Transition Your Design Team to SOLIDWORKS Electrical

Changing a product that is used as a tool in your business processes can often be a daunting task. This requires critical thought, value analysis, the right expertise, and the assumption of transition risk.

When is a good time for change? The short answer is now. Obviously, there are multiple reasons to consider change, here are some good and bad reasons that tend to be pivotal:

• New hires & onboarding
• Plans for scaling your engineering business
• Engineering volume management
• Future proofing your business
• Complex design challenges requiring new tools
• Mistakes in your BOM or purchasing, mistakes in production
• High volume of scrap or rework
• Better integration between engineering disciplines-Controls/ Electrical with Mechanical
• Desktop product subscription is coming up for renewal
• Bringing all design tools under the same family of products for compatibility or billing
• Because your competition already has made the change!

Whatever your reason for change, it is imperative that you understand the actual cost. Now the SOLIDWORKS Electrical software is only one aspect of the cost. There are other factors that cumulatively add to that number:

• Do we have the right skills and are the users proficient with the software?
• Training and implementation?
• What does the learning curve timeline look like?
• Driving that first project to print?
• Where do I want this data to reside and how do I want to operate my business with this tool?
• Is there infrastructure attached to this purchase?

Most times the above questions come as a surprise to end users and sometimes decision makers. Working with an experienced partner generally helps reduce that risk as you will get most of the answers up-front when working with mature products like SOLIDWORKS Electrical. Current offerings include the following three packages of SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic Standard, SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic Professional and SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D.

Having done this over a decade at TriMech, we have services that can help alleviate that stress and reduce the adoption time of a new tool into your business.

SOLIDWORKS Electrical Deployment Service (EDS) Training & Installation (davidc858.sg-host.com)

In terms of effort, deployment services make that integration hurt less as opposed to doing all the groundwork by yourself and coupling the effort of “how to make it work” with your business.

The elements of successful adoption for any intelligent Electrical design tool are:

1. Setting up the software for multi-user
2. Standardization of templates and library maintenance
3. Customizing the outputs to your requirements
4. Optimizing the process for efficiency with every new project through the tool
5. Developing work instructions for your business and building in-house expertise

In the off chance you have abundance of time, SOLIDWORKS Electrical expertise and money at your disposal, the links below should help you understand the scope of self-starting the adoption process:

1. How to Set Up Electrical Templates in SOLIDWORKS – TriMech
2. Building Your Electrical Parts Library: Organization (davidc858.sg-host.com)
3. Building Your Electrical Parts Library: Importing Data (davidc858.sg-host.com)
4. Building Your Electrical Parts Library Part 1: Overview – TriMech
5. Building Your Electrical Parts Library Part 2: Importing by Spreadsheet – TriMech
6. Building Your Electrical Parts Library Part 3: Organizing & Maintenance – TriMech

This just gets the ball rolling on setup and begins minimum implementation. The fact that this schematic product scales into the 3D family of SOLIDWORKS products ensures there is always room for further change and integration. Hope this blog and webinar gave you a deeper insight in to SOLIDWORKS Electrical and a general adoption process for new electrical design tools. Please reach out to us if you have more questions on how a new tool adoption might look for your business.

Sign up for our on-demand webinar below.