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Jason Cerny of Trojan Technologies

Interview with an Environmental Industry Customer

Tell me about your company's business and industry position.

Business – We’re doing well. With the environmental business, there is a steady flow of work. It’s not an up and down environment like the automotive sector. UV market share is good. We have about 6 to 8 major competitors. Our competitor isn’t really other UV companies, its transforming people from chorine products. Globally, if you look at what people are using, there’s still a lot of chlorine. UV represents under 5% of total world applications. So the market potential for us is huge.

What CAD system did you use before implementing SolidWorks?

We were using AutoCAD until 1998. We first brought SolidWorks in 1999.

What were the primary business challenges and technical requirements that led your company to evaluate SolidWorks?

We formed a CAD committee. There were some designers then who dabbled in 3D and there were a few of us that really kept up with the emerging CAD technology and thought it was time to make a big change. And that was the time we started evaluating four or five options. The University of Western here was starting to do a lot of 3D work. Some of our venders and suppliers were 3D capable. At that time they were using it for machining mostly for CAM operation.

How did you find out about SolidWorks?

We had an employee come here who formerly used SolidWorks. He was a strong advocate for it and told us we should look at it. We didn’t want to be bias, so we actually did do some research as well.

How did you find our about Javelin?

I don’t actually remember that. I think it was internet research maybe through the SolidWorks website.

Did you evaluate any other CAD systems? Which ones?

We did an on-site evaluation of five CAD suppliers; Inventor, Solid Edge, Pro/ENGINEER Foundations, IronCAD and SolidWorks. We had everyone come in one day and said “here’s a project, let’s see how fast you can process this project”. Then we let them go head-to-head. As you can imagine, not everyone accepted that challenge, but SolidWorks was one of them. Everyone gets presented the same information and you’re looking at the capability of the software and the speed in which they can use it. Some people did really well; others didn’t get through the exercise. This really helped us clear up the sales pitch items. A good salesman can sell you a box of air, but you need to see the product in action.

Why did your company choose SolidWorks?

In the head-to-head comparison, some of the CAD systems dropped off the map they just weren’t capable. IronCAD wasn’t really capable. They had a few neat features, but they weren’t really a competitor. Autodesk Inventor, we just didn’t have a good feeling for. They didn’t seem as revolutionary as some of the others like Solid Edge and SolidWorks. Pro/ENGINEER was a little pricey at the time. So it came down to Solid Edge and SolidWorks.
What really sold us at Trojan was that for the products we make here, they’re highly configurable, and SolidWorks had this really neat thing at the time that we’d never seen before called Design Tables. You could drive and design using an Excel based spreadsheet. That was exactly what we needed. A lot of our products are exactly the exact same just a little bit taller, a little bit wider and we can totally drive this with an Excel Spreadsheet. This saved us a lot of time. The configurations in general. Some of the other systems didn’t support multiple configurations. SolidWorks did. Now that was back in the day. If you went back and evaluated the top 5 CAD systems today it would be a different story.
Corporate strength was another factor we looked at. Will they be around in 10 years?

Were there one or two product features and related benefits that were most important in your decision to purchase SolidWorks?

Ease of use, user interface, shorter learning curve (started to see payback in 3 to 4 months), user friendly, technical support is really good…that’s a direct reflection on Javelin. They were instrumental in getting us up and running and they’re still really good with us today.

What version of SolidWorks do you have?

SolidWorks Professional

How many licenses do you have?

20 licenses all SolidWorks Professional

Do you think that SolidWorks technology is innovative? If so, how? Can you provide any examples of capabilities or functions that you would consider especially innovative?

Absolutely. Probably the biggest one is the ability to sell the design internally. Not everybody can visualize designs like designers in the engineering department, but that’s our nature. That’s what we do.
When you try to sell that design to your managers, executives, project sponsors, sales reps, its not always easy for them to visualize designs. In the 2D world, it wasn’t easy to for them to see what it will look like. Feedback would be “that’s not quite what we were thinking, but they couldn’t tell you what they were looking for.
With 3D you can put this model up on a screen and you can flip it around and apply colours and make it look pretty real, I would say that was a big innovation for us. You can work out any details even before you build it. It helped nail down exactly what our sales people were looking for, which really came from the customers. There’s a time savings associated with that as well. It’s like trying to sell someone looking at a five sheet layout print vrs showing someone an actual 3D model on a boardroom screen. It makes it much easier to communicate. For an engineering department, our customers really are our sales people.

Do you have SolidWorks Simulation? SolidWorks PDM? SolidWorks eDrawings? If so, how does each benefit your product development process.

SolidWorks Simulation – Yes, we do. We have SolidWorks SimulationXpress and SolidWorks Flow Simulation.
SolidWorks Flow Simulation – the biggest advantage we have here is the abilility to properly size disinfection equipment. Back in the day, you had to build a UV chamber and physically test it. We still do that but to validate, but a lot of the initial design work is optimized using SolidWorks Flow Simulation. Now using this we can get the best we can get build it. Before we were maybe selling more equipment then was necessary. So it has allowed us to properly size and be a little more competitive in the market. And the corporate risk is a little lower. SolidWorks SimulationXpress – We have one license, the light version, the one built into SolidWorks. It has everything we need. It’s not like we’re building bridges here. We’re building UV Chambers. We need to do single part evaluation using SolidWorks SimulationXpress to say “is this part strong enough?” All of our products are made of stainless. Stainless steel prices are skyrocketing. Now were saying yes we can make this out of thick plate. Other then that we’re using it for pressure vessels design for safety purposes. How cheap can we make it to meet design intent without compromising performance or safely.
SolidWorks PDM – Yes, I would say this is absolutely critical in the function of a company. It’s the whole file management issue. We share a lot of components across multiple platforms. It’s necessary to have a common source for these parts that’s accurate. I can’t imagine not having PDM with the vault and having the same parts on people’s hard drive. I don’t think we brought PDM right away. I think it was a couple of months after we brought SolidWorks on. We immediately recognized its value…it was pretty evident early on in the game. Now if anyone asks about SolidWorks we always tell them “don’t even think about starting without SolidWorks PDM at the same time.” It’s just not worth it. Fewer headaches.
SolidWorks eDrawings – Yes, it comes with our SolidWorks Professional package. That’s a mixed bag. Two people use it and a bunch of us don’t. What we find is that not all our vendors are up on it; they have native SolidWorks or just send raw files. We don’t have a lot of vendors that don’t have SolidWorks capability. We’ve actually gone down the road of including in our vendor selection criteria, the ability to accept raw SolidWorks data. Even going overseas with our venders, they’re pretty much all CAD capable. They’ll have at least one license of SolidWorks to open it up. We don’t use SolidWorks eDrawings as much. A great tool. It works well. We just haven’t had a huge need for it.

How much has SolidWorks reduced your product design process, for example, “from four months to three weeks,” or “50%.”

Savings associated with manpower costs. Two people now doing the work of 20 people nine years ago. With SolidWorks, we’re processing more work with less people.

How much money you have saved in your product development process with SolidWorks on a particular project or as an overall by percentage? Are your savings related to producing fewer prototypes or less scrap and rework?

Use of rapid prototyping is a big saving. This has helped solve a lot of form/fit issues For rapid prototyping, we would have never gotten there if it wasn’t for 3D Solid Modeling. As far as scrap/Rework – Engineering errors greatly reduced. That doesn’t really happen anymore. SolidWorks is SolidWorks. You have your parts and assemblies, they fit together and the drawing is driven from the model, there really is no way to fudge it. I would say from a manufacturing point of view, error free. You still once in a while get errors but that’s because the design wasn’t good, but that has nothing to do with the software. As far as getting something from a model on your computer to a part, I would say we’re pretty much error free. Not that all designs are great.

How have SolidWorks design capabilities improved the quality of your products? Have you been able to reduce the number of design errors, and if so, by how much?

Definitely has improved the quality of our designs. What we find now is that we’re able to visualize the integration of our products and how parts fit assemblies. Our form factor has gone up greatly. Stuff looks better, more professional. We take a lot of pride in how our product looks. Improved esthetics. We make it look good. Design to process capabilities. Building assemblies with fewer parts. Part count reduced. Error free…in the old days, they didn’t fit together well. You didn’t know until you built it and sold it. Now it’s easy to change the design. You get the best quality control with fewer parts. More parts you have, more things can go wrong. At least in my opinion. As far as software goes, going from model to part is pretty much error free. What I like about SolidWorks, you can’t fudge it. It’s so easy to make design changes. Drawings truly reflect what they have.

Have product innovations enabled by SolidWorks increased your company’s market share or gross sales? If so, could you indicate or estimate the increases?

It’s intuitive and enabling. SolidWorks is pretty good at helping itself. It’s got great help files, on-line communities built into SolidWorks, the Javelin website, the SolidWorks website and lots of “go to places” for information. It’s very enable. It’s tough to nail down numbers, but it’s definitely helped us secure more contracts due to the “WOW factor” of 3D model. Helped us sell our designs internally. Sales people take the models to customer. Scale representation is great. Based on the feedback we’ve been getting back from people, its impressive presentation.

What does it take to compete effectively in your industry? What are some of the challenges involved in maintaining your market position? How does SolidWorks impact your competitiveness?

We’re not really sure what competitors are using as far as packages go. For us to compete effectively it’s about sizing for the application. That’s the biggest one. And keeping on top of new technology as far as UV disinfection is very important.
But I think sizing is really important as I mentioned earlier, using SolidWorks Flow Simulation to more comprehensively size our equipment to give it a better feeling. That’s helped us out in a lot of markets and cases. For us challenges are driven a lot by government regulations. It’s reactive occasionally. Also getting customers to switch from chlorine to UV. Chlorine is cheap and dangerous. Using a high tech technology or what is viewed as high tech… UV technology has actual been around since the Romans. It’s about Education/Awareness on the public’s part. With UV, you can’t immediately or quickly measure its effectiveness the benefits. It’s the how do I know its working factor that we struggle with. UV filtration happens in a millisecond. You can’t immediately measure it quickly.
Also, cost of ownership is another big one. Selling the technology in North America is relatively easy, but in Europe, where hydro costs are three or four times as much, it’s a little tougher. What we find is the capital expenditure of equipment, is minuscule in relationship to the cost of ownership over a 20 year life span which is typical for these plants. You need to also look at maintenance and electricity costs year after year. Competive advantage with SolidWorks, we’re able to get the product out the door quicker. Cycle time and turn-around time is faster. We had a recall a problem with one of our products a number of years ago for a residential product and we came up with a solution and implemented it in 4 weeks…new design and rapid prototype even tooled and out the door in a month. Quite honestly if we didn’t have a 3D CAD package, we wouldn’t have been able to do what we did. We were able to maintain market share in a time of crisis.

Was the transition to SolidWorks smooth? (If moving from 2D to 3D) Were there any capabilities in SolidWorks such as file translation and other built-in tools for preserving and reusing legacy 2D data?

There’s always a learning curve. It met our expectations. We thought it would be a 6 month learning curve, before everyone was up to a good speed where the stuff started to pay itself off, but we came in under that. Training, support and implementation provided were top notch. Only hiccup was that we didn’t implement SolidWorks PDM at the same time and we had a lot of file issues to begin with.
The biggest transition here was not learning the software; it was the people who had been in the 2D world all of their lives… the whole paradigm shift on how we think. Even myself, I initially had a tough time designing in SolidWorks when I first started. It took me a few months. It was a tough paradigm shift on how you think of a model. You have to think about more than just a flat page. Getting people out of the 2D mindset and into a 3D world was a big thing.
Learning the software was easy; I don’t think anyone struggled with the software. We used SolidWorks on a go forward basis when we brought it in. All of our consulting companies, basically when you do a water treatment plant, it’s done by a consulting engineer who is working for a municipality and they’re basically who we sell the equipment to. The consulting engineering community is strongly the 2D AutoCAD world. We don’t see them ever switching to 3D. It’s not what they do. We’ve all heard it many times. They’re all AutoCAD. A lot of these contractors are older Portuguese guys. It’s all 2D stuff. Maybe in 20 to 30 years it will change.
We use SolidWorks in our design engineering only. Our project engineering group still uses AutoCAD based on their customers’ needs. If we could convince them we would train our project engineering in SolidWorks too. Unfortunately it hasn’t gotten that far yet. We still support AutoCAD and still have AutoCAD licenses. That said we use SolidWorks on a go forwarded basis and any time we have to do a revision to an existing part that existed in AutoCAD we would convert the document in SolidWorks. Too much legacy data to ever think of converting…something like 15,000 to 20,000 engineering drawings.

Did Javelin make a significant contribution in terms of training, support and implementation services?

Training and support is top notch. We were really happy with the implementation services. It has been a great relationship from a personal and professional prospective they’re a great company to work with. They solved all problems. Simple issues solved over the phone. Critical issues we’ve had people here same day solving our problems.
There have even been show stoppers for us. We had a problem a couple of years ago with one of the service packs, where we lost capability to write to a PDF file which is our controlling document. So we lost about three business days of work…which you can easily start putting numbers to. Well Javelin was all over that. They actually engaged SolidWorks for that problem and SolidWorks wrote a unique fix just for Trojan.
The response time was excellent. It could have been a disaster. It wasn’t. Javelin was more the moderator here because it was a SolidWorks issue. This situation renewed our confidence in the product we selected. To know that a company as large as SolidWorks… go from multi million dollar companies to look at the little guy, Trojan here in Canada one little customer and they responded to that. It was a nice feeling. We heavily weighted corporate strength in our CAD system evolution.
That was another factor we looked at when we were choosing a CAD system. This goes well beyond the software. Are they going to be around in 10 years? You know it’s not easy to switch CAD companies any more. Especially when you get into a group our size with 150 million in sales and we’re owned by a corporate company in the 10 billion dollar range. So you want to make sure the support is going to be around for many years to come.

What’s different about Javelin as a company from other companies in the CAD marketplace?

We haven’t had the opportunity to work with other SolidWorks resellers. The stuff pretty much sells itself. Javelin is not a high-pressure reseller. We have a good relationship with them. As far as subscription renewals go, it’s never a fight. We know the value that it offers. It’s the value of keeping current. Every year we up-grade. We’ve never skipped a release. We keep up to date on products. I know what’s coming down the pipeline from SolidWorks, so usually by the time so one calls us, I already know about it. We’ll approach them when there’s a piece of add on software that we need. They know that and that’s part the relationship between us. As far as Javelin goes…they’re a personable bunch…they’re young, fun and dynamic.

How does SolidWorks help your engineers design better products?

A lot of “off the shelf” compnents from our suppliers have SolidWorks models available. That’s a big thing because we’re not drawing a lot of components that we use to have to draw. The on-line community that SolidWorks has set-up the user library, 3D content central, the mass indices of parts and assemblies available on line is great. Electrical components for example, we use to have to model up can be downloaded. They’re accurate, current and exact. We’re not wasting a lot of time modeling off the shelf components.