SOLIDWORKS Professional Package builds better teamwork and efficiency into the design-to-manufacturing process

When it comes to a manufactured part or product, a great idea has to be clearly communicated, thoroughly understood, clearly evaluated and discussed, improved upon and, ultimately, turned into something tangible: a finished product that does what it’s supposed to do, and does it well.

Even in the best of circumstances, it’s a long and hazardous journey from initial concept to a finished product. And how great an idea turns out to be in the end depends a lot on the process it went through to get there. An initial idea will pass through many hands and many minds, being molded and modified as it moves through the process—either improving or diminishing along the way.

The SOLIDWORKS® Professional package helps you to maintain the quality and consistency of your concepts as they move between stages, resulting in better work processes—and better finished products. Each of your team members has access to a full complement of the robust features and functions that today’s design, engineering and manufacturing professionals need to do their best work. Grounded in “smart manufacturing” principles, SOLIDWORKS Professional has the advanced data management, visualization, communication and collaboration tools that help people come up with great ideas and work together to take them as far as they can go.

SOLIDWORKS Professional

Driving teamwork, delivering quality

It takes great teamwork, as well as great ideas, to make a great product—and the team is at the heart of all that SOLIDWORKS Professional can do. It’s a tool designed for collaboration, because it lets your entire team work within one unified ecosystem—and work better, smarter and faster. That adds up to lower costs, greater efficiency and better products.

SOLIDWORKS Professional Package: Doing better work together

When many minds can share a single vision, great things can happen. SOLIDWORKS Professional builds a unified vision into every great idea it touches. That’s because it is an integrated design-to-manufacturing system that serves all stages of the design-to-manufacturing process. It unites disciplines and departments within one application and around one shared 3D CAD model. And that pays big dividends when it comes to efficiency, cost savings and quality control.

SOLIDWORKS Professional breaks down barriers between the many stages and stakeholders in the product development process. Designers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, CNC programmers and others can all work from the same 3D CAD model at all stages in its development, with the contributions of each party assimilated into the model in real time. That makes a big difference for these reasons:

• There’s no need to translate models from one system to another.
• There’s no need to wait for one process to be completed before the next can start—teams can work concurrently at every stage of the process.
• Teams can collaborate throughout the design process, which allows for earlier detection and correction of flaws and errors.
• Changes made in one segment of the design-to-manufacturing process are immediately reflected everywhere in all imaging, specifications and documentation—and are immediately available to all teams.

Benefits like these add up to smoother, more productive, more efficient interactions between all members of your product development process, including easier hand-offs, fewer reworks and faster time to completion. That makes your development process more accurate, efficient and cost-effective than ever before, resulting in better-quality products and a shorter time-to-market.

SOLIDWORKS Professional includes these essential add-ins:

• CircuitWorks for integration of electrical and mechanical designs
• eDrawings Professional for easy sharing of 3D and 2D designs across a wide range of file and format types
• PDM Standard for optimizing and managing project data, including files, variations, imagery, notes and documentation
• Visualize Standard to generate photo-quality renderings of designs, enabling the most accurate representation possible of the final product without prototyping.

Learn more about the add-ins below:

CircuitWorks: Integrating electrical and mechanical design

Mechanical and electrical designers often face competing priorities and challenges. It can be difficult to integrate their work while maintaining the optimal quality of each. CircuitWorks™ helps to bridge the gap between these divergent disciplines, enabling electrical and mechanical designers to effortlessly share, compare, update, and track electrical design data. This heads off ECAD-MCAD integration problems and enables closer collaboration to better create complex designs and resolve issues.

CircuitWorks

CircuitWorks enables you to quickly create and refine electronic designs, including PCB diagrams, and maintain company standards via an extensive built-in library of 3D electrical components. Users can import electronic design data in a broad variety of formats, create and compare different board iterations, integrate design change notes, conduct electronic cooling analyses, accommodate mechanical design requirements (such as heights, slots, mounting and component locations) in electronic design specifications, and track all changes throughout the mechanical and electronic design processes. Taken together, these capabilities result in shortened development time frames, reduced costs, and higher product quality.

The clearest picture: eDrawings Professional

Chances are that all of your team members and key stakeholders aren’t all located under one roof—or even necessarily on one continent. That’s when eDrawings® Professional comes in especially handy. eDrawings enables your complex designs to be easily packaged as 3D and 2D formats, ready to be emailed, viewed, reviewed and revised wherever you need them to be.

eDrawings Professional

Using eDrawings Professional, you can view native SOLIDWORKS files, as well as a wide range of other formats, including DWG/DXF™, 3DXML, Creo, Pro/ ENGINEER® and STL files. You can also view simulation results and SOLIDWORKS model animations, gaining insight into part performance and behaviors not visible in static images.

eDrawings Professional also lets you measure, mark up and add comments to shared files. Password protection enables you to safeguard your IP from unwelcome eyes, and the eDrawings for IOS app enables them to be safely and accurately viewed on a variety of today’s most popular phones and tablets. It all adds up to a great tool for effective teamwork—across miles, time zones or entire continents.

PDM Standard: Keeping project data under control, and putting it to work

Any engineer knows that the more moving parts a system has, the more opportunities there are for errors and malfunctions. SOLIDWORKS PDM Standard keeps your projects’ “moving parts”—the files, variations, imagery and documentation—firmly under control and strictly accounted for. PDM Standard serves as the guardian and librarian for all of your vital project data, making it easy to control, use and protect.

SOLIDWORKS PDM Standard

PDM Standard ensures permissions-based, secure access to files and information; files can be checked out, viewed or modified only by appropriate personnel at the appropriate time. Workflow notifications provide alerts to managers when files are accessed, modified or have their status changed. Powerful search capabilities make it easy to locate and access related files, and seamless Windows® integration makes the system extraordinarily easy to use. Your team can easily and securely collaborate within the SOLIDWORKS ecosystem, whether from across the room or across continents—and you can still be sure of absolute data security and integrity, with complete version control—all within a system that’s easy to deploy, learn and use.

SOLIDWORKS Visualize Standard: What you see is really what you get

Shared understanding is centered around a shared vision—literally. SOLIDWORKS Visualize Standard provides a powerful toolset for the creation of photo-quality images, bringing designs out of the 2D plane and into vivid, visible life. While eDrawings Professional enables your team members to get the clearest possible technical view of your design, Visualize Standard delivers an experiential view of it as a completed, real-world product. Short of a physical prototype, Visualize Standard provides the best possible representation of how the finished product will look and function, thanks to sophisticated ray tracing and rendering capabilities that bring your designs to fully illuminated, textured, animated life.

SOLIDWORKS Visualize Standard

Through Visualize Standard, nontechnical personnel such as sales, marketing or communications staff can get a more complete and clear understanding of your product, and get a jump start on their efforts to sell it, advertise it, or develop informational materials for it. The integrated Easy Mode makes learning and using SOLIDWORKS Visualize Standard a breeze, helping you to create sophisticated marketing materials for print media and websites before your product is finished, enabling you to go to market faster than ever before.

SOLIDWORKS Professional: For the winning team

SOLIDWORKS Professional can optimize your team’s productivity—and supercharge your company’s success. Find out more about what the advanced collaborative and visualization capabilities of SOLIDWORKS Professional can do for you.