Buchli knows manufacturing from both sides, high-tech and otherwise. Born on a Nebraska farm, he spent years working in a machine shop and is a veteran SOLIDWORKS user. He now programs robots and promotes automation for Dassault Systèmes.

This is Part 2 of our interview with Buchli. Part 1 is available to read here.

What does automation look like in manufacturing?

Automation comes in all shapes and sizes. There are no two companies that are the same; even if they produce the same goods, they still are different. They all have different methodologies. Automation can be putting in a pick and place, or it could be a conveyer system to move bulky material.

We have one customer that does sheet metal forming where the part weighs 100 pounds. It takes two people to bend that part, and a full 8-hour day. Nobody wanted to do it because that's a lot of labor. We took that 100-pound part and put it in a robotic bending cell. This freed up the employees to bend the small parts.

Sometimes, automation is just work balancing. You don't have to do the bad things. Instead, we'll automate that part and allow you to continue to do the things that benefit from you doing them.

Can a factory be fully automated?

Everybody's on a different journey with a different starting point. Some companies are more fully automated than others. Other companies are doing point solutions. For example, they can't get anyone to weld anymore, so they put in a robotic welder.

How hard is it to get people to work in manufacturing these days?

To attract people into manufacturing, there must be jobs that they want to do. How do we get those people and solve this problem? We give them tools to allow them to be successful in something that they want to do. It may sound like we're caving to what everybody wants to do, but let’s face it: no one is going to work in a dirty environment. We have to change that environment.

The other thing is that manufacturing companies all end up on the same side of town. Go to a city and there will be an industrial area where all the manufacturing is done. All those companies will fight over the same employees, and there are a limited number of people who can get to that area. If you are in a rural area like where I am, there’s a shortage of people and some of these small towns cannot support an influx of new people.

That's where tools like manufacturing platforms can be useful. I can write a program to program the robots offline and send it to the small-town shop. Here in Lincoln, Nebraska, I can go find the best talent for my specific manufacturing need because I can connect them virtually to my facility without having them move to Nebraska.

Is the expense of robots a deterrent to automation?

A robot can cost $30,000 to $100,000. But look at the wages of a manufacturing employee compared to the cost of one robotic cell. Even in the middle of rural Nebraska, that is $25 to $30 an hour, plus health care, plus unemployment. Soon you’re up to $100,000 per employee—whether they're effective or not.

Robots on the shop floor. Picture from 3DEXPERIENCE World 2023.

If not the expense, then what is stopping automation?

I sit in on a lot of groups to hear why, and there’s one theme common to them all. They know they have to do something; we know we need to put in automation, but we don't know how to do it. We don't know how to make the right choices. A lot of companies don’t get started because they don't want to make the wrong choice. It's not a matter of people. It's because there is no one to guide them on their journey and ensure their success. A lot of companies don't buy a robot, or they put in a robot and don't know how to use it.

Is this a matter of lack of education?

No. All it takes is someone with the ability to learn technology. A lot of robot programming and factory simulation is like a video game. Anyone who can learn SOLIDWORKS can do it. It doesn't matter if they have a degree, because in 3D you can see it.  

Is the perception of the manufacturing environment changing?

Yes, that is one of the challenges. Manufacturing still has the perception of being a dirty, unsafe environment—not high-tech, which is what it really is. Think about what is on TV these days. Firefighting dramas, police dramas, doctor dramas… only certain professions. You’re not going to see a robot programmer nicely dressed in Grey’s Anatomy. No, it’s going to be a greased-up guy that got his finger cut off in the machine shop. The doctor will be the hero. You might get one episode of a show where they go to a manufacturing or automotive facility and it’s always dirty, dark and dingy. No wonder parents are telling their kids, “You need to be a doctor, a lawyer…”

People are missing that manufacturing is very high-tech and very clean. Most of it anyway. And the jobs are well-paid. You can make a good, sustainable life for yourself in manufacturing doing high-tech work.

How hard is it for women and minorities in manufacturing?

Again, it comes down to the perception of manufacturing. Because traditional manufacturing jobs require backbreaking labor, right? Pick up these heavy parts and put them in this machine. But it's becoming high-tech and clean, and you can work remotely because you can connect through platform applications. There’s not much awareness that these jobs are for everyone. We’re still positioning the manufacturing workforce as being one way, and so we're missing a lot of the workforce. Studies and stats have shown women are way more detail-oriented than men. That’s what robot programming is: detail oriented. And clean.

Read Part 1 of our interview with Mike Buchli for more about manufacturing automation.

Buchli often finds he’s fighting a headwind from manufacturers who are dominated by design, as well as design software vendors. Both of these treat the manufacture of products as a thankless, trivial final step, with little for the manufacturing function to do because the product has been fully defined. Why not simply throw it over the wall and have the machine shop make it?

That does not work these days, says Buchli—for a variety of reasons.

There is a shortage of people in the manufacturing sector, for one thing. For another, manufacturing these days is anything but trivial; in fact, it’s downright complicated. You don’t just have a machinist with a Bridgeport [milling machine] anymore. You have 3D printing, 5-axis milling machines, EDM, custom manufacturing and robots. You need to know programming. A whole new skillset is needed for manufacturing today, and few people have it.

Born and raised in Nebraska, Buchli brings a "farmer's ingenuity” to a small manufacturing team centered in Dassault Systèmes’ North America headquarters in Waltham, Mass. He has been there for seven years.

What did you do before joining Dassault Systèmes?

I was a Dassault Systèmes customer using SOLIDWORKS, PDM, Simulation and the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.

What was your first job at Dassault Systèmes?

I spent the first five years in R&D helping take SOLIDWORKS into the mainstream.

Why do we have a shortage of people in manufacturing?

People don’t want to work in mundane jobs anymore. Think of cashiers at Walmart. Who wants to be a cashier? Nobody. So, Walmart puts in automated checkout, and that increased throughput. That’s happening all over.

Manufacturing also requires lots of mundane activity and repetition. You load in a part, then you take it out. Load it in, take it out. The manufacturing sector is suffering from a lack of people wanting to do this. Humans like to be higher-level thinkers. They don't want to be the person that only replaces the part every two minutes.

You couple that with the pandemic, and in the last couple of years, a lot of people stayed home. They had the chance to hit the pause button and rethink their lives. They were like, ‘we don't want to do that anymore.’ It was going to happen anyway, but the pandemic accelerated it. And now we have a problem. We’re in a world where we have to produce more than ever because people consume more than they ever have. But we don't have the people to make things.

How are we going to solve this problem? We can solve it through automation.

You’re saying that if you have a robotic job, you ought to be replaced by a robot, so you could move on to other, better jobs?

Yes. Companies don't want to remove people. What they want is to have people do what they're built to do, which is work in higher functioning jobs. Take the person loading a voting machine. They can train a robot to do that. They know what skills are needed and what has to happen. Have the robot do it, and they become the robot programmer.

You think of robots as not getting rid of people, but liberating them? But do you deny that there will be dislocation in the short term? Not everybody can be a robot programmer. Some people may not get other jobs.

Yes, it’s true. Not everybody gets to go along on the journey. But at the same time, if they're doing a job just for the sake of a job, even if they don't have the skillset to do the higher end [work], it isn't really helping them. They're in a job where they're not able to flourish. Everyone’s life is a journey, but a lot of time, people get stuck in one place because that was the only opportunity available at the time.

How does that relate to your journey?

I started out as a manufacturing engineer and did drafting and engineering and design patent stuff. All the time, I was thinking of continuous improvement and automation. There were a number of jobs that I got into where it was doing one thing every day in drafting and engineering, over and over and over, like a machine. It was CAD in the early days. I was making drawings. Lines, arcs, circles. They didn’t want to hear about your ideas for continuous improvement. That wasn’t a good fit for me.

You were essentially a robot? Your intellectual gifts were not being used. You liberated yourself?

Yes. Look at what happened in engineering. Parametric modeling came along and allowed drafters to become designers. We're seeing the same thing in manufacturing. The machine operator that just loads and unloads the same part every two minutes is no different than the drafter in 1999.

You propose freeing the mind. What else?

In an assembly line the work is repetitive, not ergonomic and a drain on the human body. You can get carpal tunnel or a bad back. Humans aren’t good at this, and it’s bad for them. We can take a look at that work. If it puts a human in a repetitive, bad situation, we can have automation do it. We owe it to that working human to solve their problem, because there is a long-term health risk.

Take painting an automobile. Automotive manufacturers used to have guys in the paint booth painting cars to go down the line. Now it’s all done with robots. Workers are not breathing in fumes and their health does not suffer in the long term. Even with all the PPE [person protective equipment], workers still come into contact with chemicals. That guy in the body shop that has been painting for 30 years. He’s not a healthy guy.

Stay tuned for more on manufacturing automation in Part 2 of our interview with Dassault Systèmes’ Michael Buchli.

Dassault Systèmes has launched a bold initiative to draw in makers, offering them the company’s professional mainstream solid modeler as the main component of a special offering called 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Makers. We sought out Suchit Jain, SOLIDWORKS 3DEXPERIENCE Works Strategy and Business Development VP, to find out what type of makers SOLIDWORKS plans to add to their SOLIDWORKS maker community.

A model of a motorcycle dragster fits over a child’s wheelchair. Costume designers, such as Magic Wheelchair, and other makers, will be able to get 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Makers for $99 a year. (Picture courtesy of Dassault Systèmes.)

“The makers that we are targeting with 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Makers is a subset of all the makers,” explained Jain. “We are not going after makers of arts and crafts. Our makers will have some digital content, whether it be 2D design files or 3D print files.”

What kind of people are these? Woodworkers who work in 2D. Cosplay (costume play) designers [we remember Christine Getman and Magic Wheelchair who we last saw at a SOLIDWORKS user conference], garage mechanics and hot rodders—all those that have a need for 3D design but have found the cost of SOLIDWORKS prohibitive.

Riding the dragon. Jason Pohl on an OCC custom made chopper. (Picture courtesy of JasonPohl.com)

Jason Pohl Carries the Maker Flag

The poster child for 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Makers may be maker-extraordinaire Jason Pohl. Pohl is so glad that makers have access to professional 3D design software at an affordable price that he has signed up as the initiative’s “brand ambassador.”

Low price is #1 for makers, says Pohl. Never before have makers had access to professional 3D design software.

“You can rake leaves and make $99 bucks,” says Pohl.

Pohl is a SOLIDWORKS user favorite. Many saw Pohl first on the hit reality show Orange County Chopper, designing the super-stylized Harley Davidson powered motorbikes. They were delighted to see Pohl, along with the Teutuls—the volatile father and son team that led the OCC business—on stage at the 2005 SOLIDWORKS World in Orlando. Preceding them was John McEleney, then VP of Marketing, making what to this day remains the most memorable—and loudest—entrance ever after he fired up an OCC creation and rode it on to the main stage. The SOLIDWORKS chopper is currently displayed at Dassault Systèmes North America headquarters in Waltham. Many companies followed suit, commissioning OCC for their very own branded chopper.

Pohl, a classically trained artist (Bachelor in Fine Arts from the Illinois Institute of Art – Schaumberg) working as an animator in his home state, leapt at the chance to move to upstate New York to work with the Teutuls. To render art on macho metal machines with the world watching—what a dream job.

A Design Business is Born

But the volatility of the Teutuls was too much; the family flameouts spectacular and Orange County Chopper burnt out. From its ashes emerged Jason Pohl’s own design business. (The spirit of Orange County Chopper was revived to live on in Paul Teutul, Sr.’s motorcycle-themed OCC Roadhouse and Museum in Clearwater, Florida.)

SOLIDWORKS users relate to Pohl and vice versa. Pohl is like them in many respects. He uses math, works with metal and big engines on machines that go fast. But Pohl’s work is—let’s face it—better looking than most SOLIDWORKS creations.

“You want the best possible outcome when you design and aesthetics is a big part of that,” says Pohl, who nevertheless understands that our circumstances may dictate otherwise. “Okay, if it is something no one will see, it’s under the hood, it holds a hose, then go ahead, let it rip, who cares how it looks. But if is out there in the open, why not make it look good?”

While the rest of Pohl’s graduating class from the Illinois Institute of Art may paint and sculpt, frequent museums and galleries, wine and cheese parties and jazz clubs, Pohl prefers his garage and workshop.

“I’m in my own lane,” says Pohl. Indeed, his style and his chosen media defies classification. What could you call his futuristic concept cars, customized Harleys, knives, an axe or two and the dragon’s head on display in his gallery? American Male Modernist, perhaps.

Pohl’s choice of media being steel, fiberglass and rubber grants him easier entry into the world of engineers than the world of artists. It is the entry of a Trojan horse, with an artistic flair that engineers can relate to and with a beauty we can’t admit to wanting. Beautiful, elegant, flowing, sexy shapes that make our designs seem so primitive, all cut square and straight, banged into place with hammers. Pohl’s designs are so seductive we stretch to justify them. They have to be more aerodynamic, right?

xShape the Most Welcome Concepting Tool

Pohl has become a fan of xShape, which lets him push and pull on a rectangular solid (it’s a sub-D modeler) until it becomes a gas tank, a swoopy headlight holder, or whatever else. Any organic shape he might have once made in clay in art school—the shapes of OCC’s custom designs, shapes that would be complex in SOLIDWORKS—are child’s play with xShape, which lets you work the shape until you get the shape you want.

A seventeen-year veteran of SOLIDWORKS, Pohl tried valiantly to use SOLIDWORKS for everything, wrestling it to make it give him the shapes he imagined. He used surfacing tools in SOLIDWORKS, mastering complex guide curves, lofting and with heroic measures, he was able to achieve C2 continuity.  

“With the right people using the right tools, you will get the right results,” says Pohl, quite charitably. “There really is no easy button.”

But he was to find that “easy button” in xShape, which he claims to be the perfect tool for the curvaceous shapes he specializes in.

“xShape is amazing,” he says. “It just makes it so much easier. C1 and C2 continuity is built in.”

The xShape app is included in 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Makers offer for $99/year.

Making a Happier World

Jason Pohl turns a power tool into a motorcycle. (Picture courtesy of JasonPohl.com.)

Pohl’s advice to young makers is make something they want to make. It is now easier to make than ever before.

“You used to have something called a library,” he says. “But now all that information is at your fingertips.”

Being creative and making things will make the world a better place. If we were all to make things, we’d be happier, more satisfied… and kinder.

“We’d help the old lady across the street, not flip off the old lady,” says Pohl.

Pohl sees the Internet as somewhat of a dark place, full of trolls, everyone is a critic and no-one a creator. Pohl had to abandon social media during his time at Orange County Chopper, tiring of the unforgiving scrutiny of the masses.

“I didn’t want to hear that green was not someone’s favorite color,” he says.

Pohl is glad to be able to make what he wants to make. He doesn’t have to confine his art to two wheels.

Pohl is a father of four, with children of “6, 4, 3 years and one 5 months.” Working in his home workshop allows him time with the kids, his wife and a design business that has bloomed.

Doing the Math

It was a riot, says Pohl, recalling his days at Orange County Chopper in the most favorable way. He got to work with Fortune 500 companies, he learned a lot about how a hit show is produced and OCC provided Jason some measure of fame. There’s a lot to making a show, he says, not all of it pure art.

“It was a lot about ad sales and product placement,” he says.

However, from the show, he made connections at SOLIDWORKS, the design software company. After mastering the design software, he is able to satisfy his inner engineer.

“I had a battle with math,” says Pohl of his days as a student. He couldn’t relate to abstract mathematics, math without context, devoid of practical application, i.e., the math engineers are forced to learn.

“But I find I am surrounded by math,” says Pohl, and to his surprise, he is good at it.

All it took was the application of math to something he loved to create, like calculating the volume of a teardrop shaped motorcycle gas tank.

“I can do that.”

Still, Pohl respects the role of engineers and is careful to not represent himself as a degreed engineer.

“I’m an artist,” he insists. “I only pretend to be an engineer.”

The Business of Making

For every product designer and design engineer, the core audience for SOLIDWORKS users, many more are makers. For one reason or another, makers take a different, non-traditional or part-time path to making things compared to engineers. You might end up as a maker after being filtered out of the engineering profession by math classes. Engineering schools use math classes like the military uses bootcamp and end up filtering out much needed talent. Creative genius does not always carry an engineering degree. For example, Leonardo da Vinci, Elon Musk… Jason Pohl.

After 26 years of existence, SOLIDWORKS may have saturated the available pool of professional users in its main markets. Everyone who could be using SOLIDWORKS full time already is. How many will buy another license for personal use is something Dassault Systèmes is certainly exploring to expand the addressable market. At the same time, why not try to reach the infrequent user, the younger and/or budget-conscious user, offering them a professional grade design tool that previously they could only have dreamt of using?

“We recognize that even SOLIDWORKS users by day would have projects in their off-time that could benefit from SOLIDWORKS,” says Jain.

Therefore, an engineer could make furniture in his garage workshop after designing them in the software they are familiar with – at a greatly reduced price.

“It does not make sense for them to buy another license of SOLIDWORKS,” says Suchit Jain, adding that 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Makers will keep them from having to use unfamiliar, inferior tools just to save money.

Preventing a Runaway Hit

All 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Makers models and drawings will be digitally watermarked. The files produced by the Maker platform will display with a gear icon (shown above). These files cannot be brought into a commercial SOLIDWORKS program but can be imported though neutral files such as .stp or .iges. Other than that, 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Makers will have all the bells and whistles of the commercial product.

Files created with 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Makers will show up a with an icon of a gear with an "m" in it.

“We are enabling the learning of SOLIDWORKS,” says Jain, by making a lot of product available to makers that costs professionals several thousand dollars.  

“We still have our business with professionals who use our products during the day,” says Jain. “But we don’t want to charge a high price to those who want to learn our software and those who make no money with what they make. Like the hobbyist.”

The maker offering is not meant for those earning more than $2,000 a year from their creations.

A Little Help

SOLIDWORKS, not the type of application you can pick up in one day and use it the next, makes us wonder how users will be helped or trained to use 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Makers.

Communities will be formed to help with software onboarding, says Jain. User champions have been enlisted. In addition to Jason Pohl, other maker champions include Joel Telling, who runs the popular 3D Printing Nerd YouTube channel.

Goal Keeping

Is the 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Maker initiative to lure users in and convert them into commercial users? “We expect some may do that, but that is not the goal,” says Jain.

“Our goal is to have 50,000 makers as part of our SOLIDWORKS Maker community in the first year,” says Jain. “After three years, we hope to have 300,000. We may have to ramp users up from the initial $99/year, like we do with the Start Up program, in which start-ups pay 25 percent more each year, but for now, that is not definite.”

Find out more here: https://discover.solidworks.com/makers.

Gian Paolo Bassi, CEO of DS SOLIDWORKS. (Image courtesy of DS SOLIDWORKS.)

In today’s world, engineers must be smart and connected. This is also true of the products they design. The products of yesterday may have worked well, but too often they sat still and kept to themselves. Now those products are considered obsolete. The products of today must include computing and communications – put together in a nice package, they could be the next big thing.

We had a chance to speak with Gian Paolo Bassi on the subject of innovation. The ever-passionate CEO of Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS is on a roll about how we need a platform for innovation—and how he is going to provide it. Bassi points to amazing successes with innovative products and he is determined that SOLIDWORKS users will have everything they need to create the next big thing when the inspiration hits them.

A Nest thermostat. (Image courtesy of Nest.)

The “Nest” Big Thing

“Take the thermostat,” said Bassi. Invented in 1985, Honeywell bought the patent in the early 1990s. It sat on walls for an entire century, doing nothing but running the furnace. The only change came relatively recently with a programmable schedule.

Then Nest added WiFi to the thermostat. Now it programs itself, sensing the needs of the house and its inhabitants. The thermostat has at last been reborn and it’s suddenly fun to use. The true measure of its success? Google bought Nest for $3.2 billion and hundreds of thousands of units sell every month.

Withings Weighs In

Just like the thermostat, the bathroom scale was anything but fun. For some, it was even the enemy.

The Withings Smart Body Analyzer and the Withings Health Mate app track your fitness and health levels. (Image courtesy of Withings.)

Then came the Withings Smart Body Analyzer. It can of course measure weight, but then it connects to smartphones with the Health Mate app. It is smart enough to distinguish which member of the household is using it. It can compare a person’s body metrics (body fat, BMI, heart rate) to others of similar ages.

It will plot these metrics over time and provide reports. It even claims to sense air quality and give weather reports to encourage you get out and get moving. It’s not a scale anymore; it’s a tool to manage your health.

The Nest thermostat and the Withings scale haven’t just differentiated themselves from the competition. They’ve changed the game altogether.

More Than the Shape

Bassi is not content that SOLIDWORKS has become the standard language for mechanical design. The way he sees it, engineers are just defining a product’s physical shape in 3D – but SOLIDWORKS can do more. It can provide data management and simulation. It provides tools through an ecosystem of partners, including some for manufacturing. If that wasn’t enough, DS SOLIDWORKS is always acquiring new technologies. Does an engineer have everything necessary to produce the next big thing?

We don’t have enough, according to Bassi. The current version of SOLIDWORKS is a design platform but the future SOLIDWORKS will be a true innovation platform.

“An innovation platform has all of these little things that are necessary to make your innovation happen magically […]. You will be faster, more imaginative,” he said.

Engineers love to draw on whatever is handy.

Napkin 2.0

Innovation can happen during a conversation. Engineers are known for grabbing a pen and sketching on whatever is handy – even napkins.

“The tools need to be [minimally] intrusive because you need to let your creativity and ideas flow,” said Bassi.

Sketching has to occur naturally in the preliminary stages. Drawing with a pen doesn’t provide a complex mathematical representation of the drawing; it just helps capture a gesture easily. That’s all you need.

SOLIDWORKS Conceptual Designer was introduced three years ago. With it, users can sketch as if with pencil and paper and see models in 3D. (Image courtesy of CAD Insider.)

Once the idea is captured, engineers need to be able to share it easily. Sending an email to a friend or posting on a social network – this is the kind of communication needed for an innovation platform. It is vital to innovation. It needs to be built in. It needs to get people involved and connect them.

The key is that a design innovation platform is much more than messaging or email or even PLM. When you share a design, you need embedded tools that let you interact with the design, analyze it, animate it and put it into context.

Hey, Good-Looking

“An innovation platform will need to take a holistic view of a product,” said Bassi. “Yesterday’s engineer may have said, ‘Wow, this is a nice shape. It can be injection-molded. Done.’ But there are many aspects of innovative designs that also must be considered.”

Bunkspeed rendering. (Image courtesy of Vasileios Thalassinos.)

One of these aspects is aesthetics. The immediate visual impact and simple good looks of the Nest thermostat have no doubt contributed to its success. The importance of a product’s appearance is something that consumers and market researchers know only too well, but it can be overlooked in the engineering stage. Without any tools to simulate or improve a product’s appearance, engineers can be prone to dismissing aesthetics as just “pretty pictures.”

DS SOLIDWORKS doesn’t just recognize the need for aesthetically appealing products: it has acquired Bunkspeed to get it done. Bunkspeed, used for photorealistic rendering and ray tracing, was rebranded as Visualize in SOLIDWORKS 2016 and relegates CAD images without the bright colors.

(Image courtesy of SOLIDWORKS.)

Can’t Ignore Electronics

For a design that includes electronics and circuits (and what doesn’t these days?), SOLIDWORKS Electrical includes a host of electrical design and analysis products along with wire harnesses.

“A” Is for “Aided”

Part of being an innovation platform is harnessing the power of today’s computers.

Bassi reminds us that the “A” in CAD stands for “aided.” This started back in the ‘80s when CAD moved the industry from hand drawings to computer renderings, but Bassi means to raise the bar much higher.

“The computer should really aid you—it should really read your mind,” Bassi said.

SOLIDWORKS has a very futuristic technology that lets the computer design for you. You can give SOLIDWORKS two configurations for a mechanism—for example, a locking latch or even a robotic arm with multiple degrees of freedom—and the software will determine the optimal path for all parts of the mechanism.

Design Search

SOLIDWORKS also aims to provide geometric search functions, which Bassi compares to a Google search.

“You know how Google fills in your search term even before you are done typing?” he asked. “We want to make it like that for parts you are making in SOLIDWORKS.”

The concept is that as a user creates a bracket in SOLIDWORKS, the software will search through libraries of parts to find anything similar and then suggest it to you. It could be a part that already exists within your company or a similar part that can be ordered from another manufacturer. This would help reduce the time wasted in making parts that already exist, which happens maddeningly often at all companies. Bassi estimates his customers have 20-30 percent part duplication.

This parts search is based on EXALEAD technology. Dassault Systèmes currently offers EXALEAD OnePart, which finds parts based on similar shape and can already be used by companies to reduce part inventory.

Rapid Cycling

An innovation platform should enable engineers to experiment with variations of a design and cycle through permutations either virtually or physically.

“Innovation is about a very rapid round-trips of ideas,” said Bassi. “You want to develop something, show it to somebody, make sure that it fulfills the needs of your target audience and then you go back to do it again.”

“What makes an innovation platform is the extreme simplicity when going from ideas to visual things,” Bassi said.

The innovation platform shouldn’t just do visual prototypes, though. It should also aid in physical prototypes. This means supporting 3D printing, waterjet cutting, laser cutting, CNC and more.

Manufacturing Marketplace

MySolidWorks.com, an online hub for SOLIDWORKS, has a few hints of what is to come for SOLIDWORKS users. It has been adding manufactures with little fanfare, already featuring 100 and aiming for thousands.

The hope is that the site will let SOLIDWORKS users pick from local, national and international vendors to create the part they need. It wouldn’t matter whether the user doesn’t have a machine shop or has a shop that’s simply too busy – the selected vendor would create the prototype and ship it to your doorstep.

While the current plan for manufacturing involves users picking vendors from a list, the future plan is far more ambitious. Bassi plans to create a system in the style of Uber, in which a part in need of manufacturing is put up for the community at large and whoever can meet the cost and delivery requirements can take it on.

Bassi’s example is a small machine shop with idle cutting tools. This shop does no marketing and can only hope to be found by locals or with a Google search. If it was part of a universally inclusive platform, anyone could find and interact with it.

Supply and demand already exists with services like Uber and Airbnb, both of which increase supply by enlisting individuals with surplus resources – but the magic would be in the platform, according to Bassi.

The concept for a supply and demand fulfillment service in manufacturing is simple and brilliant. It would complete an innovation platform, providing all the necessary concept, collaboration and multidisciplinary design tools. At the end of the process, the engineer would simply cast out to find someone to make the part in its physical form.

This level of speed, efficiency and ease-of-use would enable the engineer to move quickly from one concept to the next, increasing the chances of finding the next big thing.

For more information, please visit the SOLIDWORKS website.

About the Author

Roopinder Tara has been into CAD, CAM and CAE for his entire professional life, as an engineer, CAD manager, professor and publisher. He has written numerous publications on CAD, design and engineering. He has a bachelors in mechanical engineering, masters in engineering science and is a certified professional engineer.

Breadcrumb Menu UI Icons Reduce Mouse Movements

Remember the trail of breadcrumbs left by Hansel and Gretel to find their way out of the Black Forest? That is sort of what software designers were trying to duplicate when they created navigation structures that look like this:

All products>> Mechanical>> Fasteners>> Metric>> Steel>> Screws

Breadcrumb menus in a part (left) and in an assembly (right).

The idea is that you can find your way back, either through the forest or through your command structure. SOLIDWORKS has chosen to create its version of a breadcrumb trail and have applied it to menus.

The breadcumb menus are coupled with a heads-up display that passes information that is relevant and necessary to where you are already looking, and if it works well for fighter pilots, then it works well for software, too.

Many menus now work in a breadcrumb approach. Rather than displaying all options, breadcrumb menus show only the selections that are appropriate, so they can reduce the clutter of conventional UI menu and icon systems. Plus they show very linearly a command progression, allowing the user to back up to a previous command.

With SOLIDWORKS 2016, users can press the D key (D for default) to get the breadcrumb menus to appear at the cursor — which will save you not only a lot of mouse travel but also a lot of eye travel as well. A little time saved will add up over the day, and more importantly allow you to interact with SOLIDWORKS closer to the speed of your thoughts.

For example, if a face is selected, you will get access to information on that face, its feature (like a loft) and its part. You will also see the commands for what you might do to the face.

The D key not only works with breadcrumb menus. Press D when a confirmation is required and the confirmation box scoots toward the cursor, saving you from having to mouse all the way to the corner of the screen. With 4K monitors (if you are lucky enough to have one), that is a lot of pixels you will have to traverse.

Here is an example from SOLIDWORKS of how the breadcrumb menus work in conjunction with the control D key.

Courtesy of SOLIDWORKS, users will appreciate that the confirmation of commands is now handier than ever. Image courtesy of Dassault Systèmes.

SOLIDWORKS 2015 mouse tracking (left) shows many forays into the menu and icon areas of the interface, which are reduced to almost none with SOLIDWORKS 2016 with the use of the D key.

Use of the heads-up display was no doubt a major contributor in SOLIDWORKS’s claim that 2016 reduces mouse travel significantly (20 percent across the board and by about half in the example shown above).

Is That SOLIDWORKS Part Made of Glass? Didn’t Think So

An interesting new feature in SOLIDWORKS 2016 is that when you pick a part, it turns transparent as if it was made of glass. This lets you see what that part might be obscuring in an assembly. Additionally, your mouse clicks can go right through “the glass” to any part behind it. This makes selection in complex assemblies ever so much easier.

This works particularly well when you are selecting mating parts. Pick the first part to mate and it turns transparent. You can see every part around it and you can pick right through the first part as if wasn’t there.

An Easy Tool to Add Threads to a Model? You’re Twisting My Arm

The thread definition tool lets you specify all parameters, including standard threads.

Threads, long the bane of solid models, can now be made easily in the software.

Finally, after all these years of faking threads with a call out, we can show threads as they appear in real life.

With SOLIDWORKS 2016, you can invoke a thread command, pick the proper parameters (size, pitch and length) and the thread is automatically generated. You can now put real threads easily on a part that will be 3D printed — something that cannot be done with a call out.

Here’s what the thread feature can do:

• Create several standard size threads, English or metric
• Create custom threads with the following parameters that can be stored in a library for future use

Start location
Offset
End conditions
Type
Size
Diameter
Pitch
Rotation angle
Left hand or right hand

And so ends 20 years of connivance, users faking helical threads with circular threads, users trying to sweep tooth profiles along helical paths, users generating routines or buying add-ons, users following lengthy video tutorials, and software vendors convincing us that you don’t really need to show the real thread. We’ll give you a call out. Now it’s in the software.

But pardon me for asking for more. Would it be too much trouble to have SOLIDWORKS make thread suggestions that were size appropriate for a part? For example, if you are putting threads on a 0.25-inch diameter shaft, shouldn’t it suggest a ¼ UNC-20 or ¼ UNF 28 thread?

An Improved Two-Step Sweep Function

Sweep created easily by selecting a path specifying a diameter.

Old way

1. Create a 3D curve profile
2. Create a plane on one end of it
3. Create a sketch of a circle and give it a diameter
4. Sweep the circle

New way

1. Create a 3D curve
2. Define the diameter
3. Done.

Howdy, My Quick-Draw Mate

SOLIDWORKS 2016 has promoted the profile center mate to the quick mates toolbar. In his demo, SOLIDWORKS’s Mark Schneider stated the promotion of the profile center mate to be the biggest productivity enhancement of all. The profile center mate also works beautifully to put screws and shafts in holes.

With it, the center of a profile, either rectangular or circular, can be rapidly aligned with another. One click and it’s all over. This may have taken several mates previously.
Additionally, you have the option of flipping the parts in 90-degree increments if SOLIDWORKS does not get it right from the start.

Another welcome improvement with mates is that they now stay with assemblies as they are copied or moved. Also, SOLIDWORKS 2016 allows more than one part to be copied at a time. Just use the Control key as you pick or drag the mouse.

In the past, users would discover that after the parts were moved individually, the mates would have to be reapplied. Now, you can move multiple parts at a time and the mates in between move with the parts. The copied assembly still moves like it should from the old mate definitions.

Component Preview Window

While picking a part and making it transparent can help in a cluttered assembly, SOLIDWORKS 2016 offers yet another convenient way to see a part. You can pick a part and have it displayed in a separate window, where it can be zoomed in, rotated and more. The thing is, the part stays in place in the assembly.

It’s what you wish you could do in real life — effortlessly picking out a cylinder from an engine for an inspection or some modification and then plopping it back in.

There’s Plenty More Coming in SOLIDWORKS 2016

We’ve only scratched the surface, or I should say, the solid, with these few enhancements. Stay tuned as we cover even more in an ongoing series of the world’s most popular professional mechanical design software. If there are enhancements you’d like us to explain, please make a suggestion below.

About the Author

Roopinder Tara has been into CAD, CAM and CAE for his entire professional life, as an engineer, CAD manager, professor and publisher. He has written numerous publications on CAD, design and engineering. He has a bachelors in mechanical engineering, masters in engineering science and is a certified professional engineer.