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before i kick it over to him what i really like to do is outline what we've looked at so far and give you a brief overview of what we'll be getting into today in our first session we looked at how solidworks manage can help acme helped acme audio get all their project management needs and goals under control from there we assigned some tasks in our managed project to our electrical design team and what we saw last time is we saw solidworks pcb and solidworks electrical schematic help our electrical team not just create their electrical content but also distribute the technical deliverable to the rest of the team what we focus on today is automating a lot of the tasks inside acme audio's organization now before we get into that let's really talk about the goals of design automation for acme audio one of their primary and main goals is to reduce engineering time like most organizations they very run a very lean operation and anytime that they can get the engineering output out the door quicker is a big win for acme audio not just reducing engineering time but to be able to get to the market faster with their product is a big competitive advantage for acme audio so any time that we can reduce outside of the engineering organization is a huge victory along with that a big goal for acme audio was engaging with the in customer and then last but certainly not least acme audio wanted a way to drive their market drive this audio market and evaluate the trends of the request coming in so what are they currently doing all right so let's kind of talk about their current process they currently use solidworks and within solidworks they're leveraging design tables which is kind of the extent of their design automation along with that the way that they capture the technical data of what to actually be creating is that a sales resource is needed so what generally happens is their client or their customer comes to a sales person and puts in a request for some sort of audio system they might say you know we like a four-speaker system that can mount on this type of rail in turn that sales person goes to the engineering team conveys the message and then the engineering team goes and starts doing their thing now what are the challenges that they need to address well their teams are a little bit smaller and they're so and their resources are limited so what they were looking for is a way to automate the process from the very beginning from the very time that the customer puts in a request to the time that um a product is shipped and so what we'll be looking at today is we'll be looking at a tool called driveworks driveworks is a design automation tool that can help drive your organization from the very beginning to the very end and the best way that we're going to do that is i'm actually going to hand this over to one of our uh experts in this field and his name is travis jones and what travis is going to be going through is the examples of how acme audio is using driveworks but also some examples uh in general of how a lot of customers can leverage all the suite of drive works with that said i'm gonna go ahead and pass my screen over to mr travis jones and let him take it from here thanks for the introduction roland as part of the automation team here at mlc cad systems i get to work with a lot of our customers to help them automate and streamline their design process and we typically do this with a tool called driveworks so i'm going to share with you today how we were able to streamline the design process for acme using a tool called driveworks that ultimately allowed them to handle their custom orders a lot more effectively the type of orders that lend themselves well to driveworks automation are going to be products that are the same but a little bit different and what we mean by this is where you offer a product to your customers but you allow your customers to put their own spin on it basically choose some customization here and there to fit their specific needs so like in the case of a trailer you could choose from you know one of four different types of trailers whether it's you know a flatbed it could be a curtain side overall you know there's going to be a lot of common parts between those but you're going to be able to customize and tweak it to your specific needs so could be things like trailer height or trailer length color so on the reason why driveworks is such an effective automation tool is because it has really two key pieces of technology the first key functionality that driveworks has is that it's a configurator so it allows you to intuitively configure what are oftentimes complex products it makes these products a lot easier to understand lets you know exactly what options you're going to be choosing so that you can configure a product for your specific need now it's not just enough to know what your customers need you also need to be able to generate all the data that goes along with manufacturing those products and that's where the second key piece of functionality comes in and that's that solidworks and driveworks offer an automation solution so we take all of that information from the configurator side of the product and then we actually generate all the downstream data so things like parts assemblies builds of material quotes and we're able to basically generate all this data that we need to get this product out the door so that ability to have your upfront um kind of front-end configuration where it's really easy to configure complex products but then also the powerful back-end automation where you can generate all the data needed to actually manufacture those products that's really what makes driveworks such a key piece of functionality so oftentimes when we sit down with our customers we're looking to automate the first question we ask is where does it hurt what problems are you currently facing within your process that seem to cause issues whether it's increased costs or a slowdown in the process one of the first places we often see a little bit of pain is with engineering and what we typically see is that engineers get overworked with custom orders takes a lot of effort to go in and rework all these designs every time an order comes through the door and it also means that your engineers are basically tied down reworking existing designs so they're not able to work on new innovation that can drive the company forward another key area that we often focus on is with sales with really technical products sometimes it's a little bit tough for the sales department to actually go in and be able to offer those products to your customers effectively they wind up relying heavily on engineering to figure out if we can actually manufacture this product if we're choosing things that are compatible and that causes a big slowdown in the process another area that we'll see with sales is quotes a lot of times these really technical products that are custom or engineer to order can be really expensive and slow to kind of quote and get out the door the next one might be a little bit of a slowdown with your customers and what you'll find is that your customers may always want something special right so you're seeing these customer requests more and more uh your customers aren't being steered towards your um you know off-the-shelf offerings as much and they're really veering more towards the the more custom orders and they may not understand your product offering effectively so maybe they're not always choosing the right thing or they're getting turned away from your product because they just don't understand it lastly a lot of times we see issues with data so data can be really complex in today's world we often see disconnected data data silos where you've got some data over here in a crm system and then you've got some over here and another erp system and all those different acronyms we've just got data stored all over the place and none of it's connected so what we wind up doing is just duplicating data and processes all over the place and we kind of have this really disconnected process where we're constantly having to jump back and forth and try and get the information we need so i want to look at all four of these areas but i basically want to talk to you guys about what we saw with acme so we sat down with acme and the first thing that we saw when we started to ask them what their pain was was engineering okay engineering was just overworked they had these custom speaker designs and every customer wanted a specific color they wanted a specific tweeter driver or whatever it may have been they basically wanted to customize these offerings every single time and these custom designs were just not profitable basically the margins were really thin because they were spending so much time reworking these designs for each customer and also engineering was just overworked i mean they couldn't work on any new designs and so your product offering eventually starts to get stagnant so when we start to look at ways that driveworks can solve these different issues we look start looking at the full solution stack and when we're specifically talking about engineering issues the first thing that we can often look at is driveworks express so driveworks has three different offerings they have drivers express solo and pro and you can basically scale all the way up but express is the one that we focus on first and the big reason for that is because it's actually included in every single seat of solidworks so if you're on this webinar today and you already have solidworks you already have driveworksexpress which means you can jump immediately off this webinar when we're done and you can start using this product the cool thing about driveworks express is it's really simple it's easy to use and it allows you to basically create new variations of parts and simple assemblies and drawings automatically and what i'd like to do is basically show you an example of that and walk through how we can actually generate some new designs quickly with driveworks express jumping over to solidworks what i've got is an electrical panel from acme and we've got a driveworks project that allows us to configure this panel now it's not too complex just a couple sheet metal parts and some grommets with holes in it but we want to be able to really quickly generate iterations of this panel so i've got a form that i'm going to fill out and all i'm going to do is start by filling out the order number and then i'm going to go ahead and select my name from the drop down as the person who's creating this new panel and then i'll type in some values for height width and depth so do 726 for height i'll do 400 for width and we'll go ahead and select a depth as well the bottom two options here are just going to be inlet and outlet positions so i can choose basically where the inlet and outlet positions are going to be and that'll place the grommets once i'm done i'll hit create and driveworks express is going to go round up all the components that make up this electrical panel and then it's going to actually drive the geometry so it's going to take the values that i input for height width and depth and it's going to physically change all of these parts you actually see over on the right hand side there's kind of a list of tasks that are being executed by driveworks these are all things that somebody would have had to manually do on their own in the time that it's taken driveworks to create these handful of parts i'm not even sure i could have gotten every part open in that amount of time so it's a massive time savings when it comes to redoing and reworking existing designs for new orders if you're seeing slowdowns in your engineering department with custom orders that are coming through the door be sure to check out driveworksexpress driverxpress just like we saw offers a huge benefit for being able to quickly configure simple parts and assemblies you can basically type in a little bit of info in the form and a couple minutes later it's going to spit out all of the documents that you need and this is ultimately going to allow your engineers to focus on innovation they can innovate new products they can you know make some forward-facing changes and really drive your company into the future and that's always going to be money well spent what we found with acme and what we found with a lot of companies honestly is that once you alleviate you know one bottleneck in your process you'll find the next weak point and frack me that was the sales process so once engineering is able to offer this wide array of changes because it's not too much work for them to go in and rework the product you'll find that sales may be a little bit bogged down with trying to understand all of the different options and what works with what you know is this option compatible with this option is a six inch driver going to be compatible with this size and shape housing for our speaker design there's just a lot of different things that you have to take into account and this happens a lot with custom designs sales is trying to pitch these really technical products and you're giving your customers the freedom to make all these different choices but suddenly you're worrying a lot more about compatibility and that all just flows right back to engineering sales is basically having to go back to the engineering department and say hey guys this is what the engineer or say this is what the customer asked for can we do it is it a good idea and so that's where we start to look at integrating our sales department into driveworks for this what we typically look at is driveworks pro driverx pro is going to be a more enterprise-wide product it has different modules for different departments and applications and when we're talking about sales the big thing that we're looking at is we're looking at the interface so rather than having our engineers really drive all of the model generation and the picks and clicks of you know our dimensions our order number our parameters we're going to let sales actually have some of this interaction so with driveworks pro we get these really nice custom forms that we can kind of make a little bit more intuitive make it easier to understand our products so i want to take a look at driveworks pro and show you guys what this looks like as we configure another product what i've got here in driveworks pro is a project that allows you to configure an hvac unit now acme audio they're not in the business of creating hvac units but i wanted to show you this project because it's one that you actually have the ability to interact with on your own we'll talk about that more here in a minute right off the bat you're going to notice that the interface is a lot more intuitive and that's just because driveworks pro allows us to customize these forms heavily to just make them a little bit easier to navigate so i don't need to know a whole lot about hvac units all i'm going to do is go in here and start to kind of play around with some of these options first one i can see is my connection options so i'll see the image update there for flange or screwed and then i'll go ahead and start configuring this and what we need to do now is add an entry point and i can choose between a louver mesh or just a blank option you will notice however that when i select the louver option i also get a secondary option that appears for powered and this is what we refer to as guided selling basically hiding and showing compatible options as necessary from here i'm going to navigate through a bunch of different modules starting with the fan and what i'll do is i'll just kind of slide this fan diameter slider over and then add the fan to my hvac unit i'll keep working my way through with the heat recovery unit and you'll see that we have several different options here for the type of ladder that we need whether or not we want some windows to be able to see in and we'll go ahead and add that as well down at the bottom you'll notice that it's actually keeping a list of all the different items that have been added to my order now i've only added two modules and my initial connection specification but i've got a whole bunch of different items here and that's because the heat recovery unit is made up of several different components now as the customer i really don't need to know what all those different components are as long as they're added to my order and that's one of the neat things that driveworks can do is along with guiding you through the sales process it can really hide a lot of the things that just aren't important to me as the customer i don't need to know every last fastener and component that makes up a particular item i just need to know that i've selected the correct items and that they've been added to my order so we'll continue on with adding a couple of different uh modules but one thing i want you to keep track of is that it's actually totaling up the price as we go driveworks pro offers a unique ability to be able to basically configure and quote these custom products as i'm moving around all these different sliders and options it's actually updating the price in real time based on pricing rules that my company relies on so driveworks pro allows you to really easily quote these complex products because it's using logic that you've defined in order to quote out your products on the fly so once we've finished our specification and hit complete we'll see a list of all the different items that we've added and then down at the bottom we actually have the ability to specify whether this requires an approval and we can go in and actually view some additional documentation so if i click this view bom option i've actually got a bill of materials that's been generated before i've actually ever created any solidworks files for this order so right off the bat i'm getting a bill of materials in just a few seconds and i can also use this same information to go ahead and generate a quote so we're basically taking that bill of materials that we generated along with all the pricing rules that we were able to build in and we're going to be able to turn around a quote in just a minute or two on a really complex technical product so driveworks pro offers an insane amount of automation not only for just the solidworks parts assemblies and drawings but also for builds material for quotes for emails there's all sorts of stuff that we can automate in driveworks pro i'll talk a little bit more about that but it's really pretty impressive just how far this product can go over in solidworks we can actually see all the different components that we just specified and once i'm ready i'll just go ahead and hit generate and it's going to actually go ahead and take all of that information and it's going to start to drive all the different geometry and components and features that make up that data set and it will build out the hvac module that we specified so everything from parts assemblies and drawings there's several hundred different components that it's gonna have to generate but it's gonna do it all on the fly and it's gonna do it in about five minutes roughly so really really powerful automation and i'm sure you guys can imagine how much time that could possibly save on a large hvac unit like that so i won't bore you guys with the entire model generation but i did want to show you kind of what that looks like to kick off so with driveworks pro we were able to take all of our sales people over at acme and we were able to kind of put them in the driver's seat so they could easily configure their products through the powerful use of the driveworks form set once they were able to input all the data into the forms just like we saw before with express we were able to kick out all of the resulting models so all of our parts and assemblies and from there all of our drawings not only drawings in solidworks file format but drawings in pdf format or dwg if we're talking about maybe taking some sheet metal parts and needing to cut them out on a plasma or a water jet driveworks can actually output several different file file types depending on your needs not only can it generate solidworks files but we can also generate other document types so we kind of saw some of the ability there to do a bill of materials or quote can also send emails and it can even generate and drive things like excel documents and word documents so there's a whole other aspect of driveworks pro for document generation outside of solidworks and it's incredibly powerful but just kind of starting from the basics think about just how powerful it is to be able to automate that quoting process with pricing rules that you can build into driveworks and then sending all that data downstream with a quote that can automatically be emailed out to your customer with a full bill of materials you're just talking about automating things that take a ton of effort and are often error prone and kind of complicated to carry out so really neat aspect of this this automation tool set we know that driveworkspro can help us put our sales team in the driver's seat but it can actually help put our customers in the driver's seat as well so a lot of times our customers want to be involved right they want to go and they want to do research they want to play around with our products and explore the different offerings that we have and if you have really technical products with just a ton of different options this can be completely overwhelming if you've ever been to a company's website and you think you know about their product and then you just see this long list of items and where it's even worse is if a company has a catalog right and they've got like this particular product they offer and then it's just pages of options you're like man i have no idea what this product even does anymore well that's where putting driveworks in front of your customers can be a big help and you can do this with driveworkspro and a tool called driveworks live driveworks live lets you basically take your project and then put it on the web where it can be accessed from anywhere there's a bunch of reasons why this has been official but it kind of goes without saying that consumers these days like to do their own research i think pretty much everybody now goes online and you're going to research the product as much as you can before making a buying decision that's kind of going to be your first choice is to go onto the website explore the products and really kind of come to your own conclusions before you have to go and maybe talk to a salesperson or set up a meeting i'm very much like this i mean there's probably nothing i won't research before making a buying choice you know expensive cheap uh doesn't really matter that being said i think the more complex your product is the more expensive it is the more research somebody wants to do and probably the more they want to be able to go onto your website and find the information they're looking for so driveworks pro and driveworks live really allow you to take that product put it on the web make it easy to understand for your customers so that they can make informed decisions you know hopefully we're able to communicate with them in person or over the phone but if we're unable to do that then you know we should at least be able to provide them with that information through our website so what i'd like to do is show you driveworks live and to do that i'm actually head over to a website called driveworkslive.com so you can actually check out this website for yourself again it's just driveworkslive.com and when you get there what you'll find is that they have a number of driveworks projects that they've actually put up on their website for you to interact with so there's a couple examples up at the top but then you can scroll down and there's a bunch of industry examples and the one that i'm going to take a look at here is a trailer so you kind of saw a preview of this earlier in the presentation but you can basically go in here and play around with this where you've got several different trailer types you can choose the trailer style that you want to configure and then they've got this really intuitive interface that's very graphical where you can go through and you can select all the different options pertaining to the trailer that you want to order so whether you want to go in and choose the you know height and length the wheel style the door style all of these different options you can run through right in a web browser on any device and configure what is actually a pretty complex product so driveworks live gives our customers control but more importantly it gives our customers product knowledge and understanding on even the most complex products give your customers the ability to go online explore your products in a way that's easy to understand but in a way that you can actually guide them through the product set so that they understand exactly what they're looking at and it's really going to make for an enjoyable experience i really encourage you guys to explore it on your own feel free to check out driveworkslive.com you can play around with all the different projects one of the things that i really like most about driveworks live is that there are so many different ways driveworks can be set up depending on the type of product the industry and just what your overall goals are for driveworks that using driveworks live and exploring all those different projects is a great way to just get a feel for how flexible driveworks is and some of the different ways that it can be deployed now the last thing i want to look at is data data today is just a tough task to manage if you're not properly equipped so many companies have different data sources they've got databases all over the place they've got it in the cloud they've got it on site they've got it scattered across local hard drives on every machine and it's really tough to keep all of that data organized so with driveworks what i want to do is take a look at how driveworks allows you to not only reuse data but also keep data pretty organized so when we're talking about driverx pro one of the things that you can do immediately that's very simple is you can store tabular data companies love to store stuff in excel excel is a great product don't get me wrong i store stuff in excel all the time because it's such a powerful tool set but it's not necessarily a great tool for collaboration that changes with driveworks because you can basically take all the data that you've been storing in excel files and you can put them in a centralized location and then you can feed that data into driveworks so you can actually consume that data as part of your configurator not only that but when you want to take it a step farther driveworks can actually read and write directly to another database so a good one that i like to think of is pricing what if we were able to pull real-time pricing out of our database so that as we're trying to quote these complex products we're looking at up to the minute pricing accuracy on things like materials and other resources that we have to consume as part of our manufacturing process so we can actually tie all of this in directly into driveworks and we can consume data in real time but not only that we can actually write data back out of driveworks to some of these other sources so we have bi-directional ability to read and write data to other databases and this really lets us link all of these different tool sets that we use across our organization into one interface this is kind of one of those things that's just a little bit complex to try and convey with the short amount of time that we kind of have um you know if we wanted to get into a really in-depth conversation on just the different ways that we can consume data and what the possibilities are with driveworks i'd love to kind of chat with you guys about that maybe one-on-one but i'll also offer you another tool for explaining just how good driveworks is with data reuse and managing data so if you remember back to a previous slide i talked about how it's a really good idea to make your products easy to understand for your customers if you want them to buy in and purchase your product and if there was ever a tool that believes in that it's definitely drive works so something that driveworks has done that i am absolutely in love with is they've actually used driveworks live to explain the way that driveworks operates it's like the movie inception i can't wrap my head around it either but you can actually check it out for yourself if you go to driveworkslive.com and you check out their technology stacks so just head to the website and then up at the top just click on the technology link and that'll scroll you down a little bit farther where you'll see seven different categories and these are all kind of core pieces of functionality within driveworks so things like rules and forms or integration like we just talked about what's cool is each one of these different items is actually a driveworks project so when i click explore on the integration tech stack this is actually a driveworks project so just like we saw with that hvac unit what you're seeing here is actually a driveworks project that actually explains how driveworks operates and you can kind of sort through all the different categories here but it's going to explain and break down kind of what goes on in the background so if i wanted to see how we could actually communicate with another database i can go to the database section and here it shows me an example of how driveworks can read from a database so if i select germany as a company it's going to update a rule where it queries sql sql and filters out based on a country and so this is just a cool way to show it off i can see the same thing if i want to write to a database i can type in a message click right and i'm able to see not only the result of what i'm doing but i can also see the rule that was written that makes this functionality possible so it's a great explanation that simplifies kind of a nice understanding behind the way that that driveworks actually carries out all of these different operations so be sure to check this out there's some cool stuff here i mean it can integrate directly with google maps api if i want to see a distance or if i want to communicate a shipping quote really really quickly i can do that through web api as well so there's all these really advanced pieces of functionality that these tech stacks can break down but even just going through some of the more simple ones like the way that rules operate a big thing with driveworks is that you do not have to be a programmer i promise you you guys do not want me writing code for your company but what's nice is i don't need to know how to really write code for driveworks all of the rules logic is really broken down in a simple easy to understand method you don't have to know how to program api all the api's been programmed you just kind of have to fill in the blanks so you'll see an example of what this rule would look like if we were trying to determine the volume of a pressure vessel so it's just a really simple syntax here and i can actually change some of these values to see how it carries out and i can sort through all of these different rule types so whether it's math or text or logic there's just a bunch of different areas that you can explore to get comfortable with job works really wants to kind of show off you know just how efficient and effective their product is and uh they really kind of go by you know what what they preach here and and they've really made it easy to understand their product in hopes that that'll just give you additional conf confidence in driveworks as a solution managing data it's a critical process in every organization so be sure to check out those tech stacks i think you guys will really enjoy going through those especially the one on data connectivity and integration you can just see how easy it is to integrate driveworks upstream and downstream with all of your data how to consume that data in real time to just get your customers your sales people your engineering department up to the minute information when it matters most so i hope you guys have kind of enjoyed running through the example of how we were able to solve some of these issues for acme and their engineering and their sales department where we were able to really alleviate alleviate some of the issues in their engineering department along with some of the slowdowns in sales as well more importantly i hope that you guys are able to kind of translate some of this over to your organization hopefully you've recognized a couple of areas where you could possibly improve some of the processes that you currently have in place and you know some of the key things that i just kind of want to leave you with are the big benefits that driveworks really focuses on for a lot of our customers so first just responding quickly to customer needs i mean patience these days for for a lot of customers and a lot of companies is is really small i mean you know we're really in kind of a um i i think a mindset now of instant gratification and and when somebody's really interested in your product you've got to strike while the irons hot you've got to turn around that information quick driveworks is going to let you do that whether it's quotes bombs getting data through your engineering department out to manufacturing it really just shortens that design process and that sales cycle significantly it's also going to reduce production delays caused by error and this isn't something that we've really talked about a lot but it is an important aspect to hit on so engineers were detail oriented we try to be as detail-oriented as possible but when you're talking about just a repetitive design process on a significantly complex product it's only inevitable that you're going to run into an issue you know whether it's somebody forgetting to update a particular dimension or maybe keying in an extra decimal place somewhere you're going to run into a problem that shows up in manufacturing or production that's going to be costly and time consuming and because we're able to automate a lot of these processes with driveworks we can reduce or eliminate a lot of these production delays that are just caused by human error in a repetitive process we can also help reduce the cost for custom products you know when you're involving engineering a lot in you know helping to get these custom products out the door it's expensive you know engineers we like to get paid we went to school for a long time you know we work hard um you know we like to spend money too so it's going to cost a little bit if you have to involve our time in every single product that goes out the door so reducing cost is going to be huge because not only you know does that just give you a little bit better margin but it's going to make you more competitive with companies who are just offering things off the shelf at a reduced cost you know if you can offer a customized product at the same price as one that is just off the shelf and the customer has no ability to customize that product that's a significant competitive advantage as an engineer this is one of my favorites allowing engineers to innovate you know that's that's what we really enjoy it's why we went to school we want to be able to design new products we want to problem solve you know we don't necessarily want to rework the the same design so if you let us you know we'd really like to design new products and help your company move forward so if we can offload some of the work of those repetitive custom designs to driveworks then that frees up all the engineers to be able to innovate and kind of develop some forward-looking products to help your company prepare for the future and the last one here is just enabling your customers to easily configure and view your products on a web browser so putting your customers in control giving them the ability and the resources to explore your products in a way that's easy to understand so that they really understand the way that your products off uh operate you know why you're offering certain options and what would be best for their particular application so i'll kind of leave you with a little bit of a summary here and the way that i like to summarize driveworks and the benefits that it offers is that when your products are easy to understand and you make them easy to buy turns out that they're actually pretty easy to sell so i hope you guys have enjoyed it i've certainly enjoyed kind of sharing some of this with you guys driveworks is an extremely um in-depth product so if you want to know more we would be happy to talk with you i'm going to turn it back over to roland but there are two things that i'm going to encourage you guys to do so i'm going to encourage you guys to explore driveworksexpress it's free you already own it so try to pick out a small design and maybe automate that product or once you've gone through that you can actually download a 30-day trial of driveworksolo for free you don't even have to talk to one of our salespeople you can actually go to driveworks um the website and request a trial all on your own and you can actually jump right into solo so hope you guys can take some action on that be thinking about something that you could work on and if you have any questions for me personally i'm always happy to discuss automation with anybody i think it's a really cool way to help make companies more efficient so thanks again and roland i'll send it back over to you travis thanks again for the awesome technical content and we're going to get into a q a session but before we do that let's kind of talk about where we're at in our series today we were focusing on design automation we've already talked about our project management our electrical design department so where are we headed to next week next time we'll be looking at process control and how solidworks manage can help us control many different processes but we will specifically focusing on the engineering change process this is taking from a request that comes in from an outside source like maybe the shop floor or the customer and and seeing how solidworks manage can control that from beginning to the end until we actually send out that engineering change notification i want to thank you guys again for attending and we look forward to seeing you on our next one [Music] [Music] you