STRATEGIES

May 29, 2001

Unless you're directly involved with some sort of mechanical design, you probably don't think much about computer-aided design (CAD). But chances are that something, if not most things, you touch today will have been designed by some sort of CAD tool.

SolidWorks At a Glance

Headquarters: Concord, Mass. Founded: 1993 Clients: SolidWorks 2001: 120,000 3DPartStream.NET: SMC Pneumatics Inc., Alden Products Partners: GS, Cadtek, EDA, Fisher/Unitech, i-MARK, i2t2, Microsoft, Spry Technology, TechniCon Corp., VerticalNet, Viewpoint Corporate: Subsidiary of Dassault Systemes S.A. (NASDAQ, Paris Bourse:DASTY)

CAD has come a long way since its inception a quarter century ago as a simple two-dimensional drawing tool. Within the last decade, the move to 3D has been working its way down from early adopters to the mainstream, and the latest move in the industry is to 3D-enable an online catalog of mechanical parts.

These areas are where Concord, Mass-based SolidWorks excels. SolidWorks' flagship product, SolidWorks 2001, is a 3D solid-modeling CAD system that makes the path from 2D to 3D simple, without giving up flexibility, SolidWorks chief operating officer John McEleney told ASPnews.

"Design engineering has always been about tradeoffs — strength vs. weight, availability vs. cost, weighing the aesthetic and environmental impacts. SolidWorks allows the engineers to get 3D accuracy and create an unambiguous reproduction, but still they're able to go through changes during the process," McEleney said.

A Solid Base of Customers
SolidWorks 2001, now in its ninth major release, has been shipping since 1996. It was the first product to bring solid modeling into a native Windows environment, opening up possibilities for mainstream engineers. Today, the company has over 120,000 users, and McEleney estimates that just a quarter of the potential market has converted to 3D, leaving a tremendous opportunity for SolidWorks.

An even greater opportunity lies in the barely tapped market of companies that are just beginning to 3D-enable their online catalogs. "There's a small fraction putting their catalogs online today. It's in the "early majority" stage — it's not a novelty, but it is novel to see a 3D-enabled catalog online," he said.

To reach this market, SolidWorks has taken the core engine of SolidWorks 2001 and built on top of it a service called 3DPartStream.NET. Launched in October 2000, the service allows end users to go through one of SolidWorks' e-commerce partners — which include TechniCon Corp., I-MARK Inc. and Spry Technology — to host an online catalog, which can then be 3D-enabled using 3DPartStream.NET.

Vertical Designs
Another market involves companies like VerticalNet Inc., a business-to-business trading exchange. VerticalNet has over 50 industry-specific trading communities that serve thousands of customers

VerticalNet customer Mahr Federal Inc. — formed from the recently merged Federal Products Co., of Providence, R.I., and Carl Mahr Holding GmbH of Goettingen, Germany — is the third largest full-line producer of dimensional metrology instruments worldwide. Mahr Federal is using 3DPartStream.NET to showcase its precision gauging products.

"If you go into any designers office, you'll see a bookshelf full of catalogs. In the old days, when you wanted to use a part, you'd make a photocopy and enlarge it to get the rough dimensions, then trace the copy into your drawing as a placeholder," McEleney said.

Obviously this is not an efficient solution for today's world. Though many companies are bringing their catalogs online, for the most part, many are simply scanning in their paper catalogs. With 3DPartStream.NET, companies can 3D-enable their catalog, allowing the designer to go to the manufacturer's site, download an exact 3D model of the desired part, and then embed it directly into their drawing.

Not Just a Pretty Face
So is it just about making the catalog look nice? It's much more than that, McEleney said. "If a designer embeds the part into his design, the part is more likely to be bought later on. The most expensive part of most manufacturers' business is sales and marketing. It's in the manufacturer's best interest to make its product part of the design."

While the client's Web catalog sits on the server of one of SolidWorks' partners, 3DPartStream.NET resides on SolidWorks servers co-located at Exodus Communications. The service is pulled up when a visitor accesses a 3D model, and a Java applet is automatically downloaded at that time.

Even if a manufacturer has thousands of products, it's usually only necessary to store far fewer. For example, 3DPartStream.NET client SMC Pneumatics Inc., the world's largest manufacturer of pneumatic automation components, offers a variety of parts, each with millions of permutations.

Rather than storing data about all of these parts or forcing users to sort through them all to find the exact part they need, 3DPartStream.NET is able to create a model of the part using a few hundred base configurations and then a set of user-defined options, McEleney said.

"Take something as simple as the mouse sitting in front of you. You could have models for left and right hands, children and adults, and all of them in a variety of colors. Inside the software, you could manage all of these possibilities as one assembly with multiple configurations," he said.

"When we show it to our customers, there's a high level of excitement," McEleney said. "It comes when they realize they can influence the buying decisions of their customers."

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