DriveWorksXpress
Basic Design Automation for SolidWorks Engineers
DriveWorksXpress, included with SolidWorks 2009, allows you to capture and re-use the engineering rules needed to specify, design, manufacture and Engineer-to-Order your products.
With DriveWorksXpress you can automate repetitive tasks and automatically generate design and manufacturing outputs required to create new and variant products. You will save time and be able to specify the products whilst maintaining your engineering controls.
DriveWorksXpress Features & Benefits
Automate your designs
Today customers are demanding products that meet their specific needs. As a result we see more and more product options and variants. Automating repetitive design tasks allows companies to generate more product options and variants while using less of their valuable resources.
Knowledge Capture
The expertise and logic used to generate product designs exists in many disparate locations such as in someone's notebook or in the memory of a few key individuals. DriveWorksXpress allows a company to capture this critical information and use it to automatically create future product variants.
Capturing and reusing design information reduces the risk that information will be lost, prevents mistakes, and allows information to be reused by others
Automatic creation of parts, assemblies, and drawings
DriveWorksXpress enables the automatic creation of parts, assemblies, and drawings based on predefined design rules. Once the rules are defined designs can be created again and again and again by filling out a simple form telling the software what product options are desired.
Automatically generating parts, assemblies, and drawings by reusing design information allows a company to leverage initial design overhead.
Comparison of features between DriveWorksXpress & DriveWorks
DriveWorks is the next step for fully automating your business, review the table below to see how much automation can be achieved with DriveWorks.
| Feature | DriveWorksXpress | DriveWorks |
|---|---|---|
| Scaleability | ||
| Underlying database - Access |  |
|
| Scale database from Access > SQL | |
|
| Single User | |
|
| Add multiple User(s) | |
|
| Add External User(s) - Web | |
|
| Create more than one model set per project | |
|
| Plug ins (e.g. for PDM integration etc.) | |
|
| Remote (Unattended) Document Generation | |
|
| Project Hierarchy (Sub Projects/multi-line contracts) | |
|
| Controlling SolidWorks Parts & Assemblies | ||
| Control Dimensions, Features & Custom Properties | |
|
| Control Instances, allows the swapping of files for alternatives | |
|
| Automatically save out alternative file formats | |
|
| Run SolidWorks Macros automatically | |
|
| Control Hole Wizard Features | |
|
| Create a rule for new file names | |
|
| Create a rule for file paths | |
|
| Controlling SolidWorks Drawings | ||
| Create a new drawing for each of your part, assembly | |
|
| Create multiple drawings for each part, assembly | |
|
| Control Scale, View Positions, View Scales and Layers | |
|
| Control Annotations, (e.g. weld symbols, geometric tolerances) | |
|
| Forms/User Interface | ||
| Create single linear input form with basic controls | |
|
| Design multiple customizable forms with navigation based on rules | |
|
| Incorporate advanced dynamic form controls | |
|
| Working with Data | ||
| Perform look ups/calculations on external data (e.g. databases/spreadsheets) | |
|
| Pass data to company systems | |
|
| Creating and Managing Rules | ||
| Create rules using rules wizard | |
|
| Rule breakdown & analysis for easy validation & de-bugging | |
|
| Use Tables, Constants and Variables (Rule re-use) | |
|
| Rule Revisioning | |
|
| Driving and generating other documents | ||
| Excel, Word, XML, PDF, Text, HTML | |
|
| Other | ||
| What if scenarios (Test Specification) | |
|
| On screen reporting | |
|
| Progress and status reports (release report, model generation report) | |
