"Enterprise"

billy2

It's sad that changes in the "free" plan have overshadowed the announcement of "Enterprise".

As a 30 year veteran in the CAD industry, I feel this "Enterprise" is the most progressive CAD concept dropped on the engineering community since the beginning of CAD. It's truly a new cloud concept. This is the 1st time engineers will be able to design together and control the design process. As a former business owner, running a business by the numbers is so important and it's very exciting to see this new solution for engineering departments.

Well you say "Catia, Creo & NX are the serious players in the CAD space?" but they can't do this. I see "Enterprise" as a defining moment in the history of CAD. Sorry for the guys exiting to fusion, Autodesk is a year off from having a beta cloud product (not fusion, leopard).

Face it, existing parametric modelers are best suited for one person designing one little something.

As an architect of many multi-engineering projects, I've been wanting this for years. I have never / will never setup a design project that runs a design through a PDM system. Sorry that's just wrong. Checking out bits of the project, then re-combining the bits by checking into a top level PDM controlled assembly is just goofy. Have you ever had to open the top level assembly at the end the day to see how things were progressing? 

Fragmented file check out is a bad idea:

Running the numbers

Since the Onshape guy's also like numbers, I thought I'd run the numbers for a small engineering department and see if "Enterprise" pencils out. I'm asking myself "Is this a good business idea?"

Small engineering department:

10 engineers

5 support

$100,000 engineer salary/year * 10 = $1,000,000 (rounding to make math easy)

$100,000 burden rate/year *10 = $1,000,000 (double salaries to estimate cost to run business ie.. building, desks, insurance, new computers, coffee)

$50,000 support salary/year * 5 = $250,000

$50,000 burden rate/year * 5 = $250,000

Rough guess at engineering department annual costs $2.5 million.

1% efficiency improvement

$2.5e6 *.01=$25,000 savings/annually

Cost of Onshape licenses 15x$1200=$18000/annually

You'll have to figure out transition on your own. No budget for help.

2% efficiency improvement

$2.5e6 *.02=$50,000 savings/annually

Cost of Onshape licenses 15x$1200=$18000/annually

There's plenty of budget to hire transition help.

What kind of efficiencies can one expect from a cloud solution? 10 years ago I threw microsoft out of my company and went to the cloud using simple php scripts. The following year we doubled sales due to efficiencies and better planning. I'm now a cloud junky and pity desktop users. I've seen the efficiencies in a small business and know that engineering departments are ripe for improvements.

Will engineering departments see a 100% improvement? We'll see in the next 5 years. Efficiencies of 1%, 2%, 3% and greater will happen making Onshape Enterprise the most exciting thing since Bresingham's algorithms.

I feel we're just at the beginning of a engineering revolution. OnShape is spot on.

Run the numbers guys, how expensive is your engineering team?

brian_brady

Good analysis, but you are missing something. What were you using before Onshape and how much did it cost. I assume you weren't using a free solution. 

3dcad

Thanks for calculations @billy - I love this sort of simplified play with numbers.

As a small business owner who works 12 hours per day and handles various tasks for the company (not selling design work separately, but need cad for many things in furniture factory) I tend to calculate few different approaches:

- Pure ROI (return on investment) in efficiency improvement, product value improvement etc..
- Worst case scenario ie. what if I don't like and will revert back to old system after first year
- The affect for me to wake up happy at 5am because I have hitech tools to play with at work.
- Savings for my nerves / mental condition if I don't need to hassle with updates / crashes / something else that has been bugging me.
- The new possibilities/preparedness that investment can provide me in future, I try to give space for things that I'm not aware of at the moment.

I think many small business owners tend to forget how important position they have in their company. They organize stuff to keep employees happy but forgot them selves. I try to keep myself happy by getting new interesting machines & software even though all of them might not be the right choice to maximize the profit. Usually these are pretty small things like smartwatch, new phone/tablet/laptop or Onshape pro account at early stage.
But if you burn yourself out by maximizing profit and discover that you don't wan't to work in your own company anymore - that is a bad investment.

Don't get me wrong, I'm really strict where I use money. I always calculate how much I save/earn if I don't buy some service but rather do myself at night.
So it is all about numbers, but make sure you think also the big picture that might have even bigger affect on long term numbers than short term profit if you, for example, decide to roll out new cloud cad system into your company.

I wen't a bit off topic but the bottom line is that if I had even a small team of designers - I wouldn't even think of anything else than Onshape enterprise where you have all the strings in single system and you don't need to guess as you can quickly check if you have made progress or not. No excuses from employee that "I had several crashes, lost some work and had to update and that's why I didn't get anything done today". This can still happen but you know it's true and can send fury feedback to Onshape for being down
I wish there was similar dashboard for running any type of business

billy2

Good for you 3dcad, 

Small business guys get to work half days. Luckily we get to choose which half we work.

billy2

Brian-

I dabbled with cadkey, pro/e & solidworks.

Made most my money with pro/e then solidworks & then cadkey.

I'd never touch something free as I sold CAD systems, free isn't a business model.

I did support the education market though, I do realize you have to give before you take.

brian_brady

Billy,

I was just trying to make the point that you should include the cost difference relative to what you were using. If, for example, your yearly per seat license was $3000 for whatever you were using, then switching to $1200 per seat is already as savings of $1800 per seat. No efficiency gain needed to save money. All efficiency gains you see just save you more money.

billy2

brian-

I now get your point. I should have run 0% efficiency improvements. You're right that pencils out too. Thanks
 

jon_hirschtick

Thanks @billy for the praise on Enterprise.  We are pretty excited about it too.

matthew_menard

Is Onshape working on an ITAR compliance protocol of some sort?  There could be a 90% improvement in efficiency by making drawings directly from my thoughts, but lacking ITAR compliance makes it a non starter.  I imagine there are a number of DoD or NRC companies that are in the same boat. 

michał_1

@matthew_menard

"Drawings directly from my thoughts"? You should start working on that immediately, I can't wait for that. Will you write FeatureScript for that?

stevehess

Tagging on here. Thank you @billy .