In the previous article, we described how the voting process works and shared our favorite top 20 ideas with the EngineersRule readers. Since then, the voting has been completed and the results announced at 3DEXPERIENCE World 2023 in Nashville.

Before sharing the results to a packed room, John Sweeney, Senior Director and Bruce Holway, Director of Product Development reviewed the history of the Top Ten List.

They made it clear that while the list may be just one of the many tools in the product development toolbox for gathering enhancement suggestions from the users, it is the most spectacular one.

Figure 1. Snippet from John Sweeney's presentation (used with permission).

Top Ten Ideas Throughout the Years

The Top Ten List debuted in 2001 at SOLIDWORKS World in Orlando. Let’s time-travel to 2001 and take a look at the winning ideas in that year:

Figure 2. The Top Ten List for 2001.

Three of these ideas (3, 6 and 8) were implemented the following year, and the rest have since been fully or partially implemented. This high level of visibility for the ideas on the list encouraged users to engage more over the next several years, and so the Top Ten List became a permanent event at the SOLIDWORKS World conferences.

As of 2022, 68 percent of the ideas that made the Top 10 list have been reported by John as implemented (Figure 4).

Figure 3.

Notice that John was very conservative in assessing whether an idea was fully implemented or not. Based on our research, many of the white spaces in Figure 3 have been addressed in part. For example, by comparing figures 3 and 4, you will notice that John did not consider four ideas from TTL 2001 to be implemented, but let’s take a closer look.

#1: More flexible BOMs. The BOM flexibility has been significantly enhanced since 2001. You only need to look at the filtering functionality introduced in SOLIDWORKS 2023 to see how much more flexible BOMs are now.

#7: Better surfacing tools. This has been addressed with Boundary Surface, the queen of surfacing tools, which was implemented in 2008.

#9: Interrupt rebuild. For parts, at least, this has been implemented. Just press Escape to interrupt the rebuilding process.

Figure 4.

#10. Improve assembly performance. Assemblies that took 30 minutes to open in 2001 now take under two minutes. Even the upgrade from 2022 to 2023 offers significant reductions in open time and lag in operation, increased frame per second on dynamic viewport manipulation and more.

So, we must not take John’s chart at face value. It is more likely that 80 to 85 percent of the ideas voted in the Top Ten List have been implemented—at least partially.

Declaring “victory” may be premature, but when the user requests “improved assembly performance,” what exactly defines that?

But even the conservatively stated 68 percent is impressive.

What About the Other Hundreds of Ideas?

The good news is that the ideas that do not make the top 10 are not disappearing in a black hole. The Product Definition Team is evaluating all of them and implements the most relevant to the user community.

Many ideas are critical to certain areas of the software, so they might not get as many votes as a general request to “improve assembly performance.”

John and Bruce provided examples of such ideas implemented in SOLIDWORKS 2023. As you can see in Figures 5 to 10, none of these ideas were voted into the top 10 list, but they were still implemented in the latest version of the software.

Figure 5. PDM Enhancements.

Figure 6.

Figure 7.

Figure 8.

Figure 9.

Figure 10.

Top Ten List 2023

The Top Ten List for 2023 contains 12 ideas, not 10. As you will see, some of them received the same number of votes.

#10 – Make All Features Available in Parts Also Available in Assemblies

Figure 11.

This will be a tall order, considering how many features are relevant only at the part level. We see the benefits of being able to define curves at the assembly level, but are not so sure about other types of features that create geometry (additive). Also, we hope that any implementation of this idea will be done very carefully, to ensure it will not affect assembly performance.

We predict that this idea will be implemented partially. Curves – for sure!

#7 to 9 – Three-Way Tie Between Ideas

Figure 12.

Figure 13.

Figure 14.

Dave’s idea (Figure 12) will enrich the information contained in the FeatureManager Design Tree for Assemblies. We predict a quick implementation.

Ian’s idea (Figure 13) is extremely valuable for PDM users. Marrying the power of the SQL database in PDM with the graphic display of the Treehouse will create one of the most powerful tools available to SOLIDWORKS users for quickly understanding and modifying file structures.

Grant’s idea (Figure 14) is a prod to the MBD developers to finish what they started. MBD as implemented in SOLIDWORKS is a great product, but it requires more work.

#6 Enhance Markups

Figure 15.

Markups have already been significantly enhanced in SOLIDWORKS 2023, as we will demonstrate in an upcoming article. Offering users the ability to anchor them to the relevant entity from the model or drawing will streamline the editing process.

#5 Tell Us Which File Is at Fault

Figure 16.

We already have excellent troubleshooting tools in SOLIDWORKS. John’s idea will take the diagnostic tools to a new level.

#4 Ability to Create MBD Reference Dimensions Between a Cylinder and a Plane

Figure 17.

It is great to see so much interest in improving the MBD functionality this year. Jane’s request is related to a fundamental tool that is missing from the software.

#3 Ability to Reattach Dangling DimXpert Annotations in MBD

Figure 18.

We just need to point out that implementing this idea will serve not only the users who have the MBD add-in, but all of us. DimXpert is included in all seats of SOLIDWORKS and is useful for annotating 3D models, quickly creating drawing views. DimXpert annotations can also make eDrawings deliverables more valuable by allowing users to interact with the model (click on a dimension to highlight the entities that are dimensioned).

#2 Ability to Toggle a Selection Filter for Entities from a Specific Component

Figure 19.

Recep’s idea will allow users to save valuable time when working with complex assemblies. It is all about giving more control to the user.

#1 AutoSolve Dangling Relations and Dimensions in Sketching and Drawings

Figure 20.

This idea is all about improving the UX (user experience) consistency. Troubleshooting and fixing dangling dimensions, especially on drawings, can be a chore. We might need an injection of AI to implement this request.

Permanent Top Ten List?

One thing that users complained about was the brief visible life of the Top Ten List. The submission of ideas starts in December, with voting done by January and results announced in February. After that, the Top Ten List portal would be removed and little would be known about the implementation progress until the following SOLIDWORKS World event.

Starting this year, all the ideas submitted in this program have been collected in the new SOLIDWORKS Enhancement Ideas Community.

Here, users can continue to submit new ideas, vote (by liking existing ideas) and have clear visibility of the Implementation Pipeline.

Figure 21.

Searching for relevant ideas is a breeze using the 6W Tags.

Figure 22.

Conclusion

The Top Ten List is one of the best tools SOLIDWORKS users have for brainstorming with the whole community, including the SOLIDWORKS Product Definition Team. It is also the most effective one for seeing their ideas quickly implemented in the software.

About the Author

As an Elite AE and Senior Training and Process Consultant, working for TriMech Solutions, Alin Vargatu is a Problem Hunter and Solver. He has presented 38 times at 3DEXPERIENCE World and SOLIDWORKS World, twice at SLUGME and tens of times at SWUG meetings in Canada and the United States. His blog and YouTube channel are well known in the SOLIDWORKS Community. In recognition for his activity in the SOLIDWORKS Community, at 3DEXPERIENCE World 2021, the SWUGN (SOLIDWORKS User Group Network) awarded the SOLIDWORKS AE of the Year title to Alin Vargatu.

This article was derived from Dassault Systems' What's New in SOLIDWORKS 2023 for accuracy. Many of the images are also derived from this article for simplicity. We also kept the same order of topics to simplify cross-referencing. My contribution to this subject is to provide background details on the base functionality and provide real-life uses where possible. We left the original text where we felt that further details were not required.

Automatic Update of Mapped Linked Record Properties

Linked record objects are record objects that act as parents for document or PDM objects. Linked Records make it possible to create records in Linked Records that are initiated from a Document or PDM Objects. The document or PDM records are added as primary references to the Linked Records.

For those new to SOLIDWORKS Manage, Records are one of several object types available in Manage. Objects are the key building blocks of the SOLIDWORKS Manage structure. The object acts as a container for items such as BOMs, references and workflow diagrams.

Two common object types are records and document records. Document records have an attached document, while records do not. For example, we can have a document record containing files located in SOLIDWORKS PDM, known as a PDM Object. And we can have a BOM record that contains information about those files but does not include the files. In SOLIDWORKS Manage, records can be associated or linked. These linked records often have a parent/child relationship.

In SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023, mapped properties can automatically be updated to connect primary references and the associated linked record. The linked record updates when the primary reference changes and the record is checked in.

Enabling automatic updating of mapped linked records.

Using the 'New From' Option

Fields are used everywhere in SOLIDWORKS Manage. Creating and modifying fields is one of the most common tasks an administrator will perform. SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023 makes the creation of fields less time-consuming by making it possible to copy a field and its settings to create a new field with the same settings.

The new functionality is accessed by right-clicking on a field and selecting 'New From.'

Accessing the “New From” command.

The next step is defining the display name for the new field.

New From display name.

Once 'Save' is selected, a new field is created with the same settings as the field from which it was copied.

New copied field.

Note that additional fields can be created in the 'New From' dialogue box. These additional fields will also have the same settings as the copied field.

Task Administration Access

Tasks are an important part of SOLIDWORKS Manage and are used throughout the Manage Environment. A task is a configured action that requires the attention of a SOLIDWORKS Manage user.

Tasks can be defined as a required element of processes, cases and projects. Processes, cases and projects are Manage objects used to replicate a company's existing or desired processes from within SOLIDWORKS Manage.

In SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023, tasks can be accessed from the Manage client interface. From within the dashboard tab, right-click on a Task or All Tasks. Then select Administration Tasks.

Accessing tasks.

Dashboards provide a real-time view of aspects of a company's Manage environment, such as project percentage completion. A dashboard can be configured to meet a company's reporting requirements. Reports are available in SOLIDWORKS Manage but are generated on-demand, compared to Dashboards' real-time nature.

Linked Record BOM Compare Field Selection

We have already discussed Records and Linked Records. Most people reading this article are likely familiar with the concept of a BOM (bill of materials). BOMs are used extensively throughout SOLIDWORKS Manage. Since records can be linked, so can BOMs. The ability to compare a linked record BOM to the BOM of its primary references has been improved in SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023. It is now possible to select which BOM fields to compare.

Selecting BOMs to compare.

Support for Variable Driven BOM Quantities

A significant advantage of SOLIDWORKS Manage is its integration with SOLIDWORKS PDM. This integration includes the ability to pull information, such as that which is contained in PDM BOMs, into Manage.

SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023 reads the BOM quantity from a SOLIDWORKS PDM variable set and uses it for the UNIT_OF_MEASURE attribute.

Previously, SOLIDWORKS Manage used the instance count for the UNIT_OF_MEASURE attribute.

Mapping of attributes from a SOLIDWORKS PDM BOM.

Timesheets to Approve Node

Timesheets are used to track the progress of processes and tasks. In SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023, a manager can see the timesheets that a user needs to work on, to complete the timesheet approval process.

Viewing SOLIDWORKS Manage timesheets.

Cancelled Task Line in Capacity Planning

Capacity planning allows a manager to see all of an organization's defined resources, including their capacity and utilization. With SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023, a manager can see the number of hours consumed by a cancelled task.

The Assigned Tasks row displays the total assigned task time, including the cancelled task time. The available capacity row displays assigned task time, less the amount of cancelled task time.

Viewing cancelled tasks.

Capacity Planning User Efficiency

Prior to SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023, the efficiency percentage in user details always displayed 100 percent, irrespective of the settings in the capacity planning. Now in SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023, the value shown in capacity planning is applied to the user's time.

Hide Labels

Hide Labels allows a user to hide captions. This can declutter the interface to make it easier to see the displayed tabs.

To hide captions for the following items, right-click tabs and select Hide Labels:

• Bottom tabs in the main user interface for all objects.
• Property card tabs for processes.
• Administration for document and record objects (not SOLIDWORKS PDM).
• Administration for relationships and resource objects.

To hide labels for property cards for document and record objects, click Hide Labels.

Hiding labels.

Marking Tasks as Complete

When multiple users are assigned to a task, each user has the option to 'Mark as completed' for that Task. The 'Mark as completed' button is displayed in the task's property card and various task grids.

This functionality is enabled from tasks in Manage system administration. Prior to SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023, a user would need to enter the required time in the progress area to mark the task as complete.

Accessing tasks.

Task Snooze Reminder Time

Preceding SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023, the Snooze option in a SOLIDWORKS Manage Reminder would set the snooze length to five minutes. In SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023, the SOLIDWORKS Manage Reminder saves the last task’s snooze time.

Snoozing tasks.

Tasks Board Time Display

A Task Board is just that: a location where a user can review assigned Tasks. In SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023, the Tasks Board displays the time required for completion, the total assigned time and the number of due days until the next task.

The text is color coded depending on the state of the task. Green indicates complete tasks, red indicates overdue tasks and gray indicates in-process tasks that are not overdue.

Task board time display.

The rapid pace of new functionality in SOLIDWORKS Manage 2023 continues. This new release continues to offer some important new functionality as well as providing a more efficient user interface. The integration with SOLIDWORKS PDM is also tighter. This release continues to show the power of an advanced data management system that extends the capabilities integral to SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional.

About the Author

Joe Medeiros, as an Elite Applications Consultant at TRIMECH, a premier SOLIDWORKS reseller servicing customers throughout North America, offers SOLIDWORKS customers expertise in implementing and using DS SOLIDWORKS solutions.

Joe has been involved in many aspects of the DS SOLIDWORKS product family since 1996 and as an award-winning blogger, he regularly writes about DS SOLIDWORKS solutions.

Many of the enhancements are centered on that unsung hero, the PDM Administrator—but there is something for everyone. In this article, we will review these enhancements and provide insights into why these enhancements are meaningful. We have organized these enhancements to line up with the SOLIDWORKS 2023 What's New guide.

Managing Deleted Users

Administration of users is one of the most common tasks that a PDM administrator has to contend with. Whether it be adding users, assigning users to the correct group or deleting users, a well-functioning vault must include well-defined users.

It has always been possible to delete a user and up until SOLIDWORKS PDM 2023, this was a near-terminal event. Now, by providing the user the permission “Can administrate users,” a deleted user can be restored. To accomplish this feat, an administrator need only to right-click Users and select “Deleted users.”

Deleted users.

Select the user(s) to restore and click on Save.

Restore login.

If there is already an active user that matches the deleted user, there is no need to worry about overwriting the active user. A warning will be displayed if the login name you are attempting to restore is already active.

If the restored user does not appear after the restore operation, right-click on the vault and choose the refresh option.

Refresh vault.

After the deleted user is restored, that user will be added to any groups they were members of prior to being deleted.

Refuse Login

The option to block a user from logging into PDM has always been possible, from Administrative Permission > Refuse Login. Setting this option has been made easier by adding it to the right-mouse menu of users and groups. Expanding the users and groups management tab, right-clicking users and selecting open, will allow an Administrator to refuse Logins.

Opening user properties.

Once the users dialogue box is opened, there is an option to refuse login.

Setting refuse login.

Configuring Transition Actions

Transitions are the workhorses of workflows and transition actions are workhorses of transitions. A properly orchestrated group of transition actions can significantly boost productivity. One of the tools available to transition actions is the option to populate a variable value. Often, we want to populate a variable with user information. Building on user fields introduced in SOLIDWORKS PDM 2022, the transition action dialogue box includes the user properties field.

User variables.

These fields are available to the below transition action types:

• Import data from XML
• Inc. revision
• Send mail
• Set variable

Adding Tooltips to Data Card Controls

Data cards are the gateway for entering and displaying metadata. This metadata can be entered or displayed in data card controls. As a PDM administrator, we can use static text to prompt or inform a user about what is expected or displayed in a control. In SOLIDWORKS PDM 2023, an administrator can add a tooltip to a control, so when a user mouses over a control, the user will be given additional information about that control.

Control tooltip.

Tooltips can be added to controls in a data card by selecting a control, then in the control properties, entering a title and body for the tooltip.

Adding control tooltips.

Tooltips cannot be used with tab and frame controls.

Automatic Login to the Administration Tool

When creating or modifying a PDM vault, an administrator may need to regularly log into PDM Administration. To avoid having to continually enter login credentials, in local settings, SOLIDWORKS PDM can be configured to automatically log into PDM Administration using a specific PDM or Windows user. To access automatic login options, right-click on settings and choose open.

Accessing local vault settings.

Under the automatic login tab of the settings, select a vault in the Administration login section and check “Use automatic login for this vault.” Next, select “Login as the following user” or “Login as the currently logged-in user in Windows.” For the option, “Login as the following user,” enter the admin username and password.

Note, local settings apply to the current computer.

Setting administration login.

Data Card Controls

For the Button control in a Data Card, there is a Command Type option, Find User, which opens the Find User Dialogue box and allows you to search and select a PDM vault user. In previous releases, this option would return a user login name. In SOLIDWORKS PDM 2023, several user values are available, such as full name, initials, first name and last name.

Also relating to data card controls is control logic. Control logic is used to regulate the visibility of data card controls. Control logic can gray out or hide a control. A condition configures the visibility of a control. For example, a control can be hidden if the variable value of that control contains certain text.

Control logic conditions.

In previous releases, control logic was only available from the control pull-down in the data card editor. Now control logic can be accessed from the toolbar of data card editor. 

Accessing control logic from the toolbar of the data card editor.

Control logic can also be accessed from control properties.

Control logic in control properties.

Controls using control logic can be identified by an icon at the control's top-left. This will greatly simplify identifying these types of controls.

Control with control logic.

The display of this icon can be toggled from the toolbar in the data card editor. Being able to toggle the icon for controls with control logic will help to declutter the data card when the information that the icon provides is not needed.

Toggling of control logic icon.

Performance Improvements for File Version Upgrade Tool

The File Version Upgrade tool is often used after updating PDM to a newer major release. The File Version Upgrade tool upgrades SOLIDWORKS files from earlier to current releases. Using this tool to upgrade SOLIDWORKS files can reduce open times for legacy files. Also, routinely upgrading files can prevent corruption when files that are several versions older are converted to the current version of SOLIDWORKS.

In SOLIDWORKS PDM 2023, the conversion process is faster. By selecting the overwrite and latest version options on the version settings page, the File Version Upgrade tool only upgrades the latest versions of files. Since potentially fewer files will be updated, less time should be needed to perform the file version upgrade.

Latest version option in file version upgrade.

Logging File Retrieval Operations

In SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional, a server-side log can be maintained that tracks file access. This can be a great auditing tool. This ability now gives an administrator or manager real-time reporting on who has accessed files, and from where and when.

The server side-logging is enabled from the vault properties. To enable logging for a vault, right-click on the vault and choose properties. In the properties dialogue, under logging operations, check Get.  

Setting logging file retrieval operations.

To see the logs, right-click on the vault and choose “Show the Get log.” The log will display the date of the operation, the name of the user who initiated the operation and the computer on which the operation was performed.

Get log.

The document name, document path and the archive server where the file was retrieved from are also displayed.

Additional Get log information.

Support for Microsoft Edge WebView2-Based Controls

PDM 2023 now offers support for Microsoft Edge WebView2-based controls. In SOLIDWORKS PDM, the Internet Explorer-based controls are replaced with WebView2-based controls. This applies for:

• Preview pane in SOLIDWORKS PDM File Explorer. You can preview the HTML documents that are present in the vault.
• EXALEAD OnePart Search view.
• Web Card Configuration Editor dialogue box.

Removing Computer from the Task Execution

Removing a computer as a task host is now easier in SOLIDWORKS PDM 2023. In earlier releases, a computer was removed by modifying the PDM task host configuration from the computer where the task host was enabled. This involved physically getting on that computer to make those changes. Now computers can be removed from a single location.

In PDM 2023, the task host can be removed directly from the task in PDM administration. To remove a computer, edit the task that contains the computer to be removed. Next, select the execution method tab. Then right-click on the computer to be removed and select either “Remove from SWTaskAddIn” or “Remove from All Add-ins.”

Removing task host computer from task.

“Remove from SWTaskAddIn” removes the selected computer from the add-in being edited, while “Remove from All Add-ins” will remove the selected computer from all tasks in the current vault.

Display Groups for Inherited Permissions

In PDM, user permissions are often set for groups and users can belong to multiple groups. To make it easier to determine which group an administrative permission is coming from, an administrator can mouse over the group icon for a given permission. A popup window will display what group(s) that permission is coming from. The window that lists the group(s) can be pinned to remain open.

Notification Templates

Notifications can be sent by PDM when a file changes state, or it can be sent manually. Previously to SOLIDWORKS PDM 2023, modifying the template used for notifications was limited and cumbersome. In PDM 2023, there are now better tools to configure Notifications.

First, accessing the templates is easier. The templates are now listed under the Notification node of PDM administration.

Accessing notifications.

Each of these templates can be edited by right-clicking on it and selecting Open.

Opening template.

To customize the template, select the Custom button.

Customize notification template.

SOLIDWORKS PDM Performance

With many employees now working from home, high latency can impact performance. In PDM 2023, changes have been made to minimize the impact of latency. The below PDM operations benefit from these changes.

Archive server data operations:

• Add files to the vault.
• Get files to the local cache.
• Replication of vault archive.

File operations:

• Check in files or folders.
• Check out files or folders.
• Undo check out of files or folders.
• Get latest version of files.

Enhanced Data Security

Data security is a continuously increasing concern for most companies. SOLIDWORKS PDM 2023 now encrypts all data to and from the archive server. This is huge!

Support for Windows 11

SOLIDWORKS PDM supports Windows 11.

Copying Static Text

Static text can now be copied from a data card. Static text refers to text that is not associated with a data card control. In previous releases, text associated with a data card control could be selected, but not static text.

User Interface for eDrawings Web

To add consistency, the user interface of eDrawings Web Viewer follows the language specified in Web2.

This release offers tools that will make the administration of PDM easier and more intuitive. But it is not only administrators who benefit from these enhancements. With performance and security enhancements, SOLIDWORKS PDM 2023 has something for all who use PDM.

About the Author

Joe Medeiros as an Elite Applications Consultant at TRIMECH, a premier SOLIDWORKS reseller servicing customers throughout North America, offers SOLIDWORKS customers expertise in implementing and using DS SOLIDWORKS solutions.

Joe has been involved in many aspects of the DS SOLIDWORKS product family since 1996 and as an award-winning blogger, he regularly writes about DS SOLIDWORKS solutions.

Hide/Show FeatureManager F9

Screen space is often at a premium so anything you can do to preserve it, or at least efficiently manage it, is very welcome.One of the fastest ways to gain a lot of real estate in the graphics window is to press F9, which hides the entire FeatureManager. You can get it back by pressing F9 again.

Split FeatureManager

You can split the FeatureManager area to show the FeatureManager on the bottom and another panel such as ConfigurationManager on the top. You can also move PropertyManager so that it is in a floating window.

Rollback, Roll Forward, Roll to Previous and Roll to End

These are basic feature for going back in your design history.

Freeze Bar

This is the ultimate tool for people who complain about history. Instead of rolling from the bottom like the Rollback bar, the Freeze bar rolls from the top. You can freeze features above the Freeze Bar so that they do not change. In fact, you can take the frozen features and convert them into "dumb" bodies.

This is essentially how Solid Edge Synchronous works. The initial body has no history but after that, you can have history-based features. It helps you there, because you have real direct edit tools, but in SOLIDWORKS the dumb body conversion removes parametric and associative relations for those who don’t have expert control over their models.

You can use both Freeze and Rollback at the same time, but one can't go past the other. They can, however, meet in between two features. You should work with some example files to more fully understand how these two tools work individually and together before having users use it on production models. In particular, you should investigate how frozen external references work (or don’t work. Spoiler!).

Arrow Key Navigation

If you use the Rollback bar, you can then use the arrow keys up/down to scroll through the FeatureManager more easily. The arrow keys will continue navigating the FeatureManager until you click in the view window again.

Scroll Selected Item Into View

This option is turned on (in Tools/Options) by default, so that if you select something in the graphics window, the FeatureManager will scroll up or down as necessary so you can see the item’s entry in the tree.

Use Transparent Flyout FeatureManager in Parts/Assemblies

The flyout FeatureManager solves a lot of workflow problems having to do with the feature list getting hidden by a PropertyManager when you need to select something from the tree. Learning to use this will streamline your selection workflow in cases where a new feature requires you to select a named item from the FeatureManager.

One thing you can do is to hide the main FeatureManager while using the transparent flyout FeatureManager. This can be visually a little messy but it gives you more room.

Display Pane

The display pane is a great tool that enables you to show/hide, change display style or transparency in FeatureManager. Hit F8 to turn it on. The display pane can be used for sketches, bodies, parts and assemblies. This is one of the most underused tools in the FeatureManager interface.

FeatureManager Filter

The FeatureManager filter is essentially a search function that works great for long FeatureManagers or big assemblies. It will search feature, part, tags and folder names as well as descriptions. This is another reason to have good names or descriptions for items you're going to access a lot.

The FeatureManager Filter can be set to affect the graphics view in addition to the display of names in the FeatureManager. You can also choose to have it access or ignore suppressed or hidden components. It can also be set to filter for custom properties.

Find/Go To

Instead of using the right mouse button for features in the FeatureManager or the graphics window, you can select the Go To option. This brings up a dialog box which enables you to find a particular piece of text that may be in the FeatureManager somewhere.

This is similar to the FeatureManager Filter in some ways. SOLIDWORKS has been known to create partially duplicate functionality.

Dynamic Reference Visualization

From any selected feature, dynamic reference visualization (DRV) will show you parent (up the tree) and child (down the tree) features to help you troubleshoot dependency issues. All of the blue (up) and purple (down) arrows can get distracting, so it is recommended that you assign this to a hotkey.

Flat Tree View

Flat Tree View shows the features in the FeatureManager in the order in which they were created, with no indentations, no absorptions, no history-based or parent/child or hierarchy shenanigans. Just a straight ordered list of your features.

If you have created reference sketches early in the tree that got absorbed by references further down the tree, seeing everything in correct order is very helpful. To access this view, right mouse button to the top-level item (part name) in the FeatureManager and use the Tree Display flyout to select the top item which is Flat Tree view.

Use this for troubleshooting and editing, especially when using complex parent/child features such as compound curves, sweeps and anything with a sketch.

Breadcrumbs

This is another function that you have to use in order to get the hang of it. This is still relatively new, so it might not have caught on yet for a lot of users.

When you're navigating a website, a breadcrumb display shows the hierarchy of the selections you have made to get where you are—like Windows Explorer showing the path to the current folder.

SOLIDWORKS does the same thing. If you have a sketch in a part in a subassembly selected, the breadcrumb display shows this. Like the website or Windows Explorer display, you can also navigate back up the crumb trail to select something specific, like a body or a feature that can't necessarily be selected from the graphics window. This might take some practice or some time watching someone else do it to get the value, but I think you'll find this helps you navigate complex parts, and especially assemblies, more efficiently.

History Folder

This doesn't have anything to with history-based history, as such, but it has to do with the history of the features or other items you have recently created or edited. If you have a big assembly or part, this gives you easy access to things you have been working with.

Folders

You can create folders for features, parts or mates to help you organize items in the FeatureManager.

There are a lot of options for things you can hide or display in the FeatureManager and icons that indicate various situations. There are also tons of things you can find in the various right mouse button menus from the FeatureManager. You can find all of this stuff in the SW help under the FeatureManager heading.

Summary

The SOLIDWORKS FeatureManager can seem like a simple list of features or parts, but it is a highly developed organizational tool to help you classify organize and access information about a design. There is a lot of functionality that might seem hidden but once you learn to use it efficiently, it may be difficult to remember how to work without its powerful tools.

Learn more about SOLIDWORKS with the eBook SOLIDWORKS 2022 Enhancements to Streamline and Accelerate Your Entire Product Development Process.

1. How to handle top-down design
2. Feature Manager management
3. Interface setup and use
4. Surfacing work
5. Manual file management

1. How to Handle Top-Down Design

Top-down design is one of those things that salesmen are quick to promote but technical people are quick to mock because in the wrong hands it can cause some major heartaches and loss of data. There are several ways of handling top-down design, but only two real concepts.

One concept—the typical in-context method—is to make references between parts within the assembly. This can include making references to layout sketches that have fewer layers of problems but still the same underlying issues. This approach works, but it adds a lot of overhead to the assembly, and you have to have the assembly open to update the parts. It is fraught with problems such as slow speed and references getting lost due to file management issues. You also have all of those icons in the Feature Manager.

Companies often require users to delete all references or round-trip export the data at the end of a project. It is silly and unnecessary, but I get it. They don’t understand what’s going on or don’t trust their employees or systems.

The second method is the master model. In the master model, you model the parts that require external references in the assembly as a single part. It could be a multibody part or a single solid, and can be a mix of solids and surfaces. In this way, all of the references for changes and updates stay within the same file.

To make parts from the multiple bodies, use the four master model push or pull type features: Save Bodies, Split, Insert Into New Part and Insert Part. Refer to Surfacing Episodes for a detailed explanation of how these features are different from one another and how to pick which one to use in different situations.

Once you break the individual parts out to separate files, you can put them back together again in an assembly. They will all share the same origin, so they are easy to assemble. You can also add additional features to the broken-out parts. Details, plastic features, shell, draft, mating features and anything else you need can be added after the part is broken out from the master model.

The advantage of the master model is that it does not require an assembly file to control anything. It also allows you to break up the rebuild times for parts that have large feature trees. This means that, for all the detail work, you won’t have all of the initial features rebuilding. This technique requires the master model and the child parts created from the master. You still have to understand and follow some basic file management rules but should you break something, it is easy to fix.

The main disadvantage of the master model method is that you have a master model part file that is not part of the assembly. It won’t show up on a BOM, but you have to have it if you want to make changes.

2. Feature Manager Management

There are two kinds of users as far as I’m concerned: those who make complex assemblies of simple parts and those who make small assemblies of complex parts. I’m typically the second kind. Either way, you can get a Feature Manager full of stuff that needs some special tools and techniques to manage.

There is a detailed article that talks about this topic here.

For Feature Manager management, itis mostly about the tools and how you use them.

• Naming features.
• Grouping features and bodies into folders.
• Using color to identify special faces or features (using the Display Pane).
• Using Freeze Bar to prevent rebuilds.
• Dynamic reference visualization.
• Use the FeatureManager filter.
• Flat tree view shows things in order of creation instead of consuming parent features.
• Gain additional display real estate by detaching the FM or using the flyout FM.
• Navigate with arrow keys.
• Use Scroll Selected Item into View in the RMB menu.
• Split the Feature Manager to see the top and bottom at the same time.
• Hide/Show Feature Manager with the F9 key.
• History folder for parts in assembly shows the features you have recently touched.

3. Interface Setup and Use

Users have different goals for the interface and there are many factors that push your use in a certain direction. Hardware is one factor that influences your interface decisions. Do you have multiple monitors? Is your main computer a laptop? Do you have a 3D mouse device?

Some people may select how they use the interface based on what’s new or what they feel is being sold as “cool” by someone they look up to or trust, and may even assign labels like “old fashioned” to some interface elements. This is an emotional approach. It is true that certain parts of the interface can be inefficient. But there are always ways you can do better.

I judge an interface setup by six criteria:

• Speed
• Clicks (mouse or keyboard)
• Mouse travel
• Memorization
• Device change (moving hands from mouse to keyboard)
• Setup time/effort

For example, using hot keys is fast but it requires setup, memorization and moving your hands from mouse or 3D mouse to keyboard. Using the radial or RMB (right mouse button) menus minimizes mouse travel but requires setup and two clicks per command. Using the regular menus requires no setup but a lot of memorization, mouse travel and, in some cases, a lot of clicks.

But isn’t everything you do some sort of compromise? Do you use the software all day every day or just once a week? Do you usually repeat an action or feature again and again or is every new feature a chess move?

I personally use the context menus—the right and left mouse button clicks that bring up contextually sensitive menus usually have the things you’re looking for when a specific item is selected.

If I’m doing a lot of specialized work, I might set up hot keys. Hot keys work best for stuff you do frequently and can remember easily. If you have to look it up on a list, it’s not helping.

4. Surfacing Work

Not everybody uses surfaces. Some people who don’t really should and some who do really shouldn’t. You should only use surfaces in these specific situations.

• You cannot make the shape you need using solids (organic shapes).
• Using solids would be inefficient (splitting a mold),
• You have to fix a badly translated model.
• You have imported a surface model for reference.

If you need to do this, take some time to look at some examples. Get comfortable with managing bodies in folders, using color (for identification) and all of the body manipulation tools you need to trim, knit, intersect, split and otherwise manage surface bodies.

Solid modeling actively tries to make a single solid body for you. Surface modeling, by default, makes a new body every time you make a new surface feature, even if it touches other surface features. It’s a different way of working.

Also, be aware that history-based CAD is not necessarily the best tool to do organic shapes. Consider tools that include T-splines, sub-D modeling or other push-and-pull type shape manipulation.

5. Manual File Management

When starting out with a new program, you are left on your own to manage the files. Some people take the folder approach; others put all the files in one big folder. Some try to get fancy with revisions or projects, or the function of the part.

SOLIDWORKS uses a system of searching for references and if you make changes or create copies, you will probably break a bunch of the references. In the beginning, we all make mistakes and sometimes make bad mistakes.

Manual file management can depend greatly on your part numbering system. There is a lot to say on this topic, but in the end, my bottom-line recommendation is to use a system with a semi-intelligent part name that allows you to identify the type of document quickly by sight, but which has in it a sequential number. Some special part types might have an identification suffix, which is also smart.

The irony is that manual file management is thrust on beginners but requires the knowledge of a veteran user. Only users with a lot of experience and knowledge can set up a manual file management system that will always work.

However, anyone with that much experience and knowledge knows that manual file management is one of the most dangerous things you can do with your company’s data.

The simple solution to manual file management is not to use it. Get an automated file management system like DBWorks or one of the SOLIDWORKS PDM applications. Unfortunately, any automated file management system will require a lot of specialized knowledge, training and maybe different skills.

An automated file management program enforces all of the best practice rules for file management. People get in trouble with file management by not knowing, not understanding or simply not following the rules. Sometimes the tools meant for manual file management are limited and not understanding those limitations can also cause you problems. For example, a search might only search where you tell it to look, it may not be able to find parts that have been moved off the network or to a folder out of your search area.

If you still feel like you need to use manual file management, here are some rules you have to follow:

• Use unique file names—always. The extension counts as part of the name.
• Do not put revision level in file name (unless it is for obsolete revisions only).
• Do not separate parts/assemblies/drawings into different folders—you have to maintain links between documents.
• Don’t use configurations for different part numbers.
• Don’t use configurations for revisions.
• Use Pack and Go, SOLIDWORKS Explorer/SOLIDWORKS File Utilities or SOLIDWORKS itself to copy, rename or move anything that is referenced by other documents or references other documents (such as parts, assemblies and drawings).
• Put shared library files in a centralized shared network location.
• Projects can all be kept together in a folder or sub-folder structure as long as they are put there when created or moved there using the tools mentioned above.
• File names should be part numbers, the description should be a custom property
• Revision should be a custom property.
• Decide which documents are release/revision controlled—drawings for sure, but how about parts and assemblies?

Learn more about SOLIDWORKS with the ebook SOLIDWORKS 2022 Enhancements to Streamline and Accelerate Your Entire Product Development Process.

Figure 1. Alin's treasure chest of best practices, tips and tricks.

Starting with this article, I begin sharing the most sparkling ones with the readers of EngineersRule.com.

Browsing, Searching or Simply… Clicking

What is the first thing most users do upon starting SOLIDWORKS? Open a file, of course.

95 percent of users find the files they need to open by browsing through multiple folders. This is a costly process that can take tens of seconds and even minutes. The other 5 percent use some type of a search tool, either as part of PDM or the Windows operating system. Searching, especially using the PDM functionality, is much faster than browsing but still requires typing and multiple clicks.

But most of the time, the document we need to find has been used recently and could be found instantly using the versatile Recent Documents list. Therefore, the focus of this article is on digging up all the gems buried in this tool.

Accessing the Recent Documents List

The documents used recently can be found by accessing the Recent tab in the Welcome dialog box. This box appears automatically once SOLIDWORKS is loaded, unless at one time you checked the Do not show on startup box.

Figure 2. The Welcome dialog box.

The Welcome dialog box can be recalled at will by:

1. Pressing the Home icon on the standard toolbar.
2. Pressing the Home icon on the task pane.
3. Double-clicking on the empty SOLIDWORKS window.

Figure 3.

That being said, the fastest way to access the recent documents list is by using the R keyboard shortcut.

Figure 4.

Setting Up the Maximum Number of Recent Documents Displayed

The number of recent documents displayed is 50 by default. Users can increase or decrease this number from 1 to 100 by adjusting the corresponding system setting.

Figure 5.

I strongly recommend checking the box that allows for the inclusion of documents opened from other documents. Examples:

• Opening a component of an assembly.
• Opening a part or an assembly referred by a drawing view from a drawing.

Recent Documents Functionality

Filter documents by:

• Type: Parts, Assemblies and Drawings
• Top-level assemblies
• Name
• Combinations of all the above

See more information about the document:

• Type
• Size
• Date modified
• Owner (who has writing rights)
• Location

Pin documents at the top of the list.

Select the document in File Explorer.

Remove documents from the Recent Documents list:

• Individually
• All unpinned documents
• All documents

Open documents (writable or read-only):

• Resolved
• Quick view (for parts)
• Lightweight (assemblies and drawings)
• Large Design Review (assemblies)
• Detailing (drawings)
• Select opening configuration
• Select opening display state
• Access file references
• Load or not hidden components (assemblies)
• Force the loading of Speedpak configurations (assemblies and drawings)

Filtering Documents

The filter area is found at the top of the dialog box.

Figure 6. Display all recent documents.

The first three icons are toggle buttons. Any combination of part, assembly or drawing type can be displayed, as shown in Figures 6 through 12.

Figure 7. Display part documents only.

Figure 8. Display assembly documents only.

Figure 9. Display drawing documents only.

Figure 10. Display part and assembly documents.

Figure 11. Display part and drawings documents.

Figure 12. Display assembly and drawing documents.

A special toggle button is the Filter Top-Level Assemblies icon. Once activated, it will cancel the other three filters and will display only the assemblies that are not used as subassemblies in their own folder.

All four icons can be used in conjunction with the text input in the Filter by Name box. Documents matching the file type, which contains the string of characters from the Filters by Name box, will be displayed.

Figure 13. Filter by Name.

Figure 14. Filter Top-Level Assemblies.

Access More Information About a Document

Hover over a document tile to see:

• Document type
• Size
• Date modified
• Owner (who has writing rights)
• Location

Figure 15. Hover to see document details.

Pin and Unpin Documents

If users plan to work with the same document for a longer duration (such as hours, days or weeks), it is a good idea to pin it. To do that, hover over the document and select the pin icon.

Pinned documents will be moved to the top of the list, behind only previously pinned documents. These documents will not disappear from the list, regardless of how many other files are opened.

Figure 16. Pinned vs. unpinned documents.

Quickly Locate and Select Documents in File Explorer

One of the most useful functions of this tool is the ability to instantly trigger the opening of a File Explorer window in the folder where the document is located and with the document already selected.

For that, hover over a document tile and select Show in Folder.

Figure 17. Show in folder.

Remove Tiles from the Recent Documents List

At the end of a project, it is a good idea to declutter the Recent Documents list.

To remove individual tiles, right-click on the tile and select Remove.

Figure 18. Remove tiles from Recent Documents.

To remove multiple tiles, select the Remove drop-down button and select either:

• Unpinned items
• All items

Figure 19.

Advanced Opening Functionality

To turn on the advanced opening box, you can either:

• Hover over the document tile and select the double arrow from the bottom right corner of the tile (Figure 20).
• Right click on the tile and select Open with options (Figure 21).

Figure 20.

Figure 21.

The result is shown in Figure 22.

Be curious and select each drop-down menu in turn.

Open:

• Open resolved
• Open read-only

Figure 22.

Mode:

• Quick View and Resolved for parts (Figure 23).
• Large Design Review, Lightweight and Resolved for assemblies (Figure 24).
• Detailing, Lightweight and Resolved for drawings (Figure 25).

Figure 23.

Figure 24.

Figure 25.

For parts and assemblies, the document can be opened in a specified configuration or display state.

Figure 26.

It is worth noting that new configurations can be automatically created for assemblies upon opening if the <Advanced> option is selected (Figures 27 and 28).

Figure 27.

Figure 28.

Assemblies and drawings can be forced to automatically load all components in a Speedpak configuration, if one exists (Figure 29).

Figure 29.

To speed up the opening process, assemblies can be opened without the hidden components’ body data loaded. This works well when the assembly contains optimized display states.

Figure 30.

Access to file references is available for all document types. This allows the user to control which files are loaded as:

Figure 31.

Opening Documents from a Recent Used Folder

As new documents are opened, SOLIDWORKS collects their locations in the Recent Folders. These folders can also be pinned as needed.

Figure 32.

Once a folder is selected, SOLIDWORKS starts the File Open command in the selected folder.

Figure 33.

Summary

Most of the files you are opening when using SOLIDWORKS have already been opened in the recent past. Mastering the use of the Recent Documents list can make the difference between spending minutes browsing for them or locating and opening them in a couple of clicks.

Learn more about SOLIDWORKS with the ebook SOLIDWORKS 2022 Enhancements to Streamline and Accelerate Your Entire Product Development Process.

About the Author

As an Elite AE and Senior Training and Process Consultant, working for TriMech Solutions, Alin Vargatu is a Problem Hunter and Solver.

He has presented 33 times at 3DEXPERIENCE World and SOLIDWORKS World, twice at SLUGME and tens of times at SWUG meetings in Canada and the United States. His blog and YouTube channel are well known in the SOLIDWORKS Community.

In recognition of his activity in the SOLIDWORKS Community, at 3DEXPERIENCE World 2021, the SWUGN (SOLIDWORKS User Group Network) awarded the SOLIDWORKS AE of the Year title to Alin Vargatu.

Let’s go on a journey through levels of sophistication of data management to demonstrate why the most modern methods are the easiest and most reliable.

Flat Files

Let’s say that the year is 1985. Each part or assembly you design is represented by a single drawing. Each individual file uses the part number as the file name. That is all pretty straightforward, and typical of legacy 2D documentation practice.

Now you need to do revisions, so you just add a revision level to the file name. For example, you might have 123456A.dwg where 123456 is the part number. This gives you an automatic archiving method, as long as you remember to follow the rules for new revisions correctly. The rules are simple and easy to follow.

Associative Files – External References

The year is now 2000, and you are using SOLIDWORKS. One complication as far as file management goes is that drawings and assemblies use external references—meaning they pull data from other files. In order to pull that data, the referenced file name and path must be the same as the file name and path stored in the referencing file. This means that you can no longer change names or locations of files referenced by other files (parts and assemblies)—which means that you can’t put the revisions in the file name.

The SOLIDWORKS Help file actually publishes a list of locations where the software looks for files. You should read this help file. You will likely find some of the places it looks for referenced files surprising. The next-to-last place it looks is the place where it was last saved, which is where most people would assume the software would start looking. This help file should be required reading for all users, and especially CAD administrators.

Unique File Names and Search Paths

The Windows operating system does not allow files in the same folder to have the same name. This leads to the first rule of SOLIDWORKS file management: Use unique file names for every document. It sounds like a simple reality that technical SOLIDWORKS users would just accept, but many people try to ignore it or work around it.

One way to handle the growing list of rules, so that all the correct files stay in the correct location with the correct file name, is to keep the latest revision as just the file name/part number while all the old revisions have the revision after the file name. The current revision would be 123456.sldprt (let’s say this is revision C) and the old revision file would be 123456B.sldprt. This works, and guarantees the latest version is easy to spot. Again, it relies on consistently following the rules.

Alternatively, you could have separate folders where the folder name has the revision in the folder name, but the file name for the SOLIDWORKS document itself doesn’t change. This second method tempts fate somewhat because, as you saw from the help file, SOLIDWORKS looks in a lot of unexpected places for the file name. Leaving the file name of a different revision the same means the old versions can easily be substituted, but it also means that old versions of assemblies which use old versions of parts can be very difficult to put back together with all of the right versions.

These are all reasons why CAD admins often enforce the “unique file names” rule even when manually managing files. It is just too easy to come up with the wrong version when several versions are named using the same file name.

It’s Just Too Dangerous to Not Follow the Rules

Because of the rules mentioned, it is possible for all of this to work manually. You must have a thorough functional understanding of the rules that the software plays by, and you must execute those rules perfectly every time.

But following a list of complex rules exactly every time is not something that users are very good at. It is, however, what software and computers are good at. The correct file management procedure can be programmed into software and essentially enforced to ensure all of the links remain the same throughout revision changes.

To further complicate an already complex issue, multiple people working on individual files can run into read/write permission problems. Figuring all of this out in real time while following a complex set of rules is now beyond the capabilities of manual file management.

All of this has been laid out here not to teach you all the technical details of file management in a program with complex external references, nor is it to point out how monstrously tedious manual file management is. This explanation of how SOLIDWORKS finds referenced files is mentioned to convince you of the need for automation to do it correctly without spending more time managing files than doing design, modeling and documentation work.

PDM Automates Following the Rules

Following the rules correctly every time is what your traditional file management or PDM software is all about. If you are using SOLIDWORKS or any 3D modeler without automated file management, your process is one accident away from destroying your projects’ design data.

To some, PDM seems like an unnecessary over-complication of the CAD process, but to those who understand how complicated the process already is, PDM frees up the user’s time and mental resources to focus on the design rather than wrangling files.

Enter the Database World

PDM untangles the mess of files created by CAD.

But what if the tangle of files was never created in the first place? What if all of the data for CAD files were saved as fields in a database instead of files?

Databases have a lot of advantages. The data is segmented into small pieces to make it faster to work on, find and access. The smaller data chunks are easier to reuse. Databases can also be worked on simultaneously by multiple users and large amounts of data can be searched quickly. Databases are inherently good at linking things and linked data is what is happening all day long in parts, assemblies and drawings.

The more you look at this scheme of storing CAD data in databases, the more attractive it becomes. Links between features that we used to avoid, such as in-context relationships, suddenly become intuitive and easy as pie. The links are all internal to items in the database which don’t move around or change names the way files on a hard drive or on a network do, so they don’t have any of the problems associated with in-context links.

Above all, with CAD data in a database, the entire PDM issue becomes far less complex. The database keeps track of everything and the links between things. PDM becomes an inherent part of the CAD model.

In essence, the database approach brings us much closer to the “single source of truth” holy grail that all data managers seek. There are never document ownership conflicts and the model is always up to date.

Databases Used in Many Applications

Databases are used to manage all types of data for many different applications such as blogs, websites, customer management, tech support, sales information, marketing data and more. It is not as though pushing CAD into a database is an unnatural application. There is a lot of cumulative database experience out there beyond CAD and applying it to CAD simplifies a great number of things.

Implementation of a database is more complex than the implementation of a Windows file folder system, but luckily, most of the complexity is handled behind the scenes. Databases are most efficient when used at scale, so they are at their best in centralized installations.

Of course, this strongly suggests CAD on the cloud or a SaaS situation. When your data is installed on a cloud server, the most efficient place to run your application is also going to be a cloud server, so the application and the data are in some proximity to one another to avoid latency. It is a very efficient concept.

To further increase the efficiency, this system would be developed as an entire platform with CAD, engineering and other product development applications to ensure compatibility and homogeneity. Such a platform would also make training easier.

The Future Has Arrived

How long before we can have a cloud-based product design platform and make our file management a thing of the past? These solutions exist right now. Dassault Systèmes offers the 3DEXPERIENCE platform of applications, which have been developed to work together using a common interface. PTC’s Onshape also makes use of similar concepts. The infrastructure for the platform is offered as a service, and you have access to as much of the platform as you need at any time. These platforms solve many of the infrastructure and organizational challenges that have been imposed on CAD users since the 1990s.

If you have been wondering what’s next in the development of CAD, the future is already here. We can remove the most challenging infrastructure barriers. And with cloud-based applications available individually and through subscription, the smallest engineering and design organizations can take advantage of the same tools that previously only the biggest enterprises, with their unlimited IT budget, had access to.

Learn more about 3DEXPERIENCE with the ebook Developing Better Products in the Cloud.

Best In Class

During this phase of the development of engineering technology, companies bought individual products. There was little to no integration. The marketing line on this was that companies were able to buy and use the “best in class” software in each field where solutions were needed.

The first level of improvement on this process was that CAD developers started partnering with certain third-party analysis product developers to make data sharing easier. You might even have a button for analysis show up in your CAD tool to automate the data transfer. Further integration allowed some third-party developers to run their software inside the CAD environment. The software packages were developed by different companies but they had learned to cooperate to some extent.

This arrangement worked—most of the time. Multiple software packages by different development teams in different companies were using the same data. However, you would have more software crashes than with either package individually.

Consolidation

Follow the business world long enough and you will notice that industries tend to consolidate. A new industry that initially has a lot of small companies will, over time, tend towards merging into fewer, larger companies. The CAD and engineering technology industry has seen a lot of consolidation since the 1990s. With the introduction of 3D CAD on the PC, there was an explosion of small companies producing engineering software. Many of those companies started around individual software packages and, over time, those companies merged, pulling the products together under a single, increasingly larger roof.

The Cosmos Example

Cosmos was an analysis product owned by SRAC (Structural Research and Analysis Company), founded in 1982 and sold by SOLIDWORKS dealers early in SOLIDWORKS’ history (1995 – 2001). SRAC also had more advanced software: Cosmos/M was for traditional simulation by analysts, while CosmosWorks was a simpler package intended for use directly by SOLIDWORKS users in conjunction with the SOLIDWORKS software.

SOLIDWORKS initiated their partner program in which third-party software was certified to work with SOLIDWORKS software. Cosmos was an early adoptee into the partner program. Eventually SOLIDWORKS introduced Gold Partner status where third-party software ran inside SOLIDWORKS from a toolbar in the SOLIDWORKS interface.

Reshuffling the Workload

Merging analysis with CAD brought analysis from the level of the analysis specialist to that of the designers and engineers who were designing the products and machinery. It allowed for faster development iteration of products and more up-front testing but there was always some question of whether taking the analysis out of the hands of the specialists was the right thing to do. This was not just true of stress analysis but of each application that ran inside the CAD application.

The added efficiency was certainly a good thing, but it required the people involved in the design to learn new skills. Misinterpreting analysis results is arguably worse than not doing the analysis at all. In the end, adding skills to the designer/engineer toolbox was a good thing for they were able to add value to the product development process. Analysis specialists were still called in for more complex and critical analysis jobs.

Gold Partners

In 2001, SRAC became one of the first SOLIDWORKS gold partners to be purchased by Dassault. The company and the product were integrated directly into SOLIDWORKS. Cosmos products that still exist today have been re-branded as SOLIDWORKS Simulation, making the integration complete. If you have SOLIDWORKS installed on your computer and do a search, you will find folder names of former Cosmos products such as CosmosWorks, CosmosMotion and Cosmos/M.

The same sort of evolution has happened with products and companies such as Toolbox/Cimlogic, PDMWorks/Design Source, SmarTeam, Conisio and others. The point here is that mature products developed by dedicated teams have been integrated into the software in use today and these products are now woven into the fabric of CAD.

What started out as a simple 3D CAD program in 1995 has developed into a suite or platform that includes just about anything you could want to do with your 3D CAD data. Because all of the products have been upgraded for years by the same team working on the main software, the likelihood of compatibility issues has faded significantly.

As the engineering technology industry moves forward, it becomes increasingly sophisticated and integrates more of the software around it. Software developers will continue to consolidate the smaller players into one of a few ecosystems. The industry continues moving toward a philosophy that companies that design, simulate and manufacture should do it all on a single complete PLM platform.

The best-in-class mantra used in the early days has been replaced by concepts such as economy of scale, buying all your software from a single vendor, getting a suite of software that is intended to be used together with a single integrated interface, a single data format and a single point of contact for support and sales.

Enter the Platform

Current PLM developers offering platforms of applications include Dassault Systèmes with 3DEXPERIENCE, as well as Siemens Digital Industries, PTC and Autodesk. Altair is another company perhaps less often mentioned but also offers a wide range of tools for engineering and product development.

Portions of the industry are also moving toward cloud delivery. Cloud applications almost require a platform approach, as platform and cloud go hand in hand. Since there are multiple cloud services available, software would have to be integrated across cloud boundaries—a formidable task. Therefore, it might be unrealistic to expect to have a cloud-based platform and still support best-in-class applications by different vendors for what platform applications can’t do, or can’t do as well.

The platform approach makes sense for certain companies in some of the ways mentioned above, but it also presents some additional challenges. When buying into a platform, it is much more important to evaluate the vendor relationship and test as much of the software suite as is practical, even if you don’t have a current need for all of the applications. It is important to talk to other customers and understand the costs and limitations involved, as well as the process for upgrading, retrieving your data, getting support, training, consulting services, license management and other common support concerns. You might also inquire what it would take if, one day, you were to decide to move to a different platform or move back to a best-in-class application.

Weigh the Advantages

Most of these platform offerings are marketed toward large, multi-divisional organizations. The traditional old school small installations stand to benefit less from these consolidated platforms than groups with hundreds of users. If you get involved or get pressure to be involved, make sure your organization stands to actually benefit from what is being offered.

With every convenience added, there is generally something sacrificed. If you think about cloud delivery and storage as part of the PLM platform being offered, there can be several convenience advantages:

• Access from anywhere with an internet connection.
• Access from any device with a network connection.
• Simultaneous access from multiple users to the same data.
• Software version upgrades become automatic and the responsibility of the vendor.
• Data version ratcheting problems become a thing of the past.
• File management integrated into the CAD functionality.
• Security becomes the responsibility of the vendor.
• Many of the IT concerns for servers and high-end workstations can be offloaded to the vendor.
• Data backup becomes the responsibility of the vendor.
• Crashing of local machines or software becomes less of an issue.
• Benefits can be greater for larger organizations.

But along with these conveniences come some sacrifices:

• Lack of local control over potentially sensitive data.
• Data locked up by the PLM vendor and you have to “pay to play.”
• Risk of failure of the platform vendor would leave your data and process stranded.
• Costs may not represent an actual savings over a locally controlled process and may, in fact, be much higher.

Summary

The platform model now in use by modern engineering design and product development companies has evolved over the past couple of decades. The benefits to companies can be significant, especially in the line of organizational technical infrastructure. Companies need to do their due diligence to make sure they understand the risks, costs and other sacrifices that are involved. In addition, the scale of the benefits that can be enjoyed by a company buying in to a platform is proportional to the buy-in.

Make sure that the idealized or standard buy-in scenario is feasible for your company and your engineering and product development processes. You should also go into any transition with a realization that to get the most from the change in tools, you may have to be flexible with your current process. Many implementation failures can be attributed to simple stubbornness on the part of companies or departments that hold on to the past regardless of the benefits of the future.

An organization can have many different types of software, such as CAD, data management, electrical, publishing and more. The first decision a company has to make is to determine who will administrate each of these applications. Will one person administrate them all? Or will there be one person or group that will handle each piece of software.

The decision you make will likely be influenced by the availability of manpower. But keep in mind that it can be hard to find someone that has the knowledge to administer all these different applications. A person that specializes in electrical may not have the skills to administrate CAD. Also, the workload to administer all these systems may be too great for a single person and can result in burnout, applications not being administrated correctly and/or your administrator exiting your organization.

While it may not be possible to have an individual for each application, a compromise may be to have one administrator that handles a number of similar products. For instance, if your data management software and your electrical software both use the same database backbone (i.e., Microsoft SQL), then your electrical person may be able administrate both of those pieces of software. If you do mainly mechanical design, your CAD administrator may be the best person to also administrate your data management software. Generally, some additional training is required.

What should be avoided is having an administrator who lacks solid knowledge of the software they will be administrating. Having someone assigned to administrate software they have little knowledge of will lead to frustration, a long learning curve and perhaps the loss of the administrator. Further, it is likely that software which is foreign to an administrator will not be configured or supported optimally.

This is not to say that that your electrical expert cannot bridge the gap and also be able to administrate CAD successfully. This depends on the innate ability of the potential administrator to learn a new discipline. You will need to provide time for your administrator to develop these skills. Yes, experience is good, but a learn-it-on-go approach can lead to bad practices. Most software sellers or resellers offer training. On the whole, you should strive to ensure your administrator is an expert in the software they will support.

An honest appraisal of a potential administrator's ability to learn needs to happen. Some people learn better than others. The user with the most experience is not always the best candidate to administrate your applications. Generally, it's the people who are more comfortable with change that make the best administrators.

Each piece of software has a periphery of related software, systems and processes. While your administrator may not need to be an expert in each one of these areas, they should have a good working understanding of those segments. As an example, while your data management administrator may not need to be an expert on networks, they should have a good understanding of how networks work. Your electrical and data management administrators will benefit from a general understanding of databases. Understanding of hardware can help your CAD administrator understand and evaluate performance. Carefully analyzing these peripheral items connected to your software will help you evaluate potential administrator candidates and help lay out a training path for the selected candidate.

An administrator will rarely work on their own. A successful administrator will need to work with team members, other teams, contractors and vendors. These include but are not limited to end users, IT, management and contractors. An administrator needs to know or be able to determine the people that they will support and who will support them.

The administrator needs to know of or learn the software vendor's contacts, such as tech support, training and sales, for all the software that they will support. The administrator will also need to know which methods are used to communicate with the vendor, where to locate sources of vendor information (knowledgebase articles, blogs, channels etc.) and how to access bug fixes and escalation procedures if and when they are required.

Because your administrator will need to interact with several different contacts, the administrator needs to have good communication skills. Since information can come from multiple sources, your administrator needs to have good organizational skills in order to document and prioritize this information. In a very real sense, a good administrator is a good project manager.

An administrator will often need to involve several disciplines in a project. For example, a project involving IT, software vendors and end-users in a software update will require an administrator with good leadership skills and the ability to delegate responsibility. The administrator must communicate effectively with various groups in order to coordinate their efforts.

Much of the information that your administrator requires is available online. Accessing this online material is often the fastest way to find a solution. An efficient administrator needs to be methodical in how they perform their research and organized on how they compile it. Being comfortable working online is a must.

Being proactive is key to preventing issues. An adept administrator will consistently scour sources to look for methods to improve the use of the software they are responsible for. Many software vendors offer webinars. Your administrator should make a point of attending the webinars that are relevant to the work of their users.

But what may be the most important attribute for a good administrator is a thorough knowledge of their company's structures and processes. This knowledge is important. This is learned knowledge, not an innate skill.

Often, the person with the most experience is picked to be an administrator. While experience is important, such a person may lack the soft skills covered previously in this article. Processes can be learned and contacts can be developed but soft skills are more difficult to acquire. Don’t let experience trump soft skills with your administrator candidate.

Also, those who are deeply familiar with your company's structures and processes may be resistant to changing those systems for which they have become the "go-to person." Or, change may be something that is outside their comfort level. An important part of being an adroit administrator is the drive to find new methods and tools to make a system more efficient. Along with that drive, this administrator needs to have the skills to ferret out these efficiencies. As noted earlier, these skills can rarely be learned.

This does not mean that the company CAD guru does not have something to offer. It may well be that this person possesses the skills I have already mentioned but even if they don’t, they can still be of great benefit to your administrator. The guru can be teamed up with your administrator to take advantage of their combined skills and knowledge.

Another partner that your administrator should have good working relations with is your IT department. There are many aspects of software that will require IT involvement. A competent administrator will know when to solicit IT’s help and provide the information that IT will need. There will also be others with whom your administrator will need to interact with. This is why communication and people skills are so important to an administrator.

To help make a quality administrator, an administrator needs the training to learn the tools they will be using. An administrator will also need the time to grow into their role. Investing in developing an administrator will pay large dividends.

In many companies, administering software is a sideline at best. Many companies believe their software vendor’s support team will be the de facto administrators and personal trainers. But as resellers freely admit, they generally will not administer software on a day-to-day basis.

Management and users should be careful not to overload administrators. A well-trained and experienced administrator is too valuable to lose. If your administrator feels overwhelmed, they may start looking for employment elsewhere. Splitting tasks between administrators or making assistants available can help lighten the load. An overload, once detected, is reason to consider a second administrator. Having a backup is good insurance in case one administrator is sick or leaves your organization.

For larger projects, such as server moves and software updates, you may want to consider contracting an organization.  Most resellers offer these services and have a great deal of experience with those projects. They will likely complete the task faster with less down time, and the end result will likely be better which also results in less down time and less frustration.

The benefits of a good administrator are plentiful and varied. Spend time choosing and developing your administrator and your engineers and designers will enjoy long lasting and far-reaching benefits.

About the Author

Joe Medeiros as an Elite Applications Consultant at TRIMECH, a premier SOLIDWORKS reseller servicing customers throughout North America, offers SOLIDWORKS customers expertise in implementing and using DASSAULT SOLIDWORKS solutions.

Joe has been involved in many aspects of the DASSAULT SOLIDWORKS product family since 1996 and as an award-winning blogger, he regularly writes about DASSAULT SOLIDWORKS solutions.

In Formula One, most people are focusing on the Drivers Championship but the more important one is the Constructors Championship, on which basis millions of dollars are distributed to the teams the following year.

Similarly, in an engineering department, the productivity of the whole team is more important than the output of an individual CAD user.

Like the driver from a top team, for maximum efficiency a CAD power user needs the best software, fast hardware specs, professional training and an optimal environment.

It is interesting how many companies are focusing on only one or two of these factors and missing the opportunity to maximize efficiency for the whole team.

Examples of missed efficiencies:

1. The company invested in the software and hardware upgrades but neglected to professionally train the user on best practices, tools and techniques relevant to her/his job.  This is like asking someone off the street to drive a Formula One car. They might be able to start it and get it to its destination, but it will be a slow and painful process.
2. The company invested in software upgrades and training but uses hardware that is not optimal for working with their large assemblies. That would be like running a Formula One car, with the best pilot, on slicks in heavy rain.
3. The company invested in the proper software, hardware and training but each user prefers different settings, methods and techniques for getting the job done. There is no consistency in their deliverables. That would be like having a subpar team of mechanics and pit crew. You have a fast car and an excellent driver, but you cannot win any race because the car is not optimized for each race.

There are multiple articles written on the topics of software, hardware and training. This article will focus on one important aspect of the CAD environment: System Settings.

SOLIDWORKS was built on the principle that users will tell how the software should work—not the other way around. As a result, with over 6 million users of the software, the options for customizing one’s environment accommodates for the differences in needs, modeling techniques and hardware systems that exist in the SOLIDWORKS community. As usage needs shift from individual users to teams and companies, consistency in SOLIDWORKS settings and modeling techniques becomes more important than the personal preferences of each user.

Figure 1: Speed or consistency? How about both?

Accessing System Options

System Options in SOLIDWORKS can be accessed from multiple locations in the interface. Most users prefer the convenience of a single-click access using the gear-like icon on the standard toolbar.

Figure 2: System Options access icon.

If a document has already been opened, the dialog box has two tabs:

• System Options – customizing the usage of the software, independent of which file is opened.
• Document Properties – customizing specific settings related to the active document.

Good to Know

It is worth noting that depending on the SOLIDWORKS version you have installed, you might find certain settings under System Options in one version and under Document Properties in another.

Example: The setting for saving Detailing mode data for drawings is a system option in SOLIDWORKS 2020 and 2021 and a Document Property in SOLIDWORKS 2022 or newer.

Figure 3. Detailing Mode Data as a System Option in SOLIDWORKS 2021.

Figure 4. Detailing Mode Data as a Document Property in SOLIDWORKS 2022.

Finding a Specific System Option

Browsing to find a specific system option is a daunting task because there is no apparent logic for the order the options are listed in. As SOLIDWORKS evolved over the years, new options were added in various places with little care for the user experience.

As a result, new users could get lost trying to find a specific option by browsing.

Figure 5. A chaotic set of options, almost impossible to browse.

Fortunately, since 2013, the developers added the Search Options field, making finding any option a breeze (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Why browse when you can search?

Specialized Sets of System Settings

With such a large number of options to customize, professional CAD administrators need to examine the way their team uses SOLIDWORKS in depth in order to find the optimal set of settings that maximizes productivity while minimizing possible errors.

For a user, working with optimal system settings is akin to driving a Formula One car that has been tuned for a specific course and specific weather. Not having to worry about what could go wrong with the car allows the user to focus only on driving their CAD program the most efficient way.

Users who design parts with complex shapes would benefit from a different set of system settings than the mold designer or users of large assemblies and drawings.

For example, students in TriMech’s Large Assembly and Drawing workshop receive a reference document describing in detail a set of settings focused on optimization for:

• Minimizing opening times for large assemblies and drawings.

• Minimizing operational slowdowns after the model or drawing has been opened, caused by:

• Repetitive model rebuilds.
• Repetitive assembly updates.
• Repetitive graphics generation.
• Repetitive drawing views updates.

• Maximizing operational efficiency, by:

• Reducing repetitive interactions with the user interface.
• Eliminating unnecessary interactions with the user interface.
• Reducing steps needed for finding or accessing: Tools, Commands, Feature tree items, Modified dimensions.

• Reducing clutter on the Graphics area and the Feature tree.

• Maximizing operational security.

• Ensuring modeling consistency.

This article will focus on a selection of 20 system settings that are critical for one or more of these factors:

• Productivity
• Security
• Ease of use

1. Verification on Rebuild

This setting is probably to biggest slow-down factor for users of complex parts or large assemblies that is independent of the user experience with using SOLIDWORKS.

Figure 7. Uncheck for "Turbo" mode, check for "Safe" mode.

To understand the effect of this setting, it is worth remembering the importance of having solid and surface bodies with clean topology in your models. One of the typical factors that would invalidate a body in SOLIDWORKS is the intersection of its faces without generating an edge along the intersection curve. A typical error is that “a face is piercing trough the solid” when running the Import Diagnostics tool (see Figure 14 in the Import Diagnostic Tool—The Ultimate Guide article).

Imagine how much work the software needs to perform for validating every feature that adds or modifies faces. Ideally, any new or modified face should be checked for invalid piercing against all the faces of the model regardless of a common edge with the new face.

That is the effect of checking the “Verification on rebuild” setting. All faces will be involved in this validation process. Should the software spot a piercing condition, an error tag will appear on the feature that generated the invalid faces.

To save time, this setting can be unchecked. In this case, only the faces who share edges or vertices with the new faces will be checked during the rebuild process. The chances of such errors appearing are minuscule, but it is important for the user to be aware of how to spot them before more work is being performed on a flawed body.

To demonstrate this functionality, follow these steps:

1. Uncheck the “Verification on Rebuild” setting.
2. Create a simple part containing a solid body in the shape of a cube.
3. Apply a Shell feature as per Figure 8, by selecting the top face and applying a small thickness value.

Figure 8.

4. The result is shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9. Y-Axis is up.

5. Rotate the viewport 180 degrees about the X Axis. The opening of the box is now pointing down (Figure 10).

Figure 10. Y-Axis is down.

6. Apply a fillet on the top face with a radius larger than the thickness of the shell.

Figure 11.

The result is an invalid solid body. The faces created by the Fillet features are piercing through the inner faces of the Shell. Notice that there is no error displayed in the FeatureManager tree.

Figure 12. Faces piercing other faces and there is no error.

While such situations are very rare in practice, it is important for users to be trained to run the Check tool before a part is saved. This way the chances of the design progressing a lot on a flawed model are reduced.

7. Use the Check tool.

Figure 13.

Let’s see what happens when the “Verification on rebuild” is checked.

8. Check the “Verification on rebuild” system option.

Figure 14.

9. Press CTRL+Q to force-rebuild the model.

Note that the Fillet1 feature has an error and the model does not create the invalid faces.

Figure 15.

You might wonder why there is even an option for turning off “Verification on rebuild.” To understand its impact on performance, let’s consider a model with only two features but with many faces.

Figure 16. Only two features.

Figure 17. 8838 faces!

We will force-rebuild the part with “Verification on rebuild” checked and unchecked.

The rebuild times are measured by the Performance Evaluation tool and displayed in Figures 18 and 19.

Figure 18. Verification on rebuild unchecked.

Figure 19. Verification on rebuild checked.

The results clearly show how much longer the cuts, which generate all those faces, take when the thorough validation process is performed.

In this case, the model is processed three times faster with the setting unchecked. The slow-down factor grows exponentially with the number of faces so the impact on performance could be significant.

Assembly Impact

While this setting controls the checks that are performed during the rebuilding of parts, it could also drastically impact assembly performance if one or more of the following conditions are present:

• Components missing body data (that would trigger their rebuilding).
• Assembly features.
• In-context relations that require updating.
• Changing configurations when the configuration data is not pre-computed.

To mitigate these issues, when using Large Assembly Settings, the Verification on rebuild setting could be automatically unchecked when an assembly meets the conditions you defined for qualifying it as a large assembly.

Figure 20.

2. The combination of “Open referenced documents with read-only access” and “Don’t prompt to save read-only referenced documents (discard changes)”

The top two settings in the External References group of settings could be extremely useful for specific case studies. Unfortunately, when both are checked, the results are disastrous.

Figure 21. Do not do that!

To demonstrate how dangerous this combination of settings could be, let’s consider this case:

1. Check both settings.
2. Open an Assembly.

Figure 22.

3. Double-click on a face of a component to reveal its part dimensions.
4. Modify one or more dimensions.

If you had not dismissed the error message shown in Figure 23, you might have a chance of noticing the problem. In practice, many users dismiss such messages.

Figure 23.

5. Accept the change and rebuild.

Figure 24.

6. Save the assembly.

Notice that only the assembly file is listed in the list of models that will be saved.

Figure 25.

7. Press Save All.
8. Close the assembly.
9. Re-open the assembly.

Notice that none of the modifications we performed at the part level have been saved.

Figure 26.

Users have been known to lose several days of work in the assembly environment because of these two settings. While each of them is useful in specific use cases, together they spell disaster.

3. Purge Cached Configuration Data (Productivity)

About 10 years ago, during the Top 10 Ideas season, users with an AutoCAD background started a campaign for implementing a Purge function in SOLIDWORKS.

They argued that AutoCAD had a fantastic purge function that would quickly remove unused data and drastically reduce the file size. They thought SOLIDWORKS files were bloated and could use such a function.

There is a reason behind having a larger file in any CAD software, including AutoCAD and SOLIDWORKS. When computing a certain data set is time consuming, it might be more efficient to save that data in the file for future reuse. Avoiding computing unchanged data over and over could save users a lot of time.

Purging simpler AutoCAD 2D data might not have a huge impact on performance, since such data could be recomputed relatively fast. The situation is different for many SOLIDWORKS cases.

When developers considered what type of data could be safely “purged” from a SOLIDWORKS part or assembly file, they came up with configuration data.

Configurations in SOLIDWORKS could save the following type of data in the part or assembly file:

When thinking about configuration data, we can make an analogy between baking a cake and building a SOLIDWORKS model.

When baking a cake, you follow a recipe. Features, mates and custom properties are part of the SOLIDWORKS recipe. They must be saved in the file.

To create a variation of that cake, simply modify the recipe. The look and the taste will be different. A recipe is pure information, usually written on a piece of paper. It cannot be eaten.

To produce the actual cake, you need to bake it according to the recipe. It is the same thing with SOLIDWORKS: to generate the body data you have to build the model feature by feature. Moreover, to generate the graphics data you must tessellate the body data in tiny triangles and hand it over to the video card to display.

Body data and graphics data take a lot of space, so purging them may have sounded like a good idea. It is true that usually computing the graphics is fast. After all, it is always done when the file is loaded, so no big loss here (other than the inactive configurations would not be accessible in eDrawings or the Large Design Review mode).

At the first sight, even computing the body data is usually pretty fast at part level. Assemblies and drawings, however, are a different story.

When the body data for a component of the assembly is missing (think of a small bolt that the assembly requires in one of its inactive configurations), the part needs to be rebuilt during the loading phase of the assembly. After rebuilding, it is identified by the assembly as a changed component. That triggers the rebuilding of all subassemblies containing it all the way to the top level, thus drastically increasing the opening time.

As you can imagine, the slow down is even worse for the drawing of the assembly. Since the assembly is identified as modified all drawing views will require updating. Depending on the number and types of drawing views, this could be a painful experience.

When the assembly or drawing is saved, because this setting is checked, all inactive configurations will get their body data purged, so the unnecessary rebuilding will happen again the next time the files open.

Example:

The part file in Figure 27 has a rebuild time of 15.19 second.

Figure 27.

It has two configurations. As you could see in Figure 28, the inactive configuration does not have the body data computed.

Figure 28.

Opening an assembly calling for the Orange configuration takes 4 seconds. Opening an assembly that uses the Blue configuration takes 24 seconds, most of that taken by the rebuilding of the part, followed by the rebuilding of the assembly. That is six times slower.

Figure 29.

When SOLIDWORKS 2013 was released, everyone praised Purging Configuration Data as an extraordinary enhancement. IT departments were thrilled because SOLDIWORKS files shrunk instantaneously and free space on the server grew.

It took a while for complaints about performance to start to trickle in. Users did not notice the performance hit right away, and it was gradual. The more files were saved, the more body data was lost, affecting mostly the library files.

After 10 years, there are still many technicians, instructors and presenters that recommend checking this setting without thinking of the implications on user performance when working with large assemblies and drawings.

The moral of this story: don’t allow anyone to check the “Purge cached configuration data” setting.

4. Automatically Populate View Palette with Views

This is one of the settings that should be a document property and not a system option.

Figure 30.

The View Palette is an amazing tool for speeding up the creation of drawing views. SOLIDWORKS pre-computes a set of drawing views based on the:

• Default orientation views:

• Front
• Back
• Right
• Left
• Top
• Bottom
• ISO
• Isometric
• Dimetric
• Trimetric

• Current model orientation view.

• Saved orientation views.

• Saved section Views.

• Saved 3D views.

For example, for the model shown in Figure 31, the View Palette would automatically compute 17 views.

Figure 31.

Figure 32.

This is great for drawing of parts and small assemblies. For drawings of large assemblies, the amount of time spent computing and updating these views can be measured in minutes.

Figure 33. 21 minutes just to rebuild a set of potential drawing views that I no longer need?

This is a system option. When working with drawings of large assemblies you must remember to uncheck it. Hopefully, in a future version, this will become a document property, so you could deactivate it only for slow drawings.

5. Use Software OpenGL

This is one of those options that was introduced in SOLIDWORKS only for diagnostic purposes. When the graphics misbehave, you can check the setting to deactivate the hardware acceleration for the graphics and let the CPU do all the heavy work.

Notice that when a file is open, the option is greyed out and unselectable. Should you want to check or uncheck it, you need to close all files first.

Figure 34.

This option should never be checked in production by users. The response of the graphics would be horrendous, especially when working with complex parts or assemblies. You will encounter pronounced lag when spinning, panning or zooming the viewport. Also, any other operations like selecting or highlighting entities would have a visible lag.

6. Enhanced Graphics Performance

Before SOLIDWORKS 2019, the graphics engine was based on OpenGL 2.0. When manipulating the viewport (zoom, rotate, pan, select) the work was shared by the CPU and the GPU (video card). This engine was old and slow and was not optimized to take full advantage of the power of modern video cards. There was almost no difference in performance between an entry-level graphics card or high-level one.

Starting with SOLIDWORKS 2019, a new graphics engine based on OpenGL 4.5 was offered as an option, using much more the GPU power.

Figure 35.

SOLIDWORKS 2019 and 2020 had this implemented only for parts and assemblies. Starting with the 2021 version, the graphics performance for drawings is also enhanced.

With this setting checked, the performance scales predictably with the quality of the video card. Even for midrange professional video cards, the rate of frame per second increased to above the human eye perception when spinning, zooming or panning large assemblies or drawings.

Figure 36. Who can perceive a rate of 274 frames per second?

Moreover, with this option checked, there is no need to “dumb-down” the graphics during dynamic manipulations. It is actually better to maintain maximum level of detail throughout the operations to eliminate the computations required for creating blocky views before spinning or zooming starts, and then reverting to the full detail when manipulating the viewport stops. Ideally, you should have the settings shown in Figure 37.

Figure 37.

Be aware that if you have one of the latest NVIDIA video cards, in order to enable this functionality fully, you would have to download and install a software patch corresponding to the version of the software you are using.

Figure 38.

As usual with any new technology, there are growing pains. The stability of the new graphics engine improved with every release and every service pack but there are still bugs that could affect specific operations.

Some users report that sometimes random components of the assembly change their display style from shaded to wireframe. The solution is a forced refresh (CTRL+Q).

Other known issues affecting older versions:

• Sometimes pressing the ALT-key while mating does not hide the face the mouse is hovering over (fixed in SOLIDWORKS 2022).
• Sometimes right-clicking on a face when the Select Other command is active does not hide the selected face (fixed in SOLIDWORKS 2022).

If you find that such problems are frustrating, you can deactivate the new graphics engine by deselecting this setting. You will have to restart SOLIDWORKS for the change to take effect.

7. Use Specified Color for Changed Dimensions on Open

This is one of the most important options impacting productivity and security when performing revisions of drawings.

Figure 39.

When this option is checked, any modified dimension will be temporarily shown in orange (default color) when a drawing opens.

Example:

In the model shown in Figure 40, we will change one dimension from 70mm to 90mm and rebuild the part.

Figure 40.

Upon opening and updating the drawing, any modified dimension is shown in orange. Notice that not only the 90mm dimension is highlighted, but also the 185 mm one. Is the second change correct? Maybe not, but at least we were warned.

Figure 41.

If you hover over the text of an orange dimension, the old dimension value is revealed.

Figure 42.

Unlocking this functionality will make capturing changes in dimensions during revisions an easy task. Moreover, it will highlight any other changes in drawing dimensions, including unintended consequences of the model changes.

8. Scroll Selected Item into View

Having the ability to quickly see in the FeatureManager tree the feature or component item corresponding to the item you selected in the graphics area is very valuable.

Figure 43.

Unfortunately, when working with large assemblies, waiting for the item to scroll into view in the FeatureManager tree will be time consuming. Even worse, if you have SOLIDWORKS 2020 or older, attempting to isolate several components from an assembly opened in Large Design Review mode would trigger a lag that could last hours as SOLIDWORKS tries to bring each selected component into view one at a time).

The solution is checking and unchecking this setting as needed. While this operation is cumbersome, it could be easily sped-up by using a toggle macro, like the one presented at 3DEXPERIENCE World 2021.

Figure 44. Scroll Selected Item into View OFF.

Figure 45. Scroll Selected Item into View ON.

9. Help Make SOLIDWORKS Products Better by Automatically Sending Your Log Files to DS SolidWorks

You may be reluctant to send any type of data to someone else but this might help allay your concerns about the amount and type of information that is sent to SOLIDWORKS and how the transfer of data could impact performance and security.

Figure 46.

• As stated in the SOLIDWORKS Customer Experience Improvement Program, the type of data sent to SOLIDWORKS is limited to:

• Computer manufacturer.
• CPU type, speed and number of cores.
• Video card manufacturer and driver version.
• Operating system and version.
• Version of installed operating system pre-requisites.
• IP address of Internet service provider.
• SOLIDWORKS version and serial number.
• SOLIDWORKS memory allocation and usage.
• SOLIDWORKS active user interface toolbars.
• SOLIDWORKS Add-Ins loaded.
• SOLIDWORKS session duration and CPU usage.
• SOLIDWORKS session user interface command sequence.

• The Customer Experience Improvement does not acquire information about you, your SOLIDWORKS designs or the usage of any other applications or activities.

Specifically, no model geometry, images or any other information that relates to the intellectual property of your designs that would enable the reconstruction of your design models.

No one will contact you unless you request it.

• Information contained in the log files is treated confidentially.
• The other major benefit for turning this setting on, is giving your company’s CAD admins access to a functional CAD Admin Dashboard. CAD admins now have access to the new SOLIDWORKS Admin Portal.

A good use case for this functionality is when multiple members of your team are experiencing unexplainable crashes. If all have this option checked, your VAR could ask SOLIDWORKS to comb through the logs sent by your users in order to find common causes triggering such events. Historically, this process solved many instability issues affecting multiple users.

10. Automatically Check and Update All Components in Large Design Review Mode

This is an important setting affecting the security of data displayed when an assembly is opened in Large Design Review mode.

The Large Design Review mode is a very powerful tool for significantly improving the productivity of large assembly users. About 50 percent of the most common tasks performed on a large assembly can be done in this mode. Opening assemblies in seconds and starting working is very tempting but with great power comes great responsibility.

Figure 47.

Opening assemblies so fast in this mode was made possible by using solely the graphics data saved in the assembly file. You could actually email someone else only the assembly file and they should be able to open it and access a lot of information about the assembly and its components. Starting with SOLIDWORKS 2020, they could even modify your assembly and send the revised version back to you.

The potential problem relies in the validity of the data saved in the assembly file. If a component or more were modified after the assembly was last saved, those changes will not be displayed in this mode since they were not captured in the current assembly file.

For users who have not received professional training in the use of the Large Design Review mode, it is imperative that this setting is checked. This way, when the assembly opens, SOLIDWORKS will dedicate a secondary CPU core to check and update the graphics data for all components. That is usually performed fast if the component files are on your local drive.

Also, considering that the checking operation is performed by a secondary core, you can continue working with the assembly during this process.

11. Display Temporary Axes Upon Hover Over Cylindrical Faces

This was one of the Top Ten List ideas voted a year ago. It was promptly implemented in SOLIDWORKS 2022.

Figure 48.

However, the initial implementation created all kind of problems:

• When attempting to select a small cylindrical face, the temporary axis would be selected instead.
• The breadcrumbs would not work properly.
• In an assembly, hovering over a face of an instance of a component would show the temporary axis for all instances of that component.

Users raised these issues on the SOLIDWORKS forum and the Product Definition team reacted fast by including this new setting in SOLIDWORKS 2022 SP 2.0.

A temporary axis is a child of a face, so using it in mates would be counterproductive. You might as well uncheck this option unless you have a specific use case where it would be beneficial.

12. Show Breadcrumbs on Selection

Breadcrumbs are the best thing added to SOLIDWORKS since… sliced bread.

Figure 49.

They free the user from the tyranny of the FeatureManager tree. When selecting a face, the user can access any entity related to that face directly in the graphics area. The context toolbar and right-mouse-button menu work like a charm with each selection level.

Figure 50. Initial selection of a face.

Figure 51. Accessing the mates of the first level subassembly.

While it might be tempting to also check the “Show breadcrumbs at mouse pointer” box, we recommend using instead the “D” keyboard shortcut for bringing breadcrumbs near the cursor.

The automatic behavior triggered by the second checkbox pushes the context toolbar away from the cursor and unnecessarily complicates the graphics area.

13. Dynamic Highlight from Graphics View

This is one of the most useful settings in SOLIDWORKS and is, at the same time, the most unchecked option in the user community.

Figure 52.

When checked, the user gets instant confirmation about which entity will be selected by simply hovering over it. This is very useful when selecting entities that are close to each other or otherwise hard to select.

Figure 53. I wanted to select that edge. By painting it orange, SOLIDWORKS confirmed that my selection will work as intended.

14. Include Documents Opened from Other Documents

The Recent Documents portal is a fantastic time saver when working with a set of files and folders for a long time.

Figure 54.

By pressing “R” you can access up to 100 recently opened files. Hovering over any of the thumbnails will provide a wealth of information.

Figure 55.

As you experiment with this functionality, attempt to pin and unpin a file, try the Show in Folder command or click on the double arrow on the bottom right of a thumbnail.

What about components that you open directly from an assembly containing them? If you need to see them added to this portal, check the option listed in Figure 54.

15. Include Detailing Mode Data When Saving (SOLIDWORKS 2020 and 2021)

While this setting is available as a system option only in SOLIDWORKS 2020 and 2021, its state could have a critical impact on:

• Opening drawings speed.
• Saving drawings time.
• Drawings file size.

Figure 56.

As we wrote in the Fast Drawings of Slow Assemblies article, the detailing mode revolutionized working with large drawings by allowing the drawings to open without their models in memory.

“Unfortunately, with improved functionality, more data needed to be written in the drawing file. If the drawing data was not optimized for this use, the saving operation took much longer than expected (hours versus seconds),” says Mark Johnson, the SOLIDWORKS User Success Engineering Director.

“The way Detailing mode works is every edge is assigned a unique silhouette edgeID by SOLIDWORKS behind the scenes.  High Quality Hidden Lines Removed (HLR) drawing views already have these edge IDs, so drawings save performance for HLR drawings is the same in 2020/2021 and older versions.”

“These unique silhouette edgeIDs are not present for Shaded or Shaded with Edges.  As a result, upon save, these edgeIDs must be generated and assigned to all shaded with edges views across all sheets.”

“The result is the potential for a much slower save of an SLDDRW in 2020/2021 vs 2019 and older.”

In summary, if a drawing view could not be set as a high-quality view, the information related to model edges could not be efficiently written in the drawing file. That makes sense considering that in draft quality views, the edges are computed based on the graphics-triangles extracted by tessellating the mathematical body data of the model. Imagine the sheer number of tiny triangles edges that must be stored for each single edge.

It is worth noting that if your drawings illustrate components with imported geometry errors, the drawing views will always be draft quality and the saving operation will suffer.

The problem was discovered very late and SOLIDWORKS R&D came up with a drastic solution: a System Setting that would enable users to decide if the data required for the Detailing mode will be saved or not saved in the drawing file.”

Figure 57.

The solution was not ideal for many reasons:

• It applies to all drawings on that system, regardless of whether they are small or large or if they have high quality or draft quality views.
• It could impact the consistency of the drawing files in a company. Imagine if one user has the setting checked and another unchecked. When the first user saves the drawing, the detailing data is saved. When the second user opens and saves the drawing, the data is scrubbed—or vice versa.”

SOLIDWORKS 2022 implemented a much better solution by moving this option to the document properties. This way, the users could have the Detailing mode data not saved for most of the drawings (small drawings would never use this functionality) and saved for large drawings.

Figure 58.

16. Part/Assembly Tangent Edge Display – As Phantom

Some of the most frequent checks that a complex part designer performs when modeling is Deviation Analysis, Curvature Analysis or Zebra Stripes display to ensure that certain faces are tangent to each other.

Fortunately, by checking this option, the software will automatically provide visual feedback about tangencies in the model by displaying the edges shared by tangent faces in phantom font.

Figure 59.

Instantly seeing the result of any edits is a great time saver.

Figure 60.

17. Scale Sketch on First Dimension Creation

Checking this option eliminates the danger of sketch entities jumping all over the place when the first dimension is applied.

Figure 61.

SOLIDWORKS simply scales all entities in the sketch with the ratio between the original length of the entity that is dimensioned and the dimension value. It is a thing of beauty.

18. Search While Typing (Incremental Search)

Search is superbly implemented in SOLIDWORKS. When working with assemblies having thousands of components with many features and custom properties, searching for a specific entity can be time consuming. By unchecking this setting, users ensure they will not experience lag when typing the search criteria.

Figure 62.

19. Don’t Prompt to Save Read-Only Referenced Documents (Discard Changes)

While this option should never be checked simultaneously with the “Open referenced documents with read-only access,” on its own it is a great time saver, especially for PDM users.

Figure 63.

When working with large assemblies or drawings, small changes could trigger updates at the component level without actually changing their geometry. Moreover, for many users, such components are loaded from a read-only library, or they have not been checked out from a PDM vault.

If this option is not selected, the saving time will be increased significantly as SOLIDWORKS checks and displays the list with all perceived modified components. In reality, maybe only the main assembly and one or two subassemblies had to be saved, so ignoring the read-only files could greatly improve efficiency.

20. Create Configuration Tables on Open

Have you read about the amazing new configuration tables enhancement introduced in SOLIDWORKS 2022 and could not find it in your models? Turning this option on will allow the creation of such tables on existing files.

Figure 64.

Figure 65.

Summary

The System Settings are the foundation of SOLIDWORKS usage. An optimal set of settings positions any user to achieve maximum efficiency for their specific use cases.

This is even more important when considering team-level consistency. CAD admins could even lock certain system settings using Administrative Image Option Settings.

Learn more about SOLIDWORKS with the eBook SOLIDWORKS 2022 Enhancements to Streamline and Accelerate Your Entire Product Development Process.

About the Author

As an Elite AE and Senior Training and Process Consultant, working for TriMech Solutions, Alin Vargatu is a Problem Hunter and Solver.

He has presented 33 times at 3DEXPERIENCE World and SOLIDWORKS World, twice at SLUGME and tens of times at SWUG meetings in Canada and the United States. His blog and YouTube channel are well known in the SOLIDWORKS Community. In recognition for his activity in the SOLIDWORKS Community, at 3DEXPERIENCE World 2021, the SWUGN (SOLIDWORKS User Group Network) awarded the SOLIDWORKS AE of the Year title to Alin Vargatu.

• Large number of faces that have appearances applied at face-level (the number of faces is important, not the number of appearances).
• Large number of bodies, especially surface bodies.

In the present article, we are presenting one more factor that impacts performance: unnecessary geometrical and topological complexity.

Table 1. Factors that contribute to system slow down.

As shown in Table 1, for each factor we cover:

• Diagnostic tools and techniques.
• Optimization techniques.
• Return on investment (time spent fixing the problem versus the initial performance impact).

A Dell Precision 5560 with an Intel Core i7-11850H CPU, 64 GB RAM and a NVME SSD was used to extract results.

3. Complex Geometry and/or Topology

Diagnostic Tools

A high degree of geometry complexity can impact performance in multiple areas:

• File size
• Part opening time (when the part opens in its own window)
• Assembly loading time (when the part is used as a component of an assembly)
• Graphics generation time
• Drawing view update time
• Slow viewport manipulation (zoom, pan, rotate)

To identify if a part is responsible for any of these slow-downs, different diagnostic tools are available.

File Size

There are many ways to get the file size reported, but the old technique of using the File Size from the Windows File Explorer is still the best.

Figure 2.

Part Opening Time

Sometimes we need to open the part file in its own window. The opening time is recorded as a file property when the file is saved. In order to find out how long it took for the file to open, you need to save it.

The open time can be found by hovering with the mouse over the part file in File Explorer and recording the Last Open Time value from the pop-up.

Figure 3.

Alternatively, a new column can be added to the File Explorer, listing the open time for all files in the folder. To add this column, follow these steps:

Right click on any column and select More.

Figure 4.

Check the SW Open Time box and click OK.

Figure 5.

The advantage of this tool is that the files can be sorted by the open time values.

Figure 6.

Assembly Open Time

To gauge how much a part takes to load as a component of an assembly, we can use one of these two tools:

• Performance Evaluation
• Assembly Visualization

Performance Evaluation – Details of the Open Document File

Figure 7.

The list contains all files that take longer than 0.1 second to load. Notice the Open File buttons, which allows for fast examination of the major culprits.

The Show These Files button gives you access to the whole list.

Figure 8.

From here you can open one or more documents simultaneously, save, copy or print the list.

Assembly Visualization – SW Open Time

Access the Assembly Visualization tool from the Evaluation tab in CommandManager or from the Tools menu.

By default, the three columns listed would be File Name, Quantity and Mass. You can change the reported value in the third column or add a new column by selecting the right arrow (Figure 9).

Figure 9.

Let’s replace the Mass values with SW-Open Time. Click More…

Figure 10.

From the Select another property dropdown, select SW-Open Time.

Figure 11.

The result is shown in Figure 12. Notice that in order to sort the part files based on this criterion, you need to select the column’s header.

Figure 12.

Both rollback bars from the top and bottom can be used for isolating components in the graphics area, for further examination.

Figure 13.

Graphics Generation Time

The impact of complex geometry on graphics computation can be computed by inserting the part as one component in a dummy assembly and then using the Assembly Rebuild report from inside the Performance Evaluation tool to read the Generation Graphics value.

Figure 14.

Bonus Material

For a detailed guide in the use of Performance Evaluation you can read this article: Powerful Time Saver: The Performance Evaluation Tool.

For a detailed guide in the use of Assembly Visualization you can read this article: The X-Ray Machine for SOLIDWORKS Assemblies.

Drawing Update Time

Create a dummy drawing of the part, containing all the drawing views that you usually use in an assembly drawing containing this part as a component.

For example, for the part used to extract the data from Figure 14, a drawing containing two model views, two projected views and a section view, takes 7.4 second to update.

Figure 15.

Simplification Methods

When used as components of large assemblies, parts imported from STEP files could have a lot of unnecessary details. For example, at the top-level assembly only the exterior of the part shown in Figure 16 is required. The inner faces will never be visible at that level.

Figure 16.

In the following case studies, the inner faces we attempt to remove are the 128 faces shown in red in Figure 17.

Figure 17. Faces to be removed are shown in red.

Should the optimization operation be successful, we would eliminate about 13,500 graphics triangles (Figure 18).

Figure 18. Care to count the graphics-triangles?

Your definition of an inner face may differ from the SOLIDWORKS’ definition. As long as a face has contact to the “outside air” it will most likely be identified by SOLIDWORKS as an outer (or external) face. That is why your input is required to perform quick simplification processes on such parts.

We will attempt to remove the inner faces of this pump using several tools and techniques:

• Surface modeling and direct editing tools.
• Defeature simplify.
• The Intersect tool.

3.1. Surface Modeling and Direct Editing Tools

In this case study, we will manually select the inner faces and delete them, using the Delete and Patch option of the Delete Face command.

Easy, right? Unfortunately, there are 128 faces to select and none of the automatic selection tools such as Select Tangent Faces would identify all of them. Holding the CTRL key and selecting them one by one would be tedious. That is why the technique we will cover next is so valuable. It works in cases where you have tens of thousands of inner faces. We will simply temporarily separate the inner faces into their own body, then isolate and select them in bulk in order to automatically create a selection set.

Step 1 (optional)

To make the selection easier, show two viewports on the screen.

Figure 19.

Step 2 (optional)

Unlink the two viewports, so they can be manipulated independently.

Figure 20.

Step 3 (optional)

Reorient the viewports to show the connections between the outer and inner faces.

Figure 21.

Step 4

Using the Delete Face command, delete the connecting faces.

Figure 22.

At this point you will have multiple surface bodies, one of which contains all inner faces.

Step 5

Using the Delete/Keep Bodies command, keep only the surface body containing the inner faces. Alternatively, just Isolate the same body.

Figure 23. Using Delete/Keep Bodies command.

Figure 24. Using Isolate.

The goal is to have only the faces we need to select visible.

Step 6

Press F5 to reveal the Entities Filter toolbar and activate the Face Filter. Alternatively, press X on your keyboard (the ON/OFF switch for the Face Filter).

Figure 25.

Step 7

Press CTRL + A. Because the Face Filter is active, SOLIDWORKS selects all visible faces in the model.

Figure 26.

Step 9

Right Click on the empty area and using the Selection Tools submenu of the right mouse button menu, create a new selection set.

Figure 27.

Step 10 (optional)

Rename the new selection set Inner Faces.

Figure 28.

Step 11

Delete the DeleteFace1 feature in the FeatureManager tree and all its children. The FaceID will not be changed for the faces collected in the selection set.

Figure 29.

Step 12

Select the Inner Faces selection set, and use the Delete Face command with the Delete and Patch option.

Figure 30.

The result is nothing short of miraculous. The inner faces are gone, and their neighbors have regenerated themselves.

Figure 31.

3.2. Case Study: Using Intersect to Fill Complex Cavities

The Intersect tool is ideal for filling cavities, as long as they are completely capped with faces of solid or surface bodies or planes.

When the openings are planar, the best tool for capping them is Planar Surface. We love it because it can use multiple contours in various locations of the part. Plus, it does not require sketches.

Step 1

Start the Planar Surface command and select the edges of all openings. Do not hesitate to use the Magnifying Glass “G”-shortcutto ensure you select the correct ones.

Figure 32.

Just in case you get an error like the one shown below in Figure 33, please report it to your VAR as a bug and complete the planar surfaces using multiple features (Figure 34).

Figure 33. There is nothing wrong with the selections. Shown here is a bug that can be easily circumvented by creating an extra Planar Surface feature to cap the opening.

Figure 34. Sometimes we need an extra step...

At this point, all the openings have been closed. It is worth noting that planes are excellent for closing multiple planar openings (Figure 35).

Figure 35.

Step 2

Start the Intersect command, select all solid and surface bodies existing in the part, choose Create both as the option and select the Intersect button.

Figure 36.

Step 3

Make sure the Merge result box is checked and complete the command. Optionally, check the Consume surfaces box in order to close the openings.

Figure 37.

And we are done!

Figure 38.

3.3. Case Study: Using Defeature Simplify in Parts

In assemblies, the Defeature tool has two flavors:

• Simplify – used for assemblies with a small number of components, where the main goal is removing small faces and cavities.
• Silhouette – used for large assemblies, where the main goal is drastically simplifying geometry complexity.

As you saw in the previous articles, the Defeature Silhouette tool is superb for quickly simplifying complex assemblies. Unfortunately, as of SOLIDWORKS 2022, we do not have access to this tool inside the part environment. However, a similar command called Defeature Simplify is available but in a stripped-down version of the same tool found inside an assembly.

As we will see, this tool is missing one small detail that makes using it very cumbersome.

Step 1

From the Tools menu, select the Defeature tool. Alternatively, use the Command Search.

Figure 39.

Figure 40. Using the Shortcut toolbar to access the command search.

Step 2

The first screen lets you select faces for preservation. Notice that the box is called Features to Keep, but that is misleading since we have only one Imported feature and we want to modify it by deleting the inner faces.

In this case, we would like to preserve all mounting holes. All of them are under 10 mm, so let’s use this option to select all holes between 0 and 10 mm, as shown in Figure 41.

Figure 41.

If needed, other small faces could be selected for preservation.

Step 3

Click Next (right arrow).

Figure 42.

Step 4

SOLIDWORKS splits the screen and shows on the right viewport a preview of how the defeatured part will look like. Looks like it could not close all the openings.

You could try to use the rudimentary sectioning tool built inside the command, but you will discover there is no triad to let you move to the section plane. To offset the section plane, you must input dimensions and pray that the moved plane intersects the part—often an exercise in frustration, as shown below.

Figure 43.

The Missing 5% of the Defeature Simplify Tool

Step 5 (wishful thinking)

Remove other items.

The end is in sight, but there is a chasm in the way—and we are denied a bridge across it.

We have an option to select other faces for removal. Let’s try to select all the faces tangential to the one we will select.

Figure 44.

You would expect all tangent faces to populate the Items to Remove box. Instead, you get more options—for removing faces, features or bodies. Select the face icon from Figure 45, and watch as everything goes wrong.

When hovering over the face icon, the caption reads Select Body.

Figure 45.

If you click on the icon, it is only the last face in the tangency chain that gets selected.

Figure 46.

Therefore, these faces cannot be automatically selected. Even if we try to use a selection set, the target pop-up from Figure 45 makes sure only one face from the selection set is retained.

Conclusion

For this specific case study, Defeature Simplify would work well if its workflow was slightly corrected. When multiple faces are selected, the target toolbar should evaluate all of them!

3.4. Case Study: Using Defeature Silhouette in Multibody Parts

The volume pump from the previous case studies will not work well with the Silhouette option of the Defeature tool, because we want to retain the complex outer faces.

Instead, we will use the Sectional Valve used in the previous articles, but this time imported as a multibody part.

Figure 47. We do not need 500 bodies for a simple space claim usage.

As we stated earlier, Defeature Silhouette is available only in the assembly environment—so, in order to use it, we need to insert our part in a dummy assembly.

Step 1

Insert the part into an empty assembly. A quick way to do that is using the Make Assembly from Part option.

Figure 48.

Figure 49.

Step 2

Start the Defeature tool.

Figure 50.

Step 3

Select the Simplify option.

Figure 51.

Step 4

From here, we will repeat the steps used in the previous articles, but instead of using the components selection box, we will use the bodies selection box. The following screenshots show various options for simplifying the bodies we want to retain for the space claim.

Figure 52.

Figure 53.

Figure 54.

Step 5

Select Next.

Figure 55.

Step 6

Use the option Save as a new document and select OK.

Figure 56.

After the new part file is created (right) the dummy assembly can be discarded.

Figure 57.

Further Optimization

To further optimize the part, it is worth roundtripping it through Parasolid to eliminate intersect, delete face and defeatured features.

Summary

With the continual enhancements in hardware and software, SOLIDWORKS can handle many parts with complex geometry with little impact on performance. But with enough parts, assembly or drawing performance will be affected, and therefore your productivity will take a hit. Different diagnostic tools can be used to pinpoint the parts that are affecting performance.

We covered multiple methods for simplifying complex geometry. These methods can be applied successively until the user regains performance.

Learn more about SOLIDWORKS with the eBook SOLIDWORKS 2022 Enhancements to Streamline and Accelerate Your Entire Product Development Process.

About the Author

As an Elite AE and Senior Training and Process Consultant, working for TriMech Solutions, Alin Vargatu is a Problem Hunter and Solver.

He has presented 33 times at 3DEXPERIENCE World and SOLIDWORKS World, twice at SLUGME and tens of times at SWUG meetings in Canada and the United States. His blog and YouTube channel are well known in the SOLIDWORKS Community. In recognition for his activity in the SOLIDWORKS Community, at 3DEXPERIENCE World 2021, the SWUGN (SOLIDWORKS User Group Network) awarded the SOLIDWORKS AE of the Year title to Alin Vargatu.

Fortunately, I was able to make some adjustments to dramatically improve the situation. Here’s some advice so this does not happen to you.

The 4 Keys to SOLIDWORKS Hardware

When buying a workstation for SOLIDWORKS, keep these four things in mind: CPU, RAM, hard drive and the graphics card. There are quite a few articles delving into the nuances of each of these four hardware elements, but let’s provide some general guidance before we move on to the specific settings that can be adjusted to ensure maximum performance from your new workstation.

CPU

The CPU should be a professional grade Intel or AMD processor with SSE2 support. For regular SOLIDWORKS usage, you’ll want a clock speed of around 3.0 GHz or faster. For my new system, I went with an Intel Core i7 clocked at 3.1 GHz.

Generally speaking, in a program such as SOLIDWORKS which uses serial rather than parallel processing, a faster clock speed is more important than multiple cores. For example, if we were comparing two computers – one with a 16-core processor with a clock speed of 2.0 GHz and one with a single core processor with a clock speed of 3.0 GHz, the 3.0 GHz single-core system would perform significantly better on the SOLIDWORKS benchmark.

RAM

The RAM you select should be the fastest you can afford. Again, there are nuances regarding different types of RAM, and how the interaction between RAM and CPU can affect performance. But for SOLIDWORKS users, the amount of RAM you need will be based on the size of the assemblies you typically work with. Use this chart as a guide to make your RAM decision:

RAM suggestions based on typical number of assembly components.

Since I typically work with mid-sized assemblies, I went with 16GB of RAM: 2 sticks of 8GB DDR5, clocked at 4,800 MHz.

The Drive

Whenever you’re opening or saving files in SOLIDWORKS, you will (hopefully) be working from your local drive and therefore, the faster the read/write speeds are, the better.

You should definitely get a solid state drive—not a hard drive with spinning disks—to save and open your SOLIDWORKS files. There are a variety of options for solid state drives (SSDs), and they almost always have faster read/write speeds.

For my system, I went with a 1TB, gen 4 PCIe SSD for my main drive and a second 1TB, gen 4 PCIe SSD for my secondary drive.

Many users select a larger, cheaper hard drive as their secondary drive for their SOLIDWORKS files. But because spinning hard drives have read/write speeds which are 10x (or more) slower than solid state hard drives, SOLIDWORKS files will open and save much more slowly.

Graphics Card

Your graphics card must be a certified graphics card found on this webpage.

Beyond this, the more RAM, the more CUDA cores and the newer the architecture, the better. For my system, I went with an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000 with 6GB dedicated video RAM.

Graphics card search on SOLIDWORKS’ hardware certification site.

As we can see in the above image, my graphics card is supported on several different system configurations and on several different versions of SOLIDWORKS. This makes me confident that the graphics card I’ve chosen will be a good fit for SOLIDWORKS. We can also see a recommended driver listed for each version of SOLDIWORKS, so I would download and install this suggested driver to ensure the greatest stability and performance with SOLIDWORKS.

Still Having Problems?

After taking care of the four key elements of hardware discussed above, some users may still run into problems.

SOLIDWORKS is running critically low on memory.

SOLIDWORKS may still feel sluggish when solving a complicated feature tree or when rotating the model. What can you do?

Check the BIOS

Start by examining the settings in your BIOS (basic input/output system) which is accessed when a computer is turned on.

On a Dell computer, the BIOS is accessed by pressing the F2 key several times while the computer is booting up. On most computers, you can access the BIOS during the boot sequence with F10 or F12.

There are two specific settings to adjust to tweak the performance.

BIOS settings for Switchable Graphics.

The first setting I look for is Switchable Graphics, but it may be called something different by different manufacturers. This setting allows your computer to switch between the high-end graphics card (NVIDIA) and the lower end graphics hardware typically found embedded on the motherboard. This ability to switch to the lower end graphics can be helpful with regards to reducing power consumption and extending the duration of your battery.

However, more often than not this switchable graphics setting causes performance degradation in SOLIDWORKS. If you’re using SOLIDWORKS and get stuck using the lower end graphics card, the result will be slow or sluggish behavior when zooming or rotating around 3D models.  

Switchable Graphics setting turned off.

For the common user, who doesn’t want to learn the intricacies of the switchable graphics functionality, you can disable (uncheck) the Switchable Graphics option. This will ensure that your workstation always uses the high-end graphics card.

BIOS Setting for Intel SpeedStep.

You can also adjust the “Intel SpeedStep” setting. This setting is found in the BIOS, usually in the section which manages performance. Similar to the switchable graphics functionality, this setting will allow your computer to manage the performance and power consumption of the CPU in order to maximize battery life and minimize power usage.

SpeedStep can result in sluggish performance due to the computer managing the CPU power consumption and throttling back the full capability of the CPU by lowering its computing speed.

Disable setting for SpeedStep.

Adjusting Virtual Memory Page File Size

The page file size (or virtual memory settings) is particularly valuable to users who commonly run into the following error message.

Warning dialog that available system memory is low.

Virtual memory is essentially a way of simulating RAM. If your computer runs out of physical RAM, you can shift some of the RAM data onto an empty section of your hard drive (this empty space is your page file). This allows your computer to continue running after you have exhausted all of your RAM.

Advanced system settings.

The setting for your virtual memory page file size can be accessed by doing a search in Windows for “Advanced System Properties.”

Click the tab for Advanced, then the first Settings button.

Once you enter the “Advanced System Properties,” click the tab for Advanced, then click the first Settings button to adjust your system performance.

Click the Advanced tab then Change.

On the “Performance Options” screen, we can see that our current “Total paging file size for all drives” is 4,000 MB, or 4 GB. This is a little low and is likely contributing to the SOLIDWORKS error message indicating that the system memory is running low. Let’s adjust this number.

Setting the virtual memory page file size.

Choose the option for Custom size and enter a minimum and maximum size for the paging file. After these values have been set, you will be asked to reboot.

There are various rules regarding how this file size should be set, but a workstation with 16 GB of RAM can have a page file of 12 GB. This will give a nice increase in virtual memory (from 4 GB to 12 GB) and will very likely alleviate the “system memory running low” problem.  

Conclusion

There are several things to consider when purchasing a new workstation to run SOLIDWORKS. When specifying the hardware for your new workstation, you will want to take care to choose the appropriate CPU, RAM, hard drive and graphics card. Once the new workstation arrives at your desk and has SOLIDWORKS loaded, you might still have performance issues, which can be addressed by adjusting some settings, including the settings in the BIOS for Switchable Graphics and SpeedStep, and the amount of virtual memory.

Learn more about SOLIDWORKS with the eBook SOLIDWORKS 2022 Enhancements to Streamline and Accelerate Your Entire Product Development Process.

About the Author

Toby Schnaars (AKA: TooTallToby) has been a SOLIDWORKS user, instructor and enthusiast for the past 20 years.  He has fielded over 10,000 tech support cases and has instructed over 200 SOLIDWORKS training classes.  He has earned the ranks of both Certified SOLIDWORKS Expert and Elite Applications Engineer (CSWE + ELITE AE). 

Toby regularly posts videos of SOLIDWORKS tips and tricks on his YouTube channel TooTallToby. 

CAD Admin is Different from Other Management Jobs

Part of the problem is that CAD administration is often not seen as a discipline unto itself. It is not given a name, a title, an official set of responsibilities or seen as a desirable career path. In smaller organizations, you wind up with someone in charge of software but there is no formal authority, no budget, no plan, no recognition from management and no formal place in the company structure. It is just extra work that someone gets to do.

In larger organizations, hopefully the CAD Admin is a full-time position that has shared responsibilities with information technology, product design (and possibly manufacturing) and documentation. They are in control of the change process, documentation and possibly are the gate keepers for the product development process as well.

CAD administration is a technology management position, and would rarely have any direct reports. A CAD Admin is not usually directly managing people; the main thrust is to manage the software that governs the PLM processes.

But to really execute this position within the company to its greatest potential, the CAD Admin must affect the people around the processes. To do this, the CAD Admin should be involved in mentoring CAD users or other documentation professionals along the path to mastering the ideas and processes that come together to enable product development.

What Is Mentoring?

Mentoring accomplishes things other than training your replacement. It is a method of specialized and individualized training in a less-than-formal setting, often with just casual contact throughout the workday. Although it can be casual, however, it still requires planning, or at least a conscious set of priorities.

There is no training program for CAD Admins, and there are few books on the topic. Many people who do the work have learned on the job and by making their own mistakes. A company with enough resources to plan into the future will help develop this type of expertise internally using internal people who appreciate the company.

How to Select a Mentee?

The first question to confront has to do with who you select as this “mentee.” Generally, and depending on the size and requirements of your organization, you might have a couple of CAD learners at any given time, each at a different stage. In any group of CAD learners, you will have one or more who are more interested than the rest.

CAD Admin is something you do because you find it interesting and even compelling. I’m trying hard not to use the word “passionate” because passion is an emotional state and technology managers do well to avoid a lot of strong emotions connected to work-related issues. Emotional reactions often interfere with orderly business operations or add unnecessary stress to others’ workdays.  Becoming overly involved in a topic or pursuit can lead to burnout. This could be a separate article, but you may want to let your mentee know—possibly with a personal anecdote—about not getting overly emotional about a project lest it lead to their burnout.

You can train protégés both in person and at a distance. In fact, I’m doing that now by writing articles for users I’ll never meet, which is one method of mentoring people who are eager to learn. Both mentors and mentees are self-selecting groups. People who want to learn become people who want to teach.

Finding our way back to the core topic, what do you teach a protégé you are mentoring to turn them into a super user? In the course of discharging your CAD Admin responsibilities, there are various decisions that must be made and to make those decisions, you must have certain priorities in mind. For example, do you upgrade to the latest version of the software? When do you start that process?

Lead By Example

The best learning is not done by lectures and reading, it is done by example. Create situations where your mentee can watch over your shoulder as you navigate various tasks or decisions. Being good at a particular task mainly requires experience, but making good decisions requires the ability to prioritize and knowing when to shuffle those priorities.

Part of the problem many companies find with management roles is that new management hires are expected to know how to manage from some book or college class but they often never get to actually do it until they are thrust into a job—and then they find themselves in over their heads. Bringing in a manager from outside the company also means that internal employees have been passed over. This way, the company loses an opportunity to reward internal employees and the person you bring in is going to have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to company and product knowledge. Advancement from within is valuable from many different angles and companies benefit from it in many ways.

You may even want to take the mentee into a meeting with your manager to see how actual company decisions get made. You will hear that you should have passion for your job, but as stated earlier, passion is an emotion and strong emotions often lead to bad decisions. Emotion needs to be balanced by rational considerations. Decision making cannot be totally devoid of emotion. Compassion may be needed for us as humans, but allowing technical company decisions to be ruled by emotion is not advisable. Think about the worst decisions you have ever made. How many of them were centered around emotional situations? If you think of good decisions you have seen leaders at your company make, how many required stepping back from the emotion of the situation and rationally looking at a wider scope?

So Much More Than Just CAD

It’s easy to see CAD Admin as a sexy job when you think of it as being a CAD boss all day long, but there is so much more than just CAD involved. Think of all the software that touches your company’s products all day. Many companies with a CAD Admin position call it something else, like a Product Development Technology Manager or PLM Manager. Interest in the position may wane upon realizing you have to become a database admin as much as network and computer hardware issues. You are not just answering CAD questions all day. You have to answer questions about software you are not familiar with. You are suddenly responsible for helping the FEA people as well as the rendering people. This requires a deep dedication to helping people, whether you have to research the issue yourself or take it to the reseller or manufacturer. This kind of dedication is impossible to teach and must be inherent in the candidate.

How To Prepare

If you have a protégé who really wants to build the skills to become a CAD admin, sometimes the best path is to go somewhere else. There are not that many companies where you can gain experience in such a wide range of product development technology. Sometimes you may have to guide your mentee out of your organization.

One option is to guide them toward employment with a software reseller. Resellers represent the gamut of technology from computers, 3D printers, scanners, CAD, CAM, FEA, services, training, tech support and more. Even with this type of position, you have to be careful that you do not get pigeon-holed into one particular aspect. Software resellers are the one place where you can easily get experience in a wide range of product development tools. Resellers do tend to have a certain rate of employee churn, so you can expect most of their employees to be younger, or junior level and moving between disciplines within the organization should be easy enough.

Learning and being exposed to a wide range of technologies for an early career professional can also be a way to help decide which direction to steer a career.  It is great on-the-job learning to be able to work in a range of disciplines before selecting one to stick with or specialize in.

Conclusion

If you are a CAD Admin and you need to train a replacement or an assistant, use opportunities from your daily work to introduce them to the job and evaluate their temperament for the work. The kind of person interested in CAD administration will usually present themselves. You will find them hanging out in the CAD office more often than others. Make sure they are in a position to see what you do on a daily basis and get exposed to the wide range of situations that CAD Admins have to deal with—because it’s not just about CAD.

You can read more about the voting process in last month’s article, Here’s What to Vote for in the Next SOLIDWORKS.

The Presenters

The session lived up to its hype, starting with the list of presenters which included:

• Gian Paolo Bassi, 3DEXPERIENCE Works Senior Vice President
• Manish Kumar, CEO of SOLIDWORKS
• John Sweeney, Senior Director, SOLIDWORKS Product Development
• Bruce Holway, Director, SOLIDWORKS Product Definition

Figure 1. The session was presented by the Who's-Who of SOLIDWORKS.

SOLIDWORKS is Listening to Its Users

Bruce Holway started the show by listing all the ways that SOLIDWORKS listens to its users:

• Alpha testing (Product Definition team)
• Usability testing (User Experience team)
• Enhancement requests (thousands every year)
• Reading and participating in Forum discussions (over 100,000 threads)
• Customer visits (tens every year)
• User group meetings (SWUGN)
• Meetings and conversations with VAR AEs
• Technical support cases
• The Top Ten List

A Comprehensive History of The Top Ten List

Since the topic of the session was the Top Ten List, Bruce also presented a list of all the ideas voted in the Top Ten List from 2001 to 2021.

It was interesting to see how many of these ideas have been implemented in SOLIDWORKS. A few interesting stats:

• Every year, 20 to 40 percent of the previous year’s ideas were implemented. An example from 2017:

Figure 2. A throwback to SOLIDWORKS World 2017, when the CEO lost his head for a second.

• By 2021, 65 percent from all ideas voted in the Top Ten List between 2001 and 2021 have been already implemented.

Figure 3. 65 percent implementation rate for all concrete ideas.

• In 2022, 16 enhancements that made it in the Top Ten list in the past became standard SOLIDWORKS functionality.

Figure 4. The Top Ten List continues to be a source of inspiration for the SOLIDWORKS Product Definition Team.

The Top Eleven List – 3DEXPERIENCE WORLD 2022

Due to the fact that three ideas received a similar number of votes, Bruce’s team decided to add an eleventh idea to the winning list. This is the 3DEXPERIENCE WORLD 2022 Top Eleven Ideas List:

Tied for 9^th Place: PDM - Correct the Problems with Different Screen Resolutions (4K-Monitors)

Submitted by: Lard Uhlenhaut

Votes: 48

Figure 5. In the 9^th to 11th place...

As Bruce said, this is one area where SOLIDWORKS will focus next. Afterall, most professional monitors nowadays are 4K.

Tied for 9^th Place: Breakout Counterbores to Avoid Zero Thickness Condition

Submitted by: Dave Laban

Votes: 48

Figure 6. In the 9^th to 11th place...

How many times have you tried to place a counterbore hole and received an error due to the tangency between the cylindrical face of the whole and the edge of another face? The workaround was to create a breakout counterbore manually, using the Extrude-Cut feature. Hopefully, in the near future, this operation will be automated as part of the Hole Wizard feature.

Tied for 9^th Place: Allow More Options for Attaching Entities to Other Entities in Drawings

Submitted by: Alin Vargatu on behalf of his client Hugo Breton

Votes: 48

Note: This idea was promoted in last month’s article. Many thanks to those of you who voted for it.

Figure 7. In the 9th to 11th place...

As we wrote in the previous article, this idea will make detailing and revising drawings faster and easier.

8^th Place: Bidirectional Linear Patterns

Submitted by: Deepak Gupta

Votes: 49

Figure 8. In the 8th place.

Deepak is always focusing on speed and consistency between similar SOLIDWORKS features. This idea will certainly improve both consistency and operational speed.

7^th Place: Linear Patterns Allow Staggers

Submitted by: Alin Vargatu on behalf of his client Stephan D’Aoust

Votes: 50

Note: This idea was promoted in last month’s article. Many thanks to those of you who voted for it.

Figure 9. In the 7th place.

As many users commented, this functionality is a must in many industries, including aerospace and construction.

6^th Place: Linear Patterns Allow Staggers

Submitted by: Glen Schroeder

Votes: 52

Figure 10. In the 6th place.

Another time saver from Schroeder. For SOLIDWORKS users, every click counts. This idea will enable them to focus on design intent, not on clicks. It will also eliminate a common source of frustration.

5^th Place: User Interface: Show/ Hide All Selected Entities/ Features In Same Step

Submitted by: Deepak Gupta

Votes: 53

Figure 11. In the 5th place.

There is little more frustrating than selecting multiple entities in bulk in the Feature Manager (e.g. sketches, planes, axes…), pressing the Hide/Show button and having only one group of entities appearing or disappearing. This functionality should have been implemented in the previous millennium.

4^th Place: Provide A Better Way of Re-Attaching Dangling Dimensions

Submitted by: John Lhuillier

Votes: 58

Note: This idea was promoted by us in last month’s article. Many thanks to those of you who voted for it.

Figure 12. In the 4th place.

SOLIDWORKS has decent tools for re-attaching dimensions, but they are not intelligent. For example, a linear dimension can be defined by selecting:

• One line
• Two parallel lines
• A line and a point
• Two points
• Two parallel faces or planes
• A line and a plane or planar face
• A point and a plane or planar face

… and the list goes on and on.

When such a dimension goes dangling, the success of re-attaching it depends on how quickly the user can guess the dimensioning scheme. Lhuillier’s idea suggests simplifying the re-attaching process, making it independent of the original mating scheme.

3^rd Place: Assembly Cut-Extrude to Have the Same End-Conditions As A Cut-Extrude in Parts

Submitted by: Alin Vargatu on behalf of his client Hugo Breton

Votes: 74

Figure 13. Bronze medal.

Note: This functionality has already been implemented in the Alpha version of SOLIDWORKS 2023, as presented in the General Session - Day 3:

Figure 14. Watch the video.

2^nd Place: More Functionality for Breadcrumbs

Submitted by: Alin Vargatu on behalf of his client Hugo Breton

Votes: 78

Note: This idea was promoted in last month’s article. Many thanks to those of you who voted for it.

Figure 15. Silver medal.

The breadcrumbs are already formidable tools in the hands of power-users. Adding this functionality will add the missing 5 percent of its ideal functionality.

1^st Place: When Parent Features Are Suppressed, Children Should Have the Option to Remain Unsuppressed and Dangling or Having the External Relations Frozen

Submitted by: Alin Vargatu on behalf of his client Hugo Breton

Votes: 79

Note: This idea was promoted in last month’s article. Many thanks to those of you who voted for it.

Figure 16. Gold medal.

Again, this idea is about the consistency of the software. When the tool behaves so elegantly when deleting entities and so clunky when suppressing them, the users get frustrated. Let’s eliminate the source of frustration.

SOLIDWORKS Quality and Performance Focus

Like almost every year, there were ideas recommending improvements in software performance and quality. This year, these ideas were submitted by Dave Laban, and both got a significant number of votes.

John Sweeney shared information about SOLIDWORKS’ efforts in addressing them. It was interesting to see how many resources his team is dedicating to quality and performance in the last two releases. Killing bugs and improving performance scored 64 percent in SW 2022.

Figure 17. The Performance and Quality of the software increases every year.

With a goal of reducing the backlog of reported bugs by 90 percent, Sweeney’s team focused on the ones with the biggest severity and the largest number of users affected.

SOLIDWORKS Quality Initiative

Figure 18. Let's kill the biggest, baddest bugs first.

Comparing the 2021 release to the 2018 one, the goal of reducing the backlog by 90 percent has been achieved.

Figure 19. 10 percent remaining...

Even more interesting, the new bugs (introduced by the new releases of SOLIDWORKS) were also reduced in numbers. From 2015 to 2021, this number was reduced by 23 percent.

Figure 20. A 23 percent reduction in new bugs.

SOLIDWORKS Performance Initiative

Along with reducing bugs, the SOLIDWORKS R&D Team started an ambitious program of re-writing big chunks of the old code of the software that was not optimized for maximum performance. John highlighted just a few of the areas which saw the biggest improvements in performance.

Figure 21. Speed, speed and more speed is what users want.

Based on our experience using all versions of SOLIDWORKS from 2018 to 2022 to produce and edit large assemblies and drawings, we can confirm that the improvements in speed are real and quite impressive. Benchmarking these improvements is a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. Past articles on these improvements:

• 20 to 30 Times Faster Graphics Response with SOLIDWORKS 2019’s New Graphics Engine
• A Potential Game Changer: No More Pain Detailing Large Drawings.
• Large Assemblies Open Faster Than Ever in SOLIDWORKS 2020
• Fast Drawings of Slow Assemblies

We will be starting a benchmarking exercise focused on real-life use cases for large assemblies and drawings. The results will be revealed in a future article.

The SOLIDWORKS Commitment for Developing SOLIDWORKS Indefinitely

The second half of the presentation reinforced SOLIDWORKS’ commitment to further developing SOLIDWORKS.

Gian Paolo Bassi stated, “I hope you understood our focus on developing SOLIDWORKS and the message we bring you is very clear, that we are doubling our commitment to you as users, to the future of SOLIDWORKS, and at the same time, the expansion of SOLIDWORKS into new domains that we are sure all of you will enjoy and which will make you more productive and more successful in your professional lives.”

Manish Kumar, the new SOLIDWORKS CEO added, “A prize should be awarded to John and his team, because what they accomplished is amazing. At this point every developer has a short list of bugs that he is responsible for solving, so planning is straightforward. This was not possible before John started this quality initiative. The number of escalations are also down this year to the minimum ever recorded.”

A “Real Prize” for the Users Who Submitted Top Ten Ideas

Gian Paolo Bassi revealed that he will award prizes (to be announced soon) to all users who submitted ideas that were voted in the Top Ten List this year. At this time, we do not know what these prizes will look like, but we were told they are in the works.

Call for Action: Join the SOLIDWORKS 2023 Beta Program.

For those of you who cannot wait to try the latest enhancements in the software, we recommend joining the Beta program that starts in early June. You will be able to download and install an early version of SOLIDWORKS 2023 and test it with your own files, replicating your own methods and processes.

This is the best way to catch the bugs that affect you and your team early, in a stage where Sweeney’s team can be the most effective in addressing any problem.

Learn more about the new enhancements in SOLIDWORKS 2022 with the ebook SOLIDWORKS 2022 Enhancements to Streamline and Accelerate Your Entire Product Development Process.

About the Author

As an Elite AE and Senior Training and Process Consultant, working for TriMech Solutions, Alin Vargatu is a Problem Hunter and Solver.

He has presented 33 times at 3DEXPERIENCE World and SOLIDWORKS World, twice at SLUGME and tens of times at SWUG meetings in Canada and the United States. His blog and YouTube channel are well known in the SOLIDWORKS Community.

In recognition for active engagement in the SOLIDWORKS Community, at 3DEXPERIENCE World 2021, the SWUGN (SOLIDWORKS User Group Network) awarded the SOLIDWORKS AE of the Year title to Alin Vargatu.

If you or your company are doing nothing in data management, you can use this article as a guide to get you started. If you have engaged at the minimal level, you can use this to help you select another level of commitment, risk and return that works for your organization.

Let’s start by stating that not all CAD or engineering software requires a separate application for data management. Some CAD software has this functionality built in—such as CAD-in-the-cloud, which doesn’t use individual files. The CAD data (and all other types of data) is all stored in a database.

CAD-in-the-cloud includes packages such as Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE, PTC Onshape and Autodesk Fusion 360, which are the best-known programs of this type.

Not all CAD that uses a database and CAD-in-the-cloud are one and the same. Serving the software (and the associated data) across public networks is a business choice, not a technical requirement. One American aircraft manufacturer bought into a contract with a CAD-in-the-cloud supplier and was able to implement the platform on private, company-owned and local servers. These servers are isolated from a connection to the outside world due to security concerns. Given the state of affairs with cyber security, this type of private server implementation may serve as a model for companies who have contractual obligations to avoid data and software being shared over public networks, providing more protection than firewalls, VPN and air gaps. Serving software and data from a centralized public network does have many potential benefits, but it also has risks—a downside that prevents some companies from taking this route.

In a practical sense, for now and for most of us, CAD-in-the-cloud will mean attaching to an outside server to run the software, known as software-as-a-service, or SaaS. The data will be saved in an associated database, like a WordPress blog with all of the articles kept in a database.

Most of us, however, are still using file-based CAD. Programs such as SOLIDWORKS, Solid Edge, NX, Inventor, Creo and IronCAD all fall into this category. Some of these put parts and assemblies in the same files, but they all store their data in some sort of file type on your hard drive or on a server that you can browse.

Some CAD programs come with some form of built-in PDM. SOLIDWORKS came with PDMWorks installed for a time, which was simple to start using. Solid Edge currently comes with built-in PDM with a lot of the basic functions that a user would need.

Options for Data Management:

• CAD-in-the-cloud. No file management needed (though there are other issues for you to address). Examples include Onshape, ENOVIA, Fusion360.
• Do nothing. Store files in local folders, mapped drives, UNC locations with some sort of method for organization and file naming, as well as a bulletproof set of rules that everybody always follows 100 percent.
• Buy a platform tool. Teamcenter, Windchill, SOLIDWORKS PDM etc.
• Buy a bolt-on third-party application for managing files. ProductCenter, DBWorks, DDM, etc.

The functions of dedicated PDM applications are the same as the functions of do-it-yourself processes. The big difference between dedicated PDM and DIY (aside from cost) is that dedicated PDM automates the rules. This guarantees that—short of intentional sabotage—the rules will be followed.

For the purposes of this article, the use of the word “document” is assumed to mean an individual file stored on a computer hard drive. This could be a part, assembly or drawing, or a file that contains some or all of that data.

Let’s go through the basics of file management, whether it is a dedicated PDM or a DIY setup.

Unique Filenames

A lot of CAD users contrive reasons for why their situation is unique and why they need to reuse filenames. They don’t understand that there is a better way and that their methods leave them exposed to more errors than they might imagine. Best practice dictates that you need to have unique file names for every document that you put into your system. For better or worse, the file name is the identifier. If you need some other property to be shared between files, make it a custom property or keyword that is inside the file. Filenames need to be unique. No exceptions.

There are two reasons for keeping unique file names. First, Windows File Explorer won’t tolerate identical filenames in the same folder. Even if you get around that by putting the same file name in different folders, your CAD program is going to do something you are not expecting when it finds files with the same names: it will reuse the first one it finds.

Using the same filename is simply not worth it. Protest all you want, but unique file naming is not a convention you will be able to successfully work against, especially if you have to train a bunch of people at various levels to follow these rules 100 percent of the time, or risk fouling a lot of company data.

A PDM program will generally enforce this and all the other rules of file management, although you might be able to get around the requirement sometimes. In a database-driven PDM program, there can be an identifier other than the file name. Still, unique file names are at the top of the best practice list for most CAD admins.

Further, some PDM systems have the built-in ability to automatically assign file names. Some of these can be straight sequential numbers or follow a semi-intelligent system for assigning names.

Add Properties and Keywords

After assigning unique file name for each document, you should also have other properties or keywords assigned to values that can be used in searches. For example, you might want to have a property called “material” filled out as brass, CR 1018, polyethylene, FR4 or another material. The properties you use will depend on your products and your process. You can have properties set up in templates, so they are ready to go for different types of parts or assemblies. Searches that use property values can be very effective ways to find documents. Not everybody is going to be able to precisely remember where they saved a particular file ten years from now, but may recall a particular property.

Properties not only help in searches, but also help with filling out tables and drawing title blocks on your automated templates.

Create and Follow CAD Standards

Your files all need to comply with CAD standards established for your company. This ensures that people hired ten years from now will be able to find and use the correct data. This will include file naming, feature naming, notes included with the features for equations and parametrics, custom properties and so on. CAD standards perform two main functions:

1. Make sure your drawings and other design documentation are created with a consistent framework and that everyone inside and outside your organization can create and interpret them consistently.
2. Because you have documented your requirements, you now have a set of requirements that make customized training and evaluation easier.

Where Used Lists

Where Used information can help you build lists of documents that need to be changed when a single part affects more than one assembly or drawing. You can sometimes coax this kind of information out of a CAD program manually, but it is much easier with a PDM application.

If a supplier has a recall on a particular circuit board, you can do a where-used search and find out which products used that part and need to be repaired. When a common part has been revised and BOMs, assembly drawings and instructions need to be updated, you can do this manually, but it can be time consuming and complicated. At some point, the earlier the better, you should entrust this function to software. One mistake in production can be more than the cost of a PDM package.

Revisions

Revisions can be the most difficult function in a DIY implementation. Many CAD users will put revisions in the file name, but due to references and links between documents, this never goes well. You could potentially put the files in folders with revision names in the folder name, but this is extremely tedious and will lead to a lot of errors.

Revisions on flat files—files without references, such as AutoCAD files—is a lot easier because you can actually use the revision in the file name technique, but when you have so many references between files, it’s simply not practical.

The best way to handle revisions is through a database that keeps track of the current and former links for drawing and assembly files. Trying to track revisions on your own is just going to result in a convoluted mess.

A simple rule to remember: if the revision produces a change and the part is no longer a drop-in replacement, it is not a revision—it is a new part with a new part number. No revision should make the assembly work or be assembled differently. Automated PDM can handle the revisions, but it is up to you to make the decision as to whether it is a revision or a new part number.

Workflow, Signoffs and Process

Not all file management systems have workflow control. For those that do, it’s usually an added expense. Electronic workflow automates your document change and approval process. You won’t need to carry a pile of papers from one desk to another. Document approvals happen electronically. Each person in the process is assigned a role and the roles have various permissions. You create a flow chart with decision nodes and the documents follow the flow.

With an electronic process, once everyone agrees to the process, there is no more arguing about interpretations of how to do it. It saves time and aggravation. You won’t have to wonder where the pile of papers is or who had it last.

Non-CAD Data

Non-CAD product related data can be attached to part numbers. This includes data such as specifications, marketing images, 2D scanned documents, 3D scan data, notes from product definition, analysis data or plots and just about any other kind of data you can generate and save. In a manual process, it becomes a piece of paper in a folder in a file cabinet. With PDM installed, it becomes an electronic file saved into the database and connected to a part number.

Almost every product development process is a hybrid—between automated and manual, paper drawings and electronic data, scan data and 3D printed parts, physical prototypes and sketches. Be prepared for parts of the process that might not fit neatly. You have to come to an agreement among your coworkers of how to handle misfits. Err on the side of saving data or physical items, at least until an agreed phase.

Non-Engineering Access to Data

Engineers and document control people aren’t the only ones who need access to all of the CAD data your company creates. Purchasing, sales, manufacturing, shipping, repair and other departments need it, too. PDM generally can allow people inside and even outside your organization gain access at various levels as appropriate, in order to search, view, measure, markup, run reports or enter meta data. PDM can handle all these requests for access for you. You get much more out of a good PDM installation than just file management.

Summary

You already know how much time you can save with document management done right because you’re a smart CAD user and you’ve been doing all of the above since day one. For everyone else’s sake, do have them read this article.

After reading it, they should have a good understanding of what a document management system should be doing. It should also be obvious that electronic, automated methods are efficient ways to control the process. They save time, money and mistakes. If you’re going to upgrade from a DIY manual method, make sure to at least get someone experienced in the process to help you lay out goals for the implementation and put together a phased approach to get the most important parts such as populating the vault and setting up revisions in place first and make sure they work as expected before moving on to the next phase.

To learn more about managing product data in SOLIDWORKS and 3DEXPERIENCE, check out the whitepaper Gain Competitive Advantage with Product Data Management.

In this article, we will review the enhancements outlined out in the official documentation, What's New in SOLIDWORKS 2022 and elaborate with examples and real-world experiences. We will follow the order laid out in What's New in SOLIDWORKS 2022 to facilitate cross-referencing and provide links where applicable. We will also reference other sources to build on the material in What's New in SOLIDWORKS 2022 and outline additional enhancements.

Create Record Process Output:

In Create Record process outputs, it is now possible to attach new records and to specify a subfolder in which the new record is created.

Recent Files:

When adding new file data, this data can be selected from a list of recently accessed files. This saves the user from having to navigate to this data every time.

Object Structure Editor:

The process of editing object structures has been made easier by allowing an administrator to access the object directly from the SOLIDWORKS Manage user interface. Previously, an administrator would need to open the SOLIDWORKS Manage administration interface and navigate to the object in order to edit the object's structure. Now an administrator can right-click on the object and select Tools > Administration (Structures) to launch the selected objects structure in a separate window.

Editing object structure.

Record Hyperlinks:

Accessing and providing access to records through the Plenary Web Client has been improved. A hyperlink to a SOLIDWORKS Manage record can be copied to an email or another document to provide quick access to the record. This is done by right-clicking on the record and selecting Tools > Copy Hyperlink.

A record can also be opened in the plenary web client directly from the desktop client. This is done by right-clicking on the record in the desktop client and selecting Tools >Open Record in Web Browser.

User Interface:

In SOLIDWORKS Manage 2022, several areas of the user interface have been improved. These improvements increase the user experience and make the interfaces more consistent. The table below lists these improvements as outlined in What's New in SOLIDWORKS 2022.

Avatar Images and Icons:

For SOLIDWORKS Manage 2020, an avatar can be set for a user. To add an avatar, in SOLIDWORKS Manage administration navigate to the users tab, right-click on the user and select Set User Image.

Set user image.

Plenary Web Client:

Logging in to the SOLIDWORKS Manage plenary web client has been simplified. Previously, a user would need to log in using their SOLIDWORKS Manage password and then log in to their SOLIDWORKS PDM object separately. Now a user can log in with their SOLIDWORKS PDM username and password.

Check Out Rights for Affected Items:

In a process, administrators have additional controls over who can check out affected items. These additional options are:

• User who accepts this stage. This option limits check-out rights to a single user who accepts the stage.
• User(s) from this field. This option allows administrators to specify check-out rights to users for a specified object type field defined for the process.

Process access rights.

Replace User:

New to SOLIDWORKS Manage 2022 is the ability to replace users and specify the Change "Checked Out By" value.

Creating and Deleting Multiple Field Groups:

Multiple field groups can be created at once by entering multiple lines or copying and pasting text from other file types such as .xlsx, .txt or .csv. The use of Ctrl or Shift select can select multiple field groups.

SOLIDWORKS PDM User-Defined References:

Paste as Reference is a tool in SOLIDWORKS PDM used to create a link between two files. For SOLIDWORKS components, this linking happens automatically but not for other document types or unrelated document types (i.e., a PFD and a SOLIDWORKS drawing). These links can be created manually by pasting a reference. In SOLIDWORKS Manage 2022, these references can now be displayed for:

• SOLIDWORKS part files and other part files.
• Non-SOLIDWORKS files (such as PDF’s) and SOLIDWORKS part files.

Paste as reference in SOLIDWORKS Manage.

SOLIDWORKS Manage Performance Improvements:

A vital component of any new software release is performance and SOLIDWORKS Manage 2022 delivers increased performance as follows (the contents of the table below are from What's New in SOLIDWORKS 2022.

As mentioned earlier, there are additional enhancements that are not covered in What's New in SOLIDWORKS 2022.  Many of these additional enhancements can be viewed in a YouTube video created and released by SOLIDWORKS. The first of these we want to look at are BOM Filters. Filters are useful for finding items in a large BOM. In SOLIDWORKS Manage 2022, filters can be saved and saved filters can be managed independently.

BOM filters.

In order to facilitate sharing through emails or other documents, BOMs also take advantage of hyperlinks. A shared BOM allows others to make changes to the BOM without having access to SOLIDWORKS Manage. Any changes made will be carried through to SOLIDWORKS Manage.

Sharing BOM.

The ability to share BOMs is controlled by editing the Object SOLIDWORKS Manage administration.

Enable BOM Sharing.

The following enhancements in BOMs are covered in detail in SOLIDWORKS Manage 2022 BOM Enhancements:

• Sharing your BOM
• Bill of material filters
• Bill of materials latest version setting
• SOLIDWORKS integration BOM view
• SOLIDWORKS integration drawing BOM table

Inside SOLIDWORKS, there is now a tab where a user can see their assigned tasks. To make viewing Tasks events easier, there is a check box to only display SOLIDWORKS-related tasks.

Assigned tasks in SOLIDWORKS.

In this article, we have attempted to bring several sources that outline What's New in SOLIDWORKS Manage 2022. The reader is encouraged to follow the included links for additional information on these enhancements.

With the release of SOLIDWORKS Manage 2022, we are starting to see the maturing of this product. Not only are there productivity and performance enhancements but a lot of work has gone into improving the user experience. These user experience improvements are achieved by providing a better user interface and cross-platform enhancements.

To learn more, check out the ebook SOLIDWORKS 2022 Enhancements to Streamline and Accelerate Your Entire Product Development Process.

About the Author

Joe Medeiros is an Elite Applications Consultant at TRIMECH, a premier SOLIDWORKS reseller servicing customers throughout North America offering SOLIDWORKS customers expertise in implementing and using Dassault SOLIDWORKS solutions.

Joe has been involved in many aspects of the Dassault SOLIDWORKS product family since 1996 and as an award-winning blogger, he regularly writes about Dassault SOLIDWORKS solutions.

In contrast to drawings, automation is a sexy topic—for engineers, anyway. Automation can make the boring repetitive work go away. It can make you feel like you’re getting away with something.  It’s fast, and it ensures accuracy and consistency.

Automating 2D drawings is some of the most rewarding work you can do in the entire CAD process. You only have to do it once and from then on, you will reap the rewards every time there is another drawing to be made. But it is also a good feeling that you can help standardize your company’s product while still putting your personal stamp on the output.

The automation we’re talking about here isn’t anything exotic. In fact, it is built into SOLIDWORKS. However, a lot of companies fail to make use of it. The tools take some thought before they can be implemented in a meaningful way. Then you have to communicate the new method to all the users. You have to write a standard (see Why Do We Have 3D Standards?).

It is best to get all of your automation set up before you ever start using your CAD software, but how often does someone get to start from scratch? Most people in most companies will have to jump on a process like this somewhere in the middle of actual production and design. If you are lucky, you will get to implement it between projects or in a phased manner starting with a pilot project. Regardless, it is important to get the new way of doing things correct on the first try. Iterating towards a set of correct settings can cause a lot of turmoil and confusion. It is much better to work out what will be used going forward and then turning it all on at once. Design the system, test on a dummy installation, then roll it out to a set of hand-picked and trained users on a single project, re-evaluate and adjust, finally train everyone and roll out the new process to everyone.

With that in mind, a new drawing automation process will include all of your files—parts, assemblies and drawings. It is best to get it all set up before you turn it loose on your company’s production data.

CAD standards are very important, even in 3D modeling, and especially as a way to get consistent 2D drawings. Standardizing your 3D process also helps with establishing the goals of user training, enforcement and the expectation that any user can pick up any model and know how to do what they need to do. CAD standards take some time to develop, but in the long run are well worth your time and effort.

Libraries

Libraries are the ultimate way to reuse data. Make the part once, and many users can reuse it hundreds of times.

Of course, it helps if part libraries are shared. If you share via mapped drives, make sure everyone maps to the same drive letter. If you use a UNC (universal naming convention) path, make sure everyone has access. Individual libraries copied to local hard drives can work, but you need to make sure that changes to one library are reflected everywhere. People may like their independence, but to make this work, you really need to have everyone sharing the same data.

Ideally, libraries should be shared through PDM. That makes everything easier. A PDM program handles local copies, latest versions, duplicates, where-used lists and more. Even a small installation will save administrative and troubleshooting time with a PDM. PDM is just a programmatic way of enforcing file management discipline. It is necessary because users will not apply that kind of discipline consistently on their own.

If you are starting with Toolbox, remember that it has a special set of requirements and shouldn’t be used as a fresh out-of-the-box install. If you have configured library parts, make sure that updates to the configurations are shared with all users and that users aren’t stashing data locally—or if they are, that you employ PDM to ensure they always have the latest versions.

Configured libraries are easy to create, but for a lot of reasons it may be safer to use non-configured libraries (where each part or size is a separate file), especially if you aren’t starting with all the sizes you’ll need later. This makes the file management much more direct and troubleshooting problems more straightforward.

Templates

Templates for parts, assemblies and drawings are low-hanging fruit for automating your process. Templates need to be implemented as a part of libraries. There are three main aspects of document templates that need to be established:

1. Reference geometry. Named planes and axes.
2. Document properties. Tools>Options settings that apply to the current document.
3. Custom properties. Metadata is useful for BOMs, PDM searches ad reports, drawing title blocks.

You might even consider special templates for special kinds of files, such as sheet metal, plastic parts, 3D prints or other processes.

Assemblies are often used to stage a part to be rendered in a certain way or might be used for 3D printing multiple parts in a single session. In short, if you find yourself making the same kind of changes repeatedly, you might be able to use a template to save yourself a lot of repetitive work.

Templates can also apply to tables such as BOMs, in case you have customization that you need to use consistently.

Drawing templates can store some information that will make your life easier. For example, you can establish pre-defined views on the drawing sheet that will automatically place various types of views that you know you’re going to want on certain kinds of drawings. Pre-defined views are under-used and can save you a lot of time when you consistently need something other than the three standard views. And if you have your parts consistently started on the same plane, the views work out nicely.

Favorites

Favorite styles can be applied to annotations and rather than recreating and applying certain formatting to annotations, you might save a lot of time for your users by setting up a set of favorites for everything from annotations to tolerances. This kind of thing can take some research to see what parts of the available functionality apply to your situation. There is more to this setting than we can cover here, but users should look into setting up favorites that can be shared to help automate and standardize the formatting on your drawings.

Reference Geometry

Having consistently named standard reference planes throughout your process is important. This makes it easier to know what to expect, especially when connected with 3D modeling standards that help you decide which plane to start sketching on, symmetry and where the bulk of a part should go. When you set up standards, you should always be looking to make downstream processes easier. This should include assemblies, analysis, CNC toolpath creation, 3D printing and more.

Standard axes for X, Y and Z directions can be useful for assembly and patterning in both parts and assemblies.

Even standard folders added to the Feature Manager, feature naming conventions and requirements for documentation for equations, notes for manufacturing or purchased components can help remind users to use a certain workflow established in the company CAD standards.

Document Properties

In addition to the Tools>Options type settings, it can be useful to have visualization and material type properties set. Having templates already set up with materials with visual properties established makes it that much easier for the people actually doing the work.

Colors for special types of features can highlight types of data that might require special handling downstream. Making this stand out visually helps ensure that it won’t escape anyone’s attention down the line. Don’t be afraid to use colors within your modeling scheme. There is no law that says sheet metal parts have to have the same color as the sheet metal. Parts with different colors will draw attention to details in parts, such as sizes or tolerances, that would otherwise be hard to detect.

Custom Properties

Custom properties can be any piece of reusable associated text and can be chosen to make your life or work easier. Some custom properties can be filled out ahead of time and sometimes that data can pre-exist in the template. Again, if you find yourself or your workers making the same changes over and over again to the standard template, it may be time to create a new template to save yourself all that repetitive work.

Custom properties can be used in a number of places, including in equations, BOMs, title blocks and annotations. Don’t be shy about using this data, especially if your CAD data goes into PDM. In PDM, custom properties can be used as search terms or in reports. If it is a piece of information that is important to that part or that assembly getting used, made, designed, purchased, manufactured, assembled or documented properly, include it. Custom properties can be entered by non-engineering staff. It takes just seconds to attach the information, but it can be reused or recalled frequently.

Custom property data can be entered using the Summary Information dialog but it is more efficient to use the custom properties tab and the Builder, which enable you to create drop down lists of choices—a great help in avoiding variations in spelling and terminology.

Title Blocks

Title blocks have been available for quite some time now, but they are one of the newest functions in this list.  Your title block can reference many different custom properties that essentially fill out the fields for you.

Formats

When SOLIDWORKS first started, there were some terminology hiccups. Formats as we know them today were originally called templates, which is why formats have the extension *.sldDRT, for drawing template. When SOLIDWORKS started using document templates for all the file types, users needed to be re-educated. The use of “formats” has always been one of the more confusing things about SOLIDWORKS drawings.

Around 1997-1998, the switch to the use of the word template happened and formats were introduced. Also about the same time, SOLIDWORKS went from a three letter extension (*.prt, *.asm, *.drw) to six letter extensions (*.sldprt, *.sldasm and *.slddrw). There were still applications that could only accept files with three letter extensions and …prt, …asm and …drw would get truncated. You would wind up with a *.sld files that had to be renamed.

That was a long explanation of why SOLIDWORKS can read *.prt, *.asm and *.drw files. Don’t get these legacy SOLIDWORKS documents mixed up with native Pro/ENGINEER (or Creo) files as they are not interchangeable.

In any case, the format, or what most mechanical engineers and designers know as the “drawing border,” is often imported from a 2D application. Editing 2D in SOLIDWORKS is a fairly miserable task so you’re better off either keeping it simple or doing the work in a 2D application. If you do so, do make a separate format for every size and orientation.

Most of the time, formats are already saved onto drawing templates that are already set up as a certain size, so end users shouldn’t have to deal with this—the Admin should have all the sizes sorted out as separate templates.

Summary

SOLIDWORKS offers a lot of automation that can be useful for drawings. This starts with metadata in part and assembly documents and can add quite a bit of custom detail to templates, formats, libraries and favorites. The CAD Administrator for a company needs to be on top of all the available tools to make the best use of functions that can be automated. Getting it right can be very rewarding because CAD users will collectively save a lot of time—and it will keep the look and content of the drawings consistent.

Here is what Configuration is according to the SOLIDWORKS Help:

"Configurations allow you to create multiple variations of a part or assembly model within a single document. Configurations provide a convenient way to develop and manage families of models with different dimensions, components or other parameters."

Essentially, configurations act as files within a file. Configurations are usually made of parts and assemblies that have significant commonalities. For those that have taken the SOLIDWORKS Essentials training, the Pin part, with its long and short configurations, is a simple example of this commonality. While the pin part may vary in length and perhaps diameter, it is still basically a cylinder.

We could create individual parts for each possible size of the pin, but this can be time-consuming and very tedious. Tracking and organizing all those individual pins can also be challenging especially if your organization is not using some sort of data management software. (By the way, organizing files in Windows Explorer folders, with some master list somewhere that lays out the structure of the Windows Explorer folder is not data management. That form of organizing files is an anachronistic behemoth that is just waiting to self-implode.)

And that pretty much sums up configurations. They work best with common parts because configurations make it easier to create new variations and make organizing these files simpler. It must be noted that modern data management software can also simplify the creation and organization of common parts without the need for configurations. More on this later.

Now that we know what a configuration is, let's look at the mechanics of configurations. Configurations can be accessed from the top of the SOLIDWORKS Feature Manager in an open SOLIDWORKS part or assembly. By default, Configurations are located under the third tab.

Configuration Tab of Feature Manager.

Every single part or assembly will contain one configuration, aptly named the 'default' configuration. Additional configurations can be created in several ways, including the creation of some features. For example, inserting a Weldment feature will result in two configurations: one a parent, the other the child configuration, which is also known as a “derived configuration.”

Derived configurations.

At its most basic, each configuration can be created manually from the right-mouse menu.

Manually creating a configuration.

Creating each and every configuration manually is laborious and unnecessary. Toiling through the creation of dozens or perhaps hundreds of configurations would be a merciless grind. Luckily, SOLIDWORKS realized this early on and allowed the use of Microsoft Excel to streamline the process.

Spreadsheets, with their ability to cross-reference rows and columns, can significantly reduce the onerous task of creating multiple configurations. Mind you, entering reams of configurations can still be quite mind-numbing, suitable only to those who enjoy data entry.

These purpose-built Excel Spreadsheets are called design tables. Design tables work by entering the proposed configurations in column A. Subsequent columns define what will be controlled by the proposed configuration. Where the cells of the proposed configuration intersect the cells of the configurable items, we add values. Using the pin part again as an example, where the 'long pin' configuration intersects with the 'length' column, we can specify the physical length of the Pin.

Design table.

We would likely not create a design table for a couple of configurations that contain only a couple of configurable items, but we do it here to provide an easily understood example. Design tables are at their best when a SOLIDWORKS component contains several configurations and/or several configurable items.

More than just dimensions can be structured with configurations. Below is a list of all the available configurable items as recorded in SOLIDWORKS Help:

Base Parts in Configurations
You can control the configuration of a base part with a design table. This is available in part documents only.

Color Parameter in Configurations
The design table can include a column for configuration-specific colors. The value is a 32-bit integer that specifies RGB (red, green, blue). If you do not specify a value, zero (black) is used.

Comment in Configurations
The Configuration Properties PropertyManager has a Comment box, where you can enter information about the configuration.

Component Configuration
You can specify which configuration of a component is used in various configurations of an assembly.

Component Part Number in Configurations
When you create configurations with a design table, the software automatically sets options in the Configuration Properties PropertyManager.

Component Suppression State in Configurations

Cosmetic Threads in Configurations
You can configure callouts for cosmetic threads.

Custom Properties in Configurations

Derived Configurations in Design Tables
You can control derived configurations in a design table.

Description in Configurations
The Configuration Properties PropertyManager has a Description box, where you can enter a description of the configuration.

Dimensions in Configurations

Display States in Configurations
You can create multiple display states for each configuration of an assembly or part.

End Conditions in Configurations
You can change the end condition of extruded features in specified configurations.

Expand in BOM in Configurations
You can control how the assembly is listed in a BOM, when this configuration is used as a subassembly.

External Sketch Relations in Configurations
You can set different external sketch relations in specified configurations.

Feature Suppression State in Configurations

Shortcuts for Suppressing Items in Design Tables
The string values suppressed and unsuppressed are valid values for selected design table columns. You can use shortcuts for these string values in design tables.

Fixed or Floating Position in Configurations
You can configure whether the position of a component is fixed or floating in an assembly.

Global Variables in Configurations
You can configure global variables.

Hole Sizes in Configurations
In the Hole Specification PropertyManager, you can configure the size of Hole Wizard holes by clicking Configurations and selecting This Configuration, All configurations or Specify Configurations.

Lighting in Configurations
You can suppress and unsuppress (turn off and on) lights in configurations.

Mass Properties in Configurations
You can configure values that you assign for mass, center of mass and moments of inertia in parts and assemblies.

Materials in Configurations
You can configure materials for parts and for bodies of multibody parts.

Scale Features in Configurations
You can configure the X, Y and Z scale factors.

Sketch Dimensions in Configurations
You can control the driving state of sketch dimensions in specified configurations to control the behavior of your model.

Sketch Planes in Configurations

The plane on which a sketch lies is configurable through the Sketch Plane PropertyManager. You can place a single sketch on different planes in different configurations.

Sketch Relations in Configurations
You can control the suppression state of sketch relations per configuration.

Sketch Suppression State in Configurations

Split Parts in Configurations
You can control the configuration of a split part with a design table. This is available in part documents only.

Tolerances in Configurations

User Notes in Design Tables
The design table can include additional columns or rows for information only (notes, intermediate calculations and so on).

The use of design tables does require Microsoft Excel. Not every SOLIDWORKS user can be expected to have Excel, however, so SOLIDWORKS introduced Modify Configurations. Modify Configurations consists of four branches. Each branch is available by right-clicking on a related object as follows:

• Configure Feature – right-clicking a feature.
• Configure Dimension – right-clicking a dimension.
• Configure Component – right-clicking a component in an assembly.
• Configure Material – right-clicking a material in the Feature Manager. Materials can also be configured from the material dialog box.

In the Modify Configuration dialog box, the item to be configured will be displayed in a table similar to an Excel spreadsheet. Additional configurable items (i.e., a dimension) can be added by double-clicking on the item in the modelling area. The items to be configured are displayed along the top row of Modify Configuration dialog box. The configurations to be generated are entered and displayed down the left column. Potential configurations can also be renamed and deleted by right-clicking on the configuration.

Modify Configuration dialog box.

Modify Configuration can be used to only create configurations, but the configurations can be saved in a table view for future access.

Save table view.

While Modify Configuration does in make design tables unnecessary in many ways, it does not completely replace them. Some SOLIDWORKS add-ins, such as Routing, rely on design tables. Also, design tables can be shared and/or referenced between multiple SOLIDWORKS documents.

Another utility that requires design tables is the SOLIDWORKS Configuration Publisher. The Configuration Publisher makes it possible to access a configuration by selecting from predefined parameters.

Configure Component dialog box.

At the beginning of this article, we mentioned that it is often faster and easier to add configurations than it is to model a new part from scratch. We looked at the pin part from the Essentials course as an example of how we can vary the size of a part by using configurations. A pin is a relatively simple part. With more complex parts, there is greater potential for time savings through the use of configurations.

Based on what we have looked at so far, we may be tempted to say that configurations should be used universally for components that share some commonality. But like everything else in CAD, there are always compromises and shortcomings.

Configurations can cause bloating of files. Each configuration needs to store information on how it differs from the other configurations, and all of it is stored in the SOLIDWORKS file. The more configurations, the bigger file. The bigger the file, the more time it takes to load or rebuild it. If you have a fastener with thirty configurations used a hundred times in an assembly, that is 30 x 100 things that have to be reloaded and rebuilt every time. This will impact performance.

There is a tool to shrink those bloated configuration components. In SOLIDWORKS System Options, you can choose to purge cached configuration data in the Performance section.

SOLIDWORKS system options.

This will purge a fair chunk of the cached configuration information. But this, too, comes at a cost. When switching between configurations, all of the configuration information that was stripped away must be rebuilt when switching configurations. You can have better performance with opening files or on switching between configurations—but you can't have both.

Since configurations can make creating similar parts easier, many designers use configurations to design whole groups of parts. The problem with this strategy is that these groups of parts are not individual files. If you have assemblies or drawings that reference these different configurations that are all contained in a single file, which assembly or drawing does that file belong to? This use of configurations can make managing your data difficult. While this approach may save time in the near term, it can be much more costly in the long run. As I tell my SOLIDWORKS Essentials students, short-term gain can lead to long-term pain.

Besides, tools such as SOLIDWORKS' Pack & Go, or SOLIDWORKS PDM's Copy Tree, make it easy to create new similar parts. Most importantly, these are separate files that can be unambiguously referenced by an assembly or drawing.

I follow a simple rule when determining if individual files are required. If the form fit or function differs, then a separate file is needed. To simplify that even further, if there is a different part number, it's a new file.

A perceived and misguided advantage of configurations harbored by some is that configurations facilitate data management. These people state that instead of having thousands of parts, a company can have much fewer parts with several configurations. This theory is often held by those that consider Windows Explorer as a data management tool. However, Windows Explorer lacks the functionality to truly organize a company's design data. Since most companies' design data is their lifeline, should it really be entrusted to such a basic tool?

With SOLIDWORKS Workgroup being available since the early 2000s, why would a company choose to be bogged down with an unwieldy Windows Explorer folder structure? While Workgroup was clunky, it still beat having to create configurations to tame the data monster. What's more, Workgroup had decent search capabilities, access control, automated revisions and rudimentary lifecycles. These are things that are not part of a Windows Explorer environment.

With SOLIDWORKS PDM, SOLIDWORKS users have access to a more powerful data management tool. Like SOLIDWORKS Workgroup, each seat of SOLIDWORKS Professional and Premium ships with a seat of PDM Standard. This means that many companies already have a decent data management tool just waiting to be deployed.

At this point, you may be wondering if configurations have any use at all. In the right environment and used for the right application, configurations can still be a useful tool. Configurations lend themselves best to library or common components, that are not revision controlled. These are often purchased components such as fasteners. Ballooning file size is still something that needs to be managed, but with the application the SOLIDWORKS System Opens options discussed earlier, file bloating can be diminished.

In summary, do not let this article persuade or dissuade you from using configurations. Think of it as thorough look and an informed opinion, if anything. Its up to you to do your homework. See if configurations work for you in your particular situation, whether they are an advantage or an impediment.

Learn more with the eBook Gain Competitive Advantage with Product Data Management.

About the Author

Joe Medeiros is an Elite Applications Consultant at TRIMECH, a premier SOLIDWORKS reseller, servicing customers throughout North America, offering SOLIDWORKS customers expertise in implementing and using SOLIDWORKS solutions.

Joe has been involved in many aspects of the SOLIDWORKS product family since 1996 and as an award-winning blogger, he regularly writes about SOLIDWORKS solutions.

Figure 1. Top 10 list – 2022.

As we stated in the last year’s article on the same topic, the Product Definition Team works tirelessly throughout the year to pick the brains of the SOLIDWORKS users throughout the world in order to collect the best enhancement requests. They do that by using the Enhancement Request Program, participating on the SOLIDWORKS Forum and performing hundreds of in-person and virtual visits to see directly how the software is actually used in the real world and hear how to further improve it to address these real-world use cases.

In the months preceding the 3DEXPERIENCE World event, ideas for enhancing the software can be submitted and voted on in the Top 10 Ideas competition. As you will see, the voting process is very simple but only a small fraction of the 6 million SOLIDWORKS users will get involved. Most of them are too busy solving the challenges in their daily jobs to take the time to properly write and submit enhancement requests. As a result, most of the inspired ideas to improve SOLIDWORKS, the “Eureka” moments, are never communicated to the developers.

Even finding the time to read and vote on all the ideas submitted by users (there were 347 ideas this year alone) could prove difficult for many users.

If you are one of those busy users, this article will help you. Here we have a curated list of hyperlinks for the ideas we believe will make the most positive impact on your usage of SOLIDWORKS. To vote for them, simple click the hyperlink and press the like button (Figure 2). [Ed. You will have to have a Dassault Systèmes account.]

Figure 2. Like = vote.

1.      Make SOLIDWORKS Multi-Core

Benefits: Increased speed, reduced lag.

Figure 3.

Currently, SOLIDWORKS has quite a few areas that use multicore processing, including:

• Processing drawing views.
• Computing graphics tessellation.
• Allowing assembly and drawing manipulation (zoom in/out, pan) during the opening phase.
• Performing renderings.
• Performing simulation studies.

While inside a history-based part model, most operations must be processed sequentially—but there are a lot of other opportunities for multi-core processing. These are a few examples where SOLIDWORKS could take advantage of more CPU cores:

• Updating inactive drawing sheets in background.
• Updating inactive configurations.
• Gathering data for the Assembly Visualization list.
• BOMs.
• Loading components body data when an assembly opens.

2.      More Functionality for Breadcrumbs

Benefits: Increased productivity by working more directly in the graphics area.

Figure 4.

Breadcrumbs were a gamechanger for the productivity of SOLIDWORKS power users, allowing them to keep their eyes on the model in the graphics area and not require looking at the feature manager tree. Thus, they could focus on designing, not on hunting for planes, bodies, subassemblies or mates.

Currently, in an assembly, clicking a component shows its mates just above the breadcrumbs. It would be even more useful if double clicking the editable mates (distance, angle) allowed editing it in the graphics area similar to double clicking an editable mate in the feature tree.

3.      Ability to Replace Templates – AKA “Copy Document Properties Wizard”

Benefits: Update document settings in existing part and assembly files.

Figure 5.

Reading the description on the SOLIDWORKS website, we were confused because there can be no templates in the part or assembly files. After some head scratching, we were able to determine that the enhancement allows us to copy document properties from one file to another. Something similar to the functionality of the Copy Settings Wizard (which applies to System Options), but geared towards document properties.

Figure 6. Copy document properties wizard.

This will be extremely beneficial for CAD admins and power users if it can be applied to multiple files at a time (based on folders or other sorting criteria).

4.      Linear Pattern - Allow Staggers

Benefits: Reduce the feature manager tree length and make conceptual and revision work faster.

Figure 7.

SOLIDWORKS has improved the patterns tremendously in the last releases, but there is always the opportunity to do more.

One SOLIDWORKS user pointed out that another CAD program has settings that allow for staggering successive rows to produce patterns like this with one feature:

Figure 8.

Such a feature would save this company a lot of time, while also shrinking the feature manager tree.

All that is required is adding two fields in the property manager of the linear pattern related to staggering direction and dimensions.

5.      Provide a Better Way of Re-Attaching Dangling Dimensions

Benefits: Reduce time spent detailing during revisions.

Figure 9.

This idea’s title perfectly captures the intent. If you experienced frustration in the past when facing dangling dimensions, you will vote for it.

6.      When Parent Features are Suppressed, Children Should Have the Option to Remain Unsuppressed and Dangling or Having the External Relations Frozen

Benefits: Faster and more consistent model changes while preserving the design intent.

Figure 10.

In a part, if feature B references feature A and you delete feature A, feature B fails but isn’t deleted—and it can be repaired. 

But if you suppress feature A, feature B is automatically suppressed and can’t be edited. A user would like to be able to suppress feature A and “freeze” feature B so that it can be edited and have its references changed so it is not dependent on feature A anymore.

7.      Assembly: Duplicate Pattern

Benefits: Combine Insert Component with Instant Mate References – An unbelievable time-savings for assembly users.

Figure 11.

This idea is a gem that has gone unnoticed by the voters. Imagine you have a screw inserted 100 times in an assembly in various locations. All instances of the screw are mated.

Now, add a nut to the screw and mate it. Then simply use the new Duplicate Pattern to instantly copy the nut to all existing instances of the screw, along with its mates related to the original screw.

Genius? I know!

8.      Ability to Redefine the Horizontal Direction in a Sketch, By Selecting an Existing Edge or a Line from Another Sketch

Benefits: Double the speed when modifying sketches. Give the user full freedom to define the “paper” orientation for each sketch.

Figure 12.

Currently the only way to rotate or mirror “the paper” onto which a 2D Sketch was drawn is by using the Modify tool. It accepts only numerical values for rotation.

Imagine how useful such a tool would be if aligning sketches would work like the Align Drawing View command (Figures 13 and 14).

Figure 13.

Figure 14.

9.      Ability to Pattern Reference Geometry

Benefits: Reduce the length of the feature manager tree while making design intent easier to implement and modify.

Figure 15.

The title says it all. Imagine how much time you would save if you could pattern:

• Planes
• Axes
• Coordinate systems
• Sketches
• Curves

Currently the Variable Pattern can do some of that in a limited capability, but there is so much more that users need.

10. Allow More Options for Attaching Entities to Other Entities in Drawings

Benefits: Make drawings easier to use and modify.

Figure 16.

A simple example: attaching notes to BOM balloons. When the balloon moves, the note follows.

This will take the current grouping functionality to another level.

 Call for Action

The goal of this article is to make it very easy for any user to vote on a curated list of ideas. If you like any of them, voting is as simple as click and like.

We are sure that once you see how easy is to read the rest of the ideas, you may want to spend more time in the Top Ten List Community and find even more ideas worth voting for.

If you want to see which of the ideas made the Top Ten, you can attend this virtual session at 3DEXPERIENCE World 2022.

Learn about all the SOLIDWORKS 2022 enhancements with the ebook SOLIDWORKS 2022 Enhancements to Streamline and Accelerate Your Entire Product Development Process.

About the Author

As an Elite AE and Senior Training and Process Consultant, working for Javelin Technologies - a Trimech company, Alin Vargatu is a Problem Hunter and Solver.

He has presented 31 times at 3DEXPERIENCE World and SOLIDWORKS World, once at SLUGME and tens of times at SWUG meetings in Canada and the United States. His blog and YouTube channel are well known in the SOLIDWORKS Community.

In recognition for his activity in the SOLIDWORKS Community, at 3DEXPERIENCE World 2021, the SWUGN (SOLIDWORKS User Group Network) awarded the SOLIDWORKS AE of the Year title to Alin Vargatu.

Even more advanced topics around 2D CAD Admin, such as part numbering systems, revision control and storage techniques, have for decades served as fodder for heated debates with neither side backing down. We have all seen or been a part of these arguments.

Maybe these days we have a lot more going on and we don’t sweat the details as much, or maybe we have simply acquired the wisdom over the past decades to settle the arguments. Either way, it is the role of the CAD Admin to simplify the requirements and make design documentation easy to produce, follow, access and interpret.

Skeleton method, also called Layout Sketch drives 3D assemblies from 2D sketches and planes.

CAD Standards

3D CAD has now been around for several decades. Many companies have grappled with evolving CAD standards to include ideas such as referenced documents, metadata, design and assembly techniques and other technical details involved in making the tools work for our processes.

Every company should go through the process of writing a CAD Standards and Best Practice document for their users. Working through all levels of the product development process helps you understand them more thoroughly and understand how your organization’s process fits in to the scheme. The concepts developed during standard writing can be extended far beyond just CAD or engineering technology. Modern CAD admin is not just concerned with drawings.

It is tempting to take a simpler approach, but you should look at the entire CAD process. For some, drawings may be the most important output of the process, even if they are at the end. There are other processes to consider, some of which use the CAD data or a portion of it. All of the data you produce along the way is reusable and it all potentially has value for multiple groups down the road.

Because of this, you have to regulate how you make all the data, not just the 2D drawing. We won’t tell you how to make standards for 2D drawings; after decades of hashing through this, there should be a consensus. You can Google to find it. What is missing is how and why to make standards and best practice guidelines for your 3D data.

Standards for 3D data—what does that mean? What do standards for 3D data control? Do you become the feature police? The fully-defined sketch police?  To an extent, yes, but there are automated tools to help you deal with that level of detail. The main job of writing 3D standards is to create and infuse a CAD philosophy into your organization. How do you control high level concepts in CAD? Much of how you write documentation depends on your primary CAD tool. For example, Onshape requires very different management ideas than SOLIDWORKS and standards that document your CAD process need to reflect the difference.

Twenty years ago, there were no guidelines on how to do parametric history-based CAD. Like anything never done before, you need to work backwards, starting from the result you want to see and then figure out how to get there.

This will prevent users seeing a crazy idea on YouTube or at the last online user group meeting and deciding that they would show how smart they are by implementing it during the company’s new product design.

Settings for PDM driven document management, revision control and libraries should be a documented part of your best practice documentation.

Best Practices

Best practices for 3D CAD can be loosely defined as:

• Having no rigid rules. 
• Being different from CAD standards.
• Flexible suggestions to help prioritize options while keeping you from creating data that can’t be edited.
• Intended to help your company use the software as it is intended to be used.
• Allow some latitude for situations that require improvising.

When writing CAD standards, one approach is to treat all the data as if it is going into a PDM database. (Though if it is not going into a PDM database, it should be.) The first line of any CAD standard should be to specify which PDM product is being used. It should move through part numbering, revision control, attached metadata, additional embedded data and so on. You can include everything from service documentation to sales projections and actual results.

In real life application, CAD users at a company need to be using the same or similar processes—or to share a single CAD philosophy, if you will. What tools and techniques are used to reference a common layout for a large assembly? What references between parts do you use to position parts in an assembly? What level of analysis or simulation is required?

Best practice is a concept that is widely misunderstood, and not just in CAD circles. In particular, I have seen best practices imposed on a group by a manager who had no idea about technical content. They had found a list of “best practice” rules and imposed them without modification, without consideration and without knowing why. This leads to undue restriction, causing problems where none need exist, and a lot of strife and unnatural solutions. Don’t be that person. Best practice should make things easier, not harder.

The Difference Between Standards and Best Practice

Best practice is a set of soft guidelines that you need to employ right from the beginning, while standards are absolute requirements that generally start being employed after the best practice. Best practice guidelines keep you out of trouble, while standards help your organization look more professional. Best practices happen behind the scenes, while standards govern how you present yourself to people outside your department or company.

Standards for 3D Models

The reasons for creating CAD standards for 3D data are:

• Establish goals for training.
• Standardize design goals with other departments.
• Make sure that your data can be used across multiple versions of the software.

One of the most important things a standard should do is to codify your training. Standards and training need to go hand in hand. You can’t expect someone to deliver a model in a certain format without making sure they understand that format.

When you get official software training from a reseller, remember that the reseller has to teach everyone from jewelry artists to mining equipment manufacturers. The person doing the training doesn’t necessarily know what the sales demo person knows about your company. Therefore, what they teach you is general.

To teach your users properly, your company needs to have someone do specialized training based on real models from your company and real processes developed for or by you. It might be best if your CAD Admin can work with a training specialist to develop and possibly deliver the training. If you have a lot of users (more than 10), you might consider doing the training in phases.

Design standards are also important when you have to work with other organizations or departments that have certain constraints. For example, injection molding design is very dependent on constraints in the injection mold process, which in turn depend on what kind of hardware is available or realistic for a given product budget. Design is cheap compared to recreating tooling.

Also, when you have to work with a machine shop, designing in such a way that requires the shop to buy and maintain a lot of specialized tooling may not be necessary. It may make sense to agree on a set of holes, a set of minimum inside radius cutters or quarter round cutters to avoid putting everything on a 5 axis machine with a 1/16” ball end cutter.

Here are some examples of standards used at real companies:

• All brake-formed sheet metal parts must use the sheet metal tools in the software in the conventional way.
• All plastic assemblies where complex shapes span multiple parts must use the master model technique as laid out in an appendix.
• Plastic and cast parts should have the draft applied as separate features (not sketched or made as part of the extrude feature). Fillets should always come after draft in the feature tree. In cases that involve draft built into a complex shape, or where draft cannot be applied as a separate feature, use ruled surfaces to give a definite reference for the draft angle at the parting line.
• Plastic parts should always be built using the input of the tooling engineer. The tooling engineer will bring any changes to your model for moldability back to you, so make sure you get their input first.
• All mechanical actuator assemblies must be designed using the layout sketch functionality in SOLIDWORKS.
• Components created by machining process are required to use the set of approved hole features and small inside radii established by the machine shop and laid out in an appendix. This is to simplify tooling expense and tool crib inventory.

Best Practices are Not Absolute

The first thing to learn about best practices is what “best” should describe. The temptation is to take the word literally, as in the pinnacle, the one singular solution to the exclusion of all others.

Do you measure your CAD models by rebuild time? Sometimes, in part, maybe. How about time to model? Again, maybe. Do you even evaluate your models in any way? That answer should be a qualified “yes.” Do you measure a part by the extent to which you have followed best practice?

The word “best” in this situation should be interpreted to mean an optimized balance between several competing goals. Best practices are not yardsticks to measure results, but guides line to help you achieve your goals.

Best practices are really a set of recommendations that help different people with different skill levels and experience to work together on a set of data in such a way that anyone can pick it up and understand what’s going on. Best practices help avoid problems. The more experienced your group, the less you need to enforce best practices. For every rule you can write, there is almost always a time to break that rule. An experienced user will know both the rule and when to break it. Inexperienced players really need the guidelines the most to help keep them out of trouble, especially the ones who know enough to be dangerous.

Best Practice is Not Universal

There is a reason why you cannot just look up a set of SOLIDWORKS best practices on the Internet. It’s because there is no single set that works for every company.

Best practices for a group of surface modelers will be different from a group of people who design parts that will be machined from a block of aluminum. Working with splines is intrinsically different from working with lines and arcs. Knowledge of the manufacturing process has a definite influence on best practice.

Is motion really necessary for your model? Do you need in-context relations, or does a master model approach work better for what you are doing? File naming, storage, and PDM. Do you use boundary or loft features? How do you name features? Do you use folders for features? Does everyone work under their own unique Windows login to make feature trails easily identifiable?

How to Write Best Practices

Write best practices for the purpose of avoiding problems. What kind of mistakes cost you the most time? With that under your belt, move on to more complex problems. By picking the low hanging fruit first, you will have more experience by the time you get to dealing with problems that are harder to identify and/or solve.

Where possible, document problems and solutions with actual examples from your data sets. Provide things such as templates, settings files, installation recommendations, network set up and most of all, give reasons why. A command to do something without justification may hinder its acceptance.

Avoid absolute language where you can. For example, try not to use words like “never” or “always” without qualification. There are very few things that you should ban entirely. For example, although it is usually a bad idea to leave errors in the model, sometimes you have to leave the model with an error state until you come back to work on it, or leave it for a more experienced user or until you have more information. Sometimes the software will not allow you to correct an error, or requires a creative method to delete the error without deleting a lot of other work. Be careful of how forcefully you say things.

Because you hired intelligent people and because you hired people you trust, make sure that they know you trust them. Where you have conflicting criteria, make sure your people know what the priorities of the business are. For example, if you have stated “fully dimensioned sketches are our #1 priority” and someone runs a macro that reads 1,000 points into a 3D sketch, can you still insist that fully dimensioned sketches are your #1 priority? Not really. Time is important and even more than that is the wise use of time. Dimensioning 1,000 points in 3D space would be a colossal waste of time. Instead, lock the sketch down and give it a name that warns people not to edit the sketch.

One of the things you need to keep in mind as you write the best practices document is how you intend to enforce it. Will your CAD Admin go through each drawing or model and approve it? Is it self-governing? Peer reviewed? Is there a best practice review as part of a drawing sign-off? Be aware that enforcing best practices may itself cost you some time. Of course, catching mistakes may save you some time.

Start With a Best Practice Template

There are a few pre-existing design philosophies that you may be able to borrow from. Some people have gone to great lengths to think out a set of rules or suggestions to help people make models that are more resilient to changes. Examples of these exist for horizontal modeling, resilient modeling and skeleton sketch techniques. These are fairly specific in their recommendations and mostly help you organize information. More general ideas would be things such as in-context modeling, master model techniques, layout sketches, multi-body methods and so on.

You can start by doing research and trying to understand some of these ideas and then combining the best of each to see what works for your company’s workflow.

Resilient Modeling System is a structured method for building editable assemblies.

Establishing Best Practice is a Technical Job

Make sure that if your best practices are written by a committee. The committee should employ your user with the best technical knowledge of the settings. If your best practice committee doesn’t know about the Freeze Bar or the Make Reference Sketch options, they might fall prey to recommend the deletion of all references and saving parts and assemblies as a Parasolid at the end of a project. That would be a huge waste of time and it kills the data design intent and re-usability.

It’s not a bad idea to have someone check your work. You might be able to run a draft of a best practice document by your reseller tech support organization. You might even consider hiring a consultant to help you find the best answers, or to settle disputes.

Summary

After it is all said and done, here’s what you can expect from a well-executed best practices document:

• It should save you time rather than cost you time.
• It is a set of suggestions or guidelines rather than strict rules.
• It is flexible, as long as you know where to bend the rules.
• It helps everyone in your organization work efficiently toward a common goal.

And remember, you can always borrow from pre-existing guidelines and don’t be afraid to call for help from those who have done it before.