HELP HELP i have to talk sense in people with no CAD knowledge

Ok guys and girls,

I was responsible for a drawing office for a factory who is making
moulds for the hollow glass industry (jars bottles etc...).

the situation there is the following they use pro-engineer, autocad, a
home made cad system running on a vax system, and the all mighty
drawing board.

they have 3 drawing offices one in england one in the mothercompany
and one in croatia. All to be run from the mothercompany. With no pdm
system or erp system

All 3 design offices have different drawing styles and to make the
whole completly unmanagable in uk there is one guy working on pro-e
and 2 others on autocad so they can't interchange designs.

The offices are always overloaded.

For the ex pro-e guys here all the people didn't get any pro-e
training. When i started there they didn't save any drawings and parts
they where working with master parts and lousy automation full with
bugs.

They are the second largest hollow glass mould maker in the world and
are making 1500 moulds a week. So you see when you have a niche in the
market you can be complete morons and still do good bussines.

I told them it was stupid way of working and that the offices would
have to be on one standart and design system.
I received the task to solve the problem but they couldn't understand
all the fuss about.

i have done a benchmark with

catia ,pro-e, unigraphics, inventor,missler,solidworks

catia and solidworks where the winners

for me solidworks was the winner for the price, user friendliness and
power

catia was just to powerfull and expensieve for what it needed to do
and here in europe you have to pay a yearly fee or it stops working.

Pro-e tricked us on the benchmark in 50 percent of the cases it
wouldn't work. I tried it myself.

Managment started to moan that the whole of the industry was switching
to pro-e and why would we do different. I told him that it was jumping
with all the sheep in the cliff and that our customers where
struggling like hell to implement it one is busy for 2 years and i
have still to see the first pro-e drawing.

I told them to sod it and started my own bussines with solidworks.
With succes i halved the design time. They are sick of it to pay my
fee because they know i do it fast and i charge the full price of it.
i asked them where they can find same service at lower price and i
will adapt my price. Quit a
bit of fun for me.

Here is my question.

Now there is a guy there in charge but he is a bit to gentle so i want
to pass him all the best arguments to kill pro-e because those buggers
of managment will still stick to pro-e even after seeing the result in
sw. You can say you crazy guy you will kill your own bussiness. I
don't care i 'm making models of glass bottles and it is more
profitable for me then designing and they won't go the sw way anyway.
I just want that the guy warnes them that he have his back saved.

So if anyof you has good arguments pro-e contra sw

My arguments where

price
customer service
pro-e is dying
wildfire is a mock-up
failed the bench mark
pro-e wasn't a succes in the past in the company
c++ for heavy automation

it toke me 3 hours to model one of the most complex parts with sw
with no course in pro-e it toke me 7 hours for the same part.

if you do not deal the complete package with all the options that you
need at once (they will suck your blood when you need an extra option
afterwards).

So if any has better arguments please let me know assembly's are max
16 pieces.
Also this story to make you all smile of disbelieve.

excuse me for grammar error i speak french.

 

Such an interesting story - and we all thought we had it rough.

WT

 

A most interesting story! We are seriously considering going the other
direction. We've been running SW since 98+, but working with fairly complex
surfaces is driving us nuts. It's taking us about three times as long to
build our parts as it should, if only SW worked the way it is advertised. We
are looking at Unigraphics, Catia and Pro/E.

With reference to Pro/E, you mentioned:

Dealing with the PTC sales force has to rank right up there with my least
favorite things to do in the whole world.

I wouldn't count them out yet. They are still a force to be reckoned with.

Gee, I've felt the same about SW since about SW2000. They keep adding these
nice capabilities that don't quite work in real life.

What was your benchmark? How did Pro/E fail?

Well, SW has been a success here, but the last two projects have taken much
too long to develop, with way too many hours on nights and weekends.

Pro/E was never easy to learn, but it was always fairly powerful. I would
guess that with training and constant use that you might be faster with
Pro/E if it only took you a little over twice as long to build the part with
no training.

They will suck your blood no matter what you do. It's part of the corporate
culture.


Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

just curious Jerry...what type of product are those surfaces for?

 

Look at the Ranger and the Recon on the TDS website: www.tdsway.com

Ranger is the one on the right on the top page and was done with SW98+.
Industrial design (hah!) by me, no surfaces, and looks like it. Recon is the
one on the left, industrial design by real designers in Pro/E, surfaces
duplicated (more or less) by us in SW2001+ The conversion into parts took
much longer than expected. The new product has industrial design done in
Alias and duplicating those surfaces and turning them into real parts has
also taken much longer than planned. We're much better at making the
surfaces, but are plagued with long read and write times, crashes and having
to build stuff over and over again as SW flakes out.


Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

Jerry i have a lot of experience with complex surfaces. Surfacing of
coca-cola bottles etc..
Catia will be more powerfull then pro-e for surfacing it will even
offer you the possibility to model complex 3d artwork and engraving.
But the price :-( will be loads higher then pro-e) because you will
need additional surfacing options. But what to you get in the place is
always interesting extra features with new releases.

You have also another very interesting product for surfacing
www.powershape.com
www.powermill.com
www.artcam.com
www.copycad.com
this is a familly of software from delcam going from surfacing to
complex engraving, 3d 5 axis milling and reverse engineering well
worth looking at it.
Very good helpdesk

This product i love because it is so fast to learn and the most
powerfull surfacer i know. One guy keeps 5 high speed milling machines
on the boil on his own. A coca-cola bottle takes 1.5h to model and 15
minutes to program.3d programming has been extensivly automated.
Machines are running 50% and 30percent less polishing time faster then
when we do the programs with pro-e because it allows us to use the
optimal milling strategies.
surfacing is also half of pro-e time.
in the mothercompany one guy make models and programs for 5 high speed
milling machines. One of them is a real rocket running at 40000 rpm
and hitting feeds of 120000mm minute for finishing. The guy is
averaging 2 to 3 moulds a day.
In the uk with pro-e they need 2 guys to run 3 high speed milling
machines and they are even struggling even with the machines running
slower. Even with this argument managment didn't want to allow the uk
plant to switch softwares. But also pro-e users can be a pain to
convince that there are some other softwares on the market. I guess
they like the power they have in there hands. Because managment will
not give the sack to quickly because they know they are up with a six
month trainingto replace the guy for complex surfacing and machining
with pro-e.

The only hick up the system is not parametric only to a certain level.
But like you see it does'nt slow the programmer down. Because a lot of
the time when you want to change something in a parametric model with
complex surfacing some features are failing and then al the fun starts
specially with pro-e. You can say think it over how to built it before
you start but a lot of the time when it is really complex you have to
try different ways to get there and it starts to be a mess. I was only
doing the effort if when it was a familly of bottles with a range of
different volumes. Then it was worth it to put the energy in to it.

Around the mould cavity parting line there is a groove who has to be
parallel to the parting line. If you switched cavity this groove had
to regenerate automaticly to be parallel with the mould cavity. The
problem is that the curve that you use to make offset varies from one
bottle to another. When you switch cavity's it doesn't regenerate
because number of entities are not the same in the seed curve.

Well they solved it by making a spline from the curve. But pro-e does
only make combined splines if the profile is tangent so no corners are
allowed above the 5 degrees. They didn't tell us and they received
some samples with curves. So afterwards if i wouldn't have tried
myself we would have been stuck with it and would have to program
something to solve it. I know vb not c++. Must say at ptc they have
mighty well trained sales people.

 

sounds like you could/should move to something more compatible with the
design people you work in with rather than try to replicate shapes in SW
that are obviously more complex than the program can really handle. SW2005
looks like a step in the right direction but as far as continuities and
nurbs go its still in the mid-range. No doubt your Ranger is a good design
but it shows how organics have moved into ID and it makes it look somewhat
dated. this type of difficulty with soft shapes is what concerns me about SW
even with the coming enhancements. its a competitive world...can I afford to
produce B grade shapes? and spend extra time doing it?

 

Dealing with the PTC sales force has to rank right up there with my least

Hehe - We used to refer to them as the "Cad Mafia" . . .

(their-mouths-full-of-cotton-marlon-brando-esque) "So, ya gonna buy,
er waht? You want I gotta go see ya boss? We're rubbin ya current CAD
system out . . . See . . . (I quitely think - please guys don't use
the term Deliverables again or I will hurl)"

I love that stuff. I'm a pretty laid back sort and I eventually had
to tell the pro-e guy to "piss off and don't call me ever again" (or
something pretty close). I felt bad but he stopped calling, so all in
all it was a good thing in the end.



SMA

 

That's the way we figure it too. We're going to be looking at Pro/E, Catia
and Unigraphics as well as ShapeWorks and GeometryWorks.

One of us has the beta running at home. He hasn't been too impressed so far.
I guess I shouldn't talk about what he said in this forum.

You're either very kind or blind as a bat. It's ugly.

We don't need to do automotive type surfaces, but we do want to make more
attractive products. SW just isn't cutting it right now. I hate the thought
of moving to another system, but we can't afford to waste our precious
engineering man-hours. We've probably lost something like three engineering
man-months on this project. Call it $100 an hour, 40 hours a week (really
much more), and 12 weeks. That's about $50K down the tubes.


Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

The price, of course, makes us nervous. What makes me even more nervous is
the possibility that after paying the big price we still run into
time-wasting road blocks. That's why hearing from people like you is very
important.

I'm very hesitant to look at software that doesn't integrate nicely with a
solid modeler. We still have lots of detail to put in that would be a pain
to do in surfaces.

This is where I get very nervous. We could have just taken the Alias
surfaces from the ID firm, but what happens when we decide that we need to
add a mm here or there? (That actually happened on the Recon project and is
bound to happen in the future.) Even if we build the surfaces ourselves with
another piece of software and then integrate them with our solid modeler, I
think the wasted time factor might become a problem again. Or am I just
being too nervous?

I'm sorry to hear that Pro/E also ran into these same problems. That is what
has been driving us nuts with SolidWorks. You make a nice shape, possibly
after a lot of trial and error to get it to work. Then you make some
seemingly simple change that doesn't seem like it would affect the original
shape. Suddenly the shape is broken and you spend half a day trying to get
it working again. Make a couple of simple changes and spend several days
trying to get rid of all of the cherries.

They aren't people. They are sales droids. When I was using Pro/E (almost
six years ago, now) I met some support people that I really liked. The
programmed selling machines drove me crazy. The thought of putting myself in
their hands again sends chills up my spine.


Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

Try using Rhino3d with Solidworks. Then you have the best of both worlds