SOLIDWORKS PLM Professional: A First Look at Modern Product Development

In today's fast-paced world, developing products means teams need to work together smoothly, no matter where they are or what tools they use. SOLIDWORKS PLM Professional aims to bring all the pieces of product development together, from planning and design to tracking materials and managing changes, all in one place. This can help get products to market faster.

Key Takeaways

• Integrates project planning, CAD data, material tracking, software control, and change management.
• Enables collaboration across different teams and devices.
• Streamlines the process from initial design to final product.

Project Planning Made Easy

Getting your projects planned out is the first step, and SOLIDWORKS PLM Professional makes it easier for teams of any size to work together. You can track tasks using a flexible approach that lets you access information from anywhere, on any device. This means everyone stays on the same page, which is pretty handy.

Smarter Material Sourcing

Dealing with raw materials can be tricky. This tool lets you create and define your raw materials, including their types and how they're used. This helps avoid mistakes when you're sourcing them. You can also attach important documents to these materials, making it quicker to check for compliance and know where everything came from. Plus, you can list equivalent manufacturer items. This is a good way to make sure you can still get what you need if a specific component becomes hard to find, reducing risks.

Concept and Design Reuse

When you're coming up with new product ideas, you can use existing CAD designs. This helps you check your concepts early on and reuse data you already have. You can build a new design by simply dragging and dropping existing parts from almost any application on the platform. This cuts down on errors and speeds up the creation of new concepts. You can position components using a standard set of tools, no matter where the original data came from. This means you don't need deep CAD knowledge in the early stages of prototyping. The result is a system that works well with multiple CAD formats, allowing more people to get involved in the design process sooner.

Managing Software and Multi-Discipline Products

For products that involve software, SOLIDWORKS PLM Professional helps you manage the source code with full traceability. You can link software items to specific branches in your external source control system. This makes it easy to grab and look at the latest code using a viewer that understands different programming languages. By bringing software components into your multi-discipline products, you can improve how different teams work together.

Unified Engineering Definition

Managing the complete engineering details for a product, from the start of the design all the way through testing, can be done in one place. This helps speed up product development. You can see the engineering information that's relevant to you, which makes things less complicated and reduces confusion. When creating engineering items, you can use design templates that work well with other CAD tools, making design work more efficient. You can also assign an enterprise item number to easily identify these engineering items, helping to keep things consistent and follow company rules. It’s also easy to check the raw materials used for an item to make sure the product quality is good and avoid issues. Dedicated views show the total amount of each raw material used in the entire engineering design, helping you quickly spot any potential sourcing problems. You can also define and approve alternative items to speed up the process of finding suppliers and keep deliveries on schedule.

Streamlined Change Management

Making changes to a product can be simplified and sped up across teams with a clear, consistent process. You can use impact analysis to find all the items affected by a change and figure out why the change is needed. You can then look at the benefits, costs, and risks, and estimate how much work will be involved. This helps you make smart decisions about whether a change is feasible based on the results of these analyses. Structured workflows guide the approval process for changes, making sure everything is transparent and decisions are made effectively. Change orders help coordinate the work needed across different areas for implementing the change. You can use built-in tools to see all the items affected by a change proposal, making sure you cover everything. Dependencies ensure that changes are coordinated accurately across all areas. You can review the changes that have been made using a built-in visual comparison tool, which helps you make informed approval decisions. You can apply these changes to different versions of a product, which helps reuse designs, lower costs, and keep control over the digital record.

With SOLIDWORKS PLM Professional, you're not just managing designs; you're changing how innovation happens. It helps your business innovate without holding back.