Pro E plus another system, but which?

[biff]

I currently use Wildfire II. I've been using Pro/E since Rev 15 so have seen a dramatic improvement from those days to what we have now.


However, A number of my clients have started ditching Pro/E and going to systems like Solid Works & UG due to the stupid maintenance costs in the UK.


The problem is, I will keep Pro/E myself but I'm considering looking at Solid works UG, or Catiaor something that will compliment my seat of Pro/E.


The cross over is 50-50 of the clients so i'm going to lose some of the clients but which system should I go with?


Thanks.

 

[tosh382]

Biff ...


Your destiny is already determined ...


The next CAD system you'll be getting will be determined by your clients.


Sorry for the BAD news.



Edited by: tosh382

 

[jayanta.diff]

if u have 3 option solid works ug and catia theni recommend solid works becuz its chepest among 3 and solid works has good translator so that u can translate all te files to ur requird format
Edited by: jayanta.diff

 

[ttraser]

Biff,


Tosh hit it on the head... Jay is correct. Solidworks has the most bang for the buck. It can digest and spit out the formats required for you by your clients.


And, it's easy to learn... i.e. I came from Pro/e v16, UG v1, Catia v3, and been on Solidworks since 97.


It's worth the $.





Good luck,

 

[Mindripper]

I also am a current user of both SolidWorks and Pro/E. I first started using Pro/E in 1997, and found it difficult to learn, but a very powerful tool. I was designing injection-molded parts, so the surfacing capabilities were essential to my job: few CAD systems could compete with Pro/E in this area. I boughtmy ownlicense for SW in 1999: I was so impressed by it's ease of use and the helpful nature of the local VAR, I dropped $3000 USD of my own money on a license. I love SW to this day: it's capabilities have grown tremendously, and the company is very responsive to enhancement requests from it's users.


I got a new job and stopped using Pro/E in 2001, using SW and AutoCAD exclusively until March of this year, when I changed jobs again. Now I run Pro/E WF3 at work. I was sorely disappointed to see how little development has been done to make Pro/E more functional in the last six years. In particular, the drawing package is still weak, esp. compared to SW. While Pro/E still has stronger surfacing and spline controls than SW, I spendall of my time on simple parts, assembliesand drawings now: I never use any of the advanced surfacingcapabilities of Pro/E, and the big penalty in drawing creation vs. SW has slashed my productivity and increased my frustration.


Like tosh382 said, check your customer base for trends: you are obligated to follow this flow. Also, look at what kind of work you are doing: if it's mostly molded parts that require advanced surfacing techniques, UG and CATIA are very strong in these areas. SW will be developing more capabilities in this area as well in the coming years, but they are behind the high-end CAD systems at this point in time. But if your primary focus is machined parts, assemblies and generating drawings, SW is a mid-range CAD package that's a perfect fit.In any case, I think you (and your customers) will find SW very easy to learn and use: user-friendliness is one of it's great strengths. Also, it is a native Windows application, unlike Pro/E.


I have to strongly disagree with tosh382's assertion that this is bad news for you: I think it's the best thing that could happen to you. Every CAD user should know more than one CAD system. I'm almost surprised by the number of Pro/E users on this board who have a mindless devotion to this CAD package. Running CAD software isn't like getting married: you can continue toplay the field, especially if you're a contractor/consultant. And in the case of SW,adding it's number to your little black bookwill be both easy and a joy for any Pro/E user. There are so many functions inPro/E that are much easierin SW,you will be up to speed within a few weeks - and wondering why you didn't start down this path sooner.


P.S. Here in the Silicon Valley, quite a few companies have abandoned Pro/E for SW. And new seat sales are much higher for SW than Pro/E, from what I've heard.

 

[prohammy]

Running CAD software isn't like getting married: you can continue toplay the field, especially if you're a contractor/consultant. And in the case of SW,adding it's number to your little black bookwill be both easy and a joy for any Pro/E user.

Mindripper,


Your point above is very valid. I read your threads with interest (sometimes I even laugh out load) but I agree that you have to be out there with the packages and willing to get a feel for as much/many as possible. As a contract engineer I feel that narrowing yourself by being package specific can be quite a drawback.


To date I have used ProE, Inventor & SW (allin the black book), all with decent experience levels and even though ProE is the mainstay of my work, there are things that are in both the others that I wish were in ProE.


I'm sure that as time goes by there will be a much bigger blurring of the boundries between all the packages (I think somebody will make a killing when it comes to an all round package that uses all the different native files) but for now we have to be content with all the different offerings from PTC, SW etc... And there in lies one of the difficulties for contractors, how do you choose the package that will maximise the size of the net we throw into the jobs market. This is one of the areas of PTC's and SW's marketing ploys that bugs the hell out of me. I cannot ever be sure where the trends are and even what the present levels of company useage are.


So it becomes choose a package and hope for the best, its hard to make a fact based decision, when the 'facts' you are given are so damn full of lies (and that biff should tell you where I stand, out in a field waiting for the .lightening strike

Kev

 

[AHA-D]

It is enough that you can "talk" to your customers, you don't need to have the same system. In fact it is most often better that you give them a dumb, translated model than the real stuff. You don't want your knowledge and experience getting spread for free, do you ?


I work with Solid Edge for my own private business, doing so since 1999. I have clients that have CAD, others that don't, even one using SE also. But I never give native files, even found a way to provide SE files without giving away the modeltree.


Most important thing is to feel comfortable with what you do, in the business you have work for. Personally I do much sheetmetal, doing so in SE is a dreamjob compared to ProE, and except for transition bends there isn't a thing that's not better and easier in SE.


It could be of course that you work with your clients on a more close base, where they want you to work on their native models. In that case you have no choice.

 

[slashct]

I went from ProE and Solidworks to UG Back to ProE, and I can say that every system has their benefits. If your thinking of UG I find it hard to believe that UG is cheaper than PTC. We had an account of 50 licenses and our maintenance was well over 250k a year and we had less functionality than our ProE licenses. We switched to UG because of a buyout and PTC pissed us off and was basically thrown out when they threatened to sue the company because of failure to report the name change when we werebought out and all along we had been paying manintenance!


Again it depends on your customer base, and one thing you might want to consider instead of switching software is looking at a feature based translator such as http://www.translationtech.com/
We used one company a few years back and worked well on about 95% of the models we converted the rest needed user cleanup all do to lousy models.

 

[Mindripper]

I have also heard good things about Solid Edge. It has the advantage of using the ParaSolids kernel, as does SW and UG. This makes transportability of databases between these systems easy, according to theory.

 

[johan d]

I have also heard good things about Solid Edge. It has the advantage of using the ParaSolids kernel, as does SW and UG. This makes transportability of databases between these systems easy, according to theory.

What about converting files from SE to Pro/E.


Can you keep the intelligance behind the model? What about assemblies...?

 

[AHA-D]

I haven't met any standard CAD systems that exchange modeltrees. Would be damn hard anyway with all the different ways that similar objectives are being acomplished across different CAD. The best intelligence I met is that assemblies keep being assemblies and keep their names in some translations. Also features (like holes)can be recognised when present. That's about as far as you get AFAIK.


Alex