Simulation, parallel development, built-in collaboration and 3D printing help further streamline product development.
Time to market is a key driver in many industries, and 3D design tools have helped tremendously by giving developers a better feel for what they are building. But that was only the start. For an update on this fast changing field, Network World Editor in Chief John Dix caught up with Aaron Kelly, VP of User Experience & Product Portfolio Management at SolidWorks, a division of Dassault Systèmes.
Let’s start with a little background on the evolution of SolidWorks. Give us the story.
Dassault Systems has been in the 3D software design business for years, but what SolidWorks did in 1995 was make the technology available to more people by running on Windows. Our price point was lower and our functionality was geared towards the mainstream as opposed to more complex things like cars and planes and ships. So we were able to reach a broader audience with the power of 3D, which helps people better understand how parts fit together. Pretty soon everyone was able to get their products designed faster.
But we also support what’s called top-down design, meaning we could automate changes. So if a designer in Cubicle A made a change, the designer in Cubicle B could have that change automatically update his design. So that was another revolutionary step. That enabled people to make changes faster, get their products to market even faster.
Let me give you a real example. I learned a lot about treadmills selling SolidWorks to a manufacturer out of Utah. The main difference in treadmill prices has to do with the width of the belt. So a cheaper treadmill may be 18 inches wide, and the next step up would be 20 inches and the elite would be 22 inches wide. SolidWorks has something called configurations, so with one design I could make all three machines from the same model, just three different configurations. That’s very powerful functionality because the fitness equipment industry is driven by time-to-market. If you can get out to market first with a new feature, say an iPhone or an iPod holder, it will help get you into all the distribution channels. And there are lots of industries like that, where even a few weeks matter.
Was the treadmill company already using 3D design tools?
They were upgrading from a 2D product, so 3D let them see how parts interacted. They could move parts and see not only static interferences, like bolt holes that didn’t line up, but also see how things moved, see if there were any collisions. And configurations were a big part of it because they knew that if they were going to have to change a core design they wouldn’t have to redesign multiple products and re-document all those changes. They could do it once and capture it.
It also meant a considerable amount of parts were the same between those treadmills, so they could go to manufacturing and say, “90% percent of the parts are the same, and here’s the 10% that are different. Let’s go get them made.” So it was a big transformation for them.
Once you mastered 3D, how did you enhance the product?
3D was a huge step forward, but as customers adopted our technology they wanted us to continue to add value, continue to help them get to market faster, and that’s where the rest of our product line comes into play.
Product Data Management (PDM), for example, helps them manage all those files CAD creates. So PDM not only secures files and makes it so you can find files because of indexing, it also supports workflows. Workflows are important when you have designs and you have changes and you want to document them.
Maybe a company wants to change a part for safety reasons. They want to make it stronger so they use our simulation products to understand where the weaknesses are, they make a design change to make it stronger, and now they want to document that and make sure they know that Rev 1 did X, Rev 2 did Y, and from now on they’ll only make Rev 2.
When someone puts out a product, they typically don’t get it perfect the first time, so whether they are addressing defects or innovating on top of what they have, they need to use our simulation products to make sure it will work before committing to tooling and then document the changes and move forward.
Another area of enhancement was addressing electrical design. Many of the products our customers design today have electronics or wiring, and that’s something we can help with. In many companies these are two separate operations. Typically the mechanical side of the house would develop their stuff and then throw it over to the electrical engineers and say, “Wire it up, make it work.” That’s a serial operation. If you could make that a parallel operation you’re going to save time. We offer customers the ability to shrink their design time by doing more at the same time. So if the electrical engineers can start designing at the same time as the mechanical side, or shortly thereafter, you’ve just shrunk your time-to-market.
You mentioned simulation, is that built in or an additional module?
There is some simulation in a 3D design, but we have other offerings for more advanced simulation. For example, we can do kinematics, which is understanding the forces that, say, a motor puts on adjacent components. Or you may have heard of Finite Element Analysis, where we can prove that the part is strong enough, that it can withstand forces put on it, and we can show what happens. What we have found over time is people overdesign their stuff because they don’t want to have to fix things later, but that adds cost and weight and complexity.
If you can use our software to determine that it could be done with plastic or aluminum or lighter metal, and still make sure that it will comply with safety standards and strength characteristics, then that makes a better design. So our simulation products range from moving parts to make sure the force is sufficient, to doing things like static finite element analysis to make sure things are strong enough but not too strong.
Other things we have in simulation is plastic flow analysis. Most parts are injection molded and customers need to understand how that mold will fill. It’s very easy to make a cavity, the area where the plastic will fill into a mold, but hard to determine if the mold will fill completely. That is determined by temperature and venting, and our simulation software can give confidence to a designer that the mold design will work. If it doesn’t work it can cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to rework, and it happens all the time.
The other thing we can simulate is cooling and warping. So you’re heating plastic, shooting it into a mold, and when it comes out of the mold what happens to that plastic? Does it deform because it’s shrinking at different temperatures because there are thin parts and more complex parts? We’ll model how that plastic will react in and out of the mold. That is a big, big deal.
You also mentioned designers collaborating on product design. How does that work?
We keep pushing further down the road to get people to market faster. The problem we found is an engineer doesn’t understand the implications of his designs all the way through the lifecycle of a product. For example, an engineer might be designing a phone, and when that phone ends up on a shelf at a retail store, the packaging may be a problem. So wouldn’t it be great if the design of the phone and the person who’s doing the packaging could talk to each other before the design is done and it’s too costly to make changes.
And if you went further and said, wouldn’t it be great to be able to talk to the person at Best Buy that’s going to arrange how this is going to fit on a shelf? Then, wouldn’t it be great if you could talk to the customer so they could comment on the colors you’ve chosen, the textures you’ve chosen, the layout of buttons and such?
Wouldn’t it be great if you could get all the feedback you would typically get through a product’s lifecycle, but get that information up front and make better designs at the start? So when we talk about collaboration, it’s about bringing in lots of people, not just other engineers, and being able to get feedback before you commit to tooling, or as much toward the front end of design as you can. That’s going to save on changes and enable you to make better products faster.
Often times today people email somebody a 3D model, and that’s okay but you miss a lot. But our new products that rely on the 3D experience as a platform to enable collaboration really do a good job of that. Being able to have that design information available to anyone who needs it at anytime, anywhere, is important. To be able to add threads of information interchange is important. Email really doesn’t support those kinds of collaborative workflows.
Ok, shifting gears here a bit at the end, where does 3D printing fit in? What does it add to the equation?
What 3D printing enables in general is the ability to quickly build something that you hold in your hand so you can prototype fast. And, in fact, some companies are already using 3D printing to actually produce parts used in manufacturing. But in order for a 3D printer to work, you need to have a 3D design. That’s where SolidWorks comes in.
In SolidWorks 2015 we’ve added the ability to support Windows 8.1 3D printer drivers, so if the driver for your printer is available you can print directly from SolidWorks just like you would print directly from Word. That’s really a huge evolutionary step. You get rid of complicated steps like creating STL files and bringing them into other software and then making sure the STL file is interpreted correctly and making sure there’s not gaps and holes and blah, blah, blah. This is a big step forward.
The key thing about this is we’re saving time again. We’re saying, all right, we understand you want to use 3D printers and we understand the workflow. You save from SolidWorks and STL, then you do lots of things on other people’s software and then print it out. Well, wait a minute. That’s IP data. Maybe that STL file should be managed so all the tweaks you made in between can be saved. Or maybe you should bypass all those steps and just use a SolidWorks file and the SolidWorks file can be managed and every time you need to print it, you just print it right from SolidWorks.
We also have costing analysis software that can tell you that your cost for plastic is this, the time is that, it’s going to cost you, say, $6 to print it out using one of these MakerBot-type printers, or if you wanted to go high end it may cost you $600 in material. So costing is important. A customer may say, well I don’t want it to look perfect. I just want it to be functional, so let’s go with the six buck option. We’re able to help people understand the cost of their prototypes. We’re able to help them understand how they’ll work in real life and obviously, with the 3D-centric graphics, you’ll be able to see it before you build it as well. And with SolidWorks 2015 you can print directly from your computer right to many of the 3D printers. I really think this 3D printing thing is a big, big deal.
