may be able to give you better insight
Since you've been gone, a lot has happened. I think SW is now catching up to OS.
I think its time to migrate from SW. There's no need for those old headaches.
For the more general audience, I was asked last week "how long will it take to catch up to the functionality of SolidWorks?", my answer was that "it would take years for them to catch up with us!". Both glib and very true. The new platform of Onshape offers capabilities that are years ahead of anything else out there. Do we still have gaps in some areas - of course! Are we knocking those off? Absolutely! For many people, the available CAD capabilities are more than enough to switch. For many, even with CAD gaps, the benefits of the platform, the sharing paradigms, release management and the security of the cloud make Onshape a preferable solution today!
For Kevin and others, very few companies are engaging in wholesale migrations - it simply isn't needed (yes some are). New designs or modifications of designs are done and released in Onshape. Modifications of existing designs can either be done in the original CAD system (features, associative drawings etc), or migrated to Onshape and modified (with new drawings) there. Data re-use is easy - designs previously released in old CAD are imported and used in Onshape moving forward.
Companies can make the move whenever they want! SolidWorks (and others) are excellent products and will be around for a few more years. When companies (whether early adopters or laggards) decide they want to maintain competitiveness by going file-less, sharing, collaborating and having a zero IT footprint, they will come to see that their choices are very limited.
As for Xdesign - you decide for yourselves. Ask - 'Is it on the same kernel as SolidWorks so that I can be guaranteed that the translations (to whatever kernel it uses) will be fidelic?'. "Is the data management and release management built-in and included in the price?". "What is the cost of ownership?". "Are you (DS) saying that it's better than SolidWorks and that I should switch or are you just saying 'look, we have something kind of like Onshape'?". We haven't seen it yet because it isn't public (and hasn't been in the 9 or so years since it was first shown at SWW) so we aren't exactly holding our breath.
These forums have a relatively limited audience - most people here are already Onshape users and very happy with the product and our (rapid) pace of development. There are also a very large number of people in trials and many of those will become future happy customers. Many are students whose schools love the zero IT footprint and the ability to run on multiple devices (Chromebooks predominantly) and the zero cost. Many are free users that for the first time have free access to a professional grade tool and love it. Onshape is not for everyone - when someone says they downloaded a monster from Thingiverse and want to move it's head, i point them to Autodesk and their fine suite of hobby-grade tools.
For our free users, welcome to the party and enjoy all that we have for free. For our Standard/Pro/Enterprise users, know that we are working night and day to build the functionality that you need to execute and manage your professional workflows - all while delivering personal tech support that is rated #1 in the industry. We are not sitting here trying to figure out how to not cannibalize our existing revenue stream - we have one product (Onshape) and one goal, to make you productive, successful and happy!
#murca (that's an inside joke for our US readers
HWM-Water Ltd
Perhaps to help you better in these support forums, I should ask 'what can we do to help you, or how can we help you contribute to the success of others?'
Well yes, Onshape isn't a Top dog free form surface maniac (yet?) but I would agree, there are great tools in Solidworks and others that I wish Onshape had, or will add in. But in some respects I've found just having the primitive tools isn't all that bad . (Although I never surface model so I can imagine that would be rough) It may require and extra feature or two, but a lot of the more bugged parts of Solidworks are those fancy tools like, in-context, multi-body. My biggest complaint with SW is the instability / constant usage headaches.
At least with Onshape if an assembly is taking forever to load or is hanging. I just open a new tab and work on another part. In SW you can't even open a new instance on SW until it is done crunching.
And I don't know these issues of which you speak...
i get that. I understand we operate in a small specialist sector. But the disappointment is that early on the promise was a system that could model anything. That is not the case. Sure, I could spend 2 weeks cobbling something to make it look right but we operate in an area where we produce 20 concepts a day.
The issue is Onshape, like SolidWorks, push all the higher end functionality onto add ons. Contrast this to Fusion or Creo, where it is an integrated solution.
in truth, I am a bit disappointed in the Onshape progress over that last few years. I was expecting a more complete geometry modelling solution by now given all the money that has been invested. I totally understand the development path but I just can't get excited about new features like title block editing, or adding symbols to dimensions. Show me an integrated sub divisional modelling workflow, or direct surface editing across multiple surface patches and I'll take notice. But as Onshape matures it is a simple case of diminishing returns. You get to the stage where you are tweaking minor features rather than adding headline tools. Will they ever want to develop world class surfacing tools? To do so takes a lot of time and money, so I tend to think surfacing will toddle on in tweak mode rather than develop any siesmic shift. I would love to be proved wrong.
the case in point is demonstrated by Fusion. A recent update hyped up a major new spline tool drawing curves by CVs rather than on curve points. No, for surfacing this is a core tool that should be there at the start. It was like SolidWorks introducing conic splines a few years back...we had been asking for them for 10 years!
again, it simply comes down to the fact, if we can't model it, we can't do anything else. Ive not used ANY software that can do everything we want. This is why we use lots! But we only buy into systems that at least let us tackle most jobs we do.
You are right - we absolutely are building Onshape for the mainstream market. That means; widgets, machine design, mechatronics, industrial, medical, fabrication, transportation and some consumer. We are using exactly the same business model as we did at SolidWorks - "of the (approx) $10 billion annual spend in this sector, what effort yields the greatest market fit?"
While this approach is great for us and our professional users, there are segments that are (and will remain) underserved (for now). You stated that it took SolidWorks 10 years to get to the point that it had some half decent tools that met your market segment's specific needs. While we hope it won't take us 10 years, it is likely that the sorts of capabilities you are looking for will also come after a long list of things that you are not looking for. It is true also, that for some specific workflow needs (such as sub-D), we are also inviting partners to fill that need (in fact, it is exactly the same partner as SolidWorks - Powersurf!).
Is this the best business model? For our target users, absolutely. For you? Probably not. Now don't get me wrong - we are super proud of some very powerful curve generation and surface creation capabilities! There are household consumer product names that use Onshape (I only wish i could list them here - some will become public in the coming months) and are very happy. Are we going to make you (and your segment) happy? Probably not for a while. I can see your face now - every three weeks when we release a whole bunch of cool stuff (assy figs, feature folders and general drawing awesomeness for instance
So, Kevin - here is my ask. While you and I have only met briefly (at D3D), I feel that it is ok ask this favor; Where you feel that small changes to existing, new or planned features/workflows could be enhanced (in your ID eye), PLEASE let us know either (constructively) in these forums, or by improvement request. While we may not make any great leaps (in the short term) towards your segment, it is possible that you could help the industry by helping us shift the needle. In short - simple, well described improvement requests are MUCH more likely to get done than any sort us grandiose hand waving
My anger management therapist and parole officer both say that I should be much nicer to people. I really hope that the tone of this post comes over (simultaneously) as genuine, open and warm!
Kevin - make me happy and earn that Onshape T shirt (pic required
There is a FeatureScript by @kevin_o_toole_1 and @maximilian_schommer that adjusts a face with manipulators
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/b8730d44070bc0466ad80444
Post about it:
https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/comment/31642/#Comment_31642
IR for AS/NZS 1100
Here is the link:
Twitter: @BryanLAGdesign
Also I just found out that the BOM are kept in excel and are not part of the SW universe...so its a real mess.
So since this is going to be a slow slow process then I am ok with redrawing everything (as I go) and cleaning things up...this is going to force me to question why things are the way they are and see if I can refine anything.