Pro/E vs. Solidworks (THE WINNER IS!)

[ctarmijo]

Good Morning All,


"Your argument does not hold water at all. From what I read he did not talk about programming cnc's"


On the first page of this topic, there it is said that this company does design through manufacturing. My point is that if they want to use all of the benefits of ProE, they should convert their manufacturing group. But that will come at a price. Thats all.


Also, as far as being a SW sales rep, NO WAY!!! I am a die hard ProE user. I also teach it at a local community college now. Sorry if I came across that way!

Have a good day and good luck with Pro!!!!!!!


Christopher

 

[cristelino]

i HAVE A FEELING



To use Catia very poverfull machine needed;and wth same one machine you
can do in ProE or SW much more because is is running with a
""normal"" machine or laptop



I think SW will repleca Catia in few years





Cristelino


Edited by: cristelino

 

[chf65]

I disagree with Christopher on SW having an advantage over ProE if you do not use it also in Mfg/NC. They can basically stay with MasterCAM, and both SW and ProE will just throw the models over the wall to MasterCAM (or other). No advantage to either.


But I certainly agree with Christopher's assessment that to get the most out of Pro/E, it should be implemented company-wide, across all or most departments. So, there will be a lot of advantages in getting your manufaturing group on board.


Now to my 2 cents on the topics of Pro/E vs. SW:


If they both came up in a benchmark within 1% of each other capability-wise, I would venture to guess that the benchmark was not tough enough. This might be OK, if you included in the benchmark a realistic assessment of your requirements; not just how you do it now, but also how you need to improve your process. Not all companies business requirementsare demanding enough to show a difference between Pro/E and SW. At the most basic level, if somebody's business is only designing square boxes, you will have a hard time differentiating between Pro/E, SW, UG, Autocad, or any other system.


To me this is how they stack up (in the areas I know best):


- Ease of use/ease of learning: SW is better, but Pro/E has caught up alot. ProE will always be taugher just because it has more stuff that it can do, so obviously these commands will ahev to show up somewhere in the UI. As far as user interaction, they both are borrowing from the MS GUI and going along. It is proven and familiar to most software users. SW strated therea nd Pro/E is following along.


- Feature capabilities: Pro/E is better, but SW keeps building more tools trying to come closer. But, pro/E is not standing still either.


- Rounds and blends: Pro/E.


- Surfacing: Pro/E, not even close.


- Additional applications: ProE has been at it longer and has a lot more to offer. Granted not all of them are best in class (neither is SW), but they are there. The associativity alone makes them worth it even when lacking in certain areas.


- Dealing with design change: ProE hands down. Not even close. SW is parametric as well, so if the changes that you look at are lenght/width, you will hardly find a difference. But when changes involve some base foundations, and making sure everything else does not fall apart, ProE has all the tools to deal with it.


- Import data: SW is more permissive of non-perfect 3rd party data, butPro/E is more capable to deal with bad geometry and clean it up (they had to since ProE is more touchy about it).


- export data: Same


- Associativity: ProE hands down. Too much marketing hype has been made of fully-constrained models vs. not fully constained. What makes ProE so capable in associativity is that everything is fully defined, so that the relationships between components have no mystery, and everything is totally predictable. If somebody tells you that geometry need not be fully constained, they are basically saying that their system makes constains assumptions. The constains are just fixed in space, and everything will fall apart at the earliest hint of change.


- Automation (and I do NOT mean programmatic automation here, like Toolkit or VB, but on the user level): ProEhas tons of tools here that SW does not. You can basically inter-realte features to parts to assemblies (back and forth) with unlimited capabilities.


I might have come up with more categories for classification with a bit more time, but this is all I have now...

 

[rpassolt]

Charles is on the money...I

 

[jvf-design]

I wish our benchmarks for Pro and SW were not so close it would be easier to sell Pro/E at this company. We do not do many complex parts and I guess thats why it seemed very close. I am a Pro user and want Pro implemented at this company but I have to justify it. The SW salesmen are trained very well and have a quick come back for everything. They have made things look very very easy and alot of people just can not get past that. At this company we make garage doors, we do all the R & D work and assembly of the products, the only manufacturing we do is roll forming and stamping, any other parts (plastics and castings etc.) is outsourced.

We are still working on the ROI and then the AFE forms will be submitted for approval. We will wait to see what happens then.

Thanks again for everyone input.

JVF

 

[chf65]

Hi JVF,


In a benchmark about making doors, I see how ProE and SW can come up close in functionality. Certainly if the benchmark was about modeling the required parts. I cannot imagine cases in doors where geometry modeling is tough enough to show a difference between CAD systems (but I can be wrong).


But with doors, where design rules are so well established, it is an idealfor automation. This is where Pro/E can make a huge difference,a nd SW cannot touch it.


It can be as simple as automating some repetive aspect of the design process, so your designers can get their job faster. But it can also go as far as expanding product offerings from a set size and options, to fully customized. The customer is allowed to select from a controlled set of dimensions and options, and Pro/E automatically generate all required assemblies and parts, BOM, cut lists, etc. This stuff is very easily done in ProE. Not so with SW.


Charles

 

[jvf-design]

I promised I would keep this updated until it was over. As to Charles post....We have many configurations of door sizes. I have partially created a Pro/E model with family tables that will allow you to select the size door you would like, eg 16x8, 8x7 etc. with windows or without, windloaded or not windloaded. It can also show the motion of the door and calculate what counterbalance springs that are required based on the weight and spit out a full bill of materials for each configuration. That is powerful, something our current AutoCAD can not do.

On another note the Cad decision group has finished the ROI and AFE to be given to upper management with Pro/E as the recommended choice and SolidWorks as the alternative.

Now the Solidworks salesman realizes he lost the top spot and is now droping to a new level. He has sent out an attacking email to upper management and the Cad decision group attacking Pro/E on what a bad decision we are making and attacking the two of us on the team that use Pro/E. (our team is made up of 8 people, 4 from one facility in which 2 are Pro/E users, 1 AutoCAD user and 1 MIS. 4 from another facility in which 1 is a Solidworks user, 2 AutoCAD users and 1 MIS). I will admit that the decision was not unamous but majority ruled.

I thought we were all professionals here but apparently not. Has anyone come across this with SolidWorks or Pro/E salesmen? So if you were upper management making a $500,000 decision would you believe what your CAD team has recommended or what a smooth talking salesmen is recommending?

JVF

 

[ctarmijo]

Good Morning jvf-design,


I have seen both types of scenarios where management took the word of the salesman over the employees and vice versa.


It is never a good thing when management takes the word of the salesman over their people. This sends a VERY BAD signal to the working people that their decisions do not mean anything, but an outside opinion does. If management thinks that the saleman knows the business BETTER than the people doing the work, then management has issues. In the cases where this has happened, people leave companies because they now feel their opinion does not matter.


On the other hand, when management uses the internal resources to make business decisions and rely on the word of the people THEY hired, then things seem to go a lot better.


In my opinion, no one can ever go wrong with using ProE. Good Luck!


Christopher