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What is SOLIDWORKS Manage?
SOLIDWORKS Manage extends SOLIDWORKS PDM by adding advanced tools for process, project, and resource management. It enables companies of any size to visualize workflows, track progress, and make informed decisions to improve efficiency and design quality. Features include engineering change control, project management, and flexible BOM handling, all integrated with PDM. This seamless approach helps organizations streamline operations, reduce manual tasks, and gain real-time insight into design and business processes.
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SOLIDWORKS PDM focuses and concentrates on looking after the design deliverables, the CAD models, the drawings and all the things that are around the actual design itself. Whereas SOLIDWORKS Manage is a system that gives you advanced tools to actually look after and control the actual processes, the projects and the resources that you use to actually design stuff. So it's about the process rather than the actual delivery. And one of the main benefits of that is the ability to visualise all those processes and those projects and all that resource so that you can track and monitor where you are to make adjustments based on informed decisions to improve those processes and therefore improve the quality of the design and the throughput that you can get from your organisation. It doesn't matter whether you're a company of two or three people or a company of 100 people, the complexity level is often the same in what you're doing in terms of design and managing the design process. And therefore, what I'm trying to highlight is that these PDM products and SOLIDWORKS Manage is not necessarily for big companies, it's for small companies as well. And the really great thing is for a small company is because there's less of you, you can deploy this technology much quicker and get much bigger benefits and get an advantage over the bigger organisations because of your size. So SOLIDWORKS Manage is a set of more advanced data management tools that actually sit on top or layer on top of SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional. So that you use PDM Professional for managing all your CAD designs and all the documents and all the actual deliverables of the process. Whereas SOLIDWORKS Manage gives you tools and capabilities that are going to manage the processes, the projects and the resources that you use to actually get to that end deliverable. So it's about managing those business processes rather than actually necessarily managing the data. We continue to use PDM Pro and its Windows interface, which is easy to use. And then, as I said, on top of that, put this extra functionality. So, for example, things like process management. And again, small companies, big companies all tend to have some sort of engineering change process. The really weird thing is, is that the change process is the really positive thing because it's the only way you can make changes and make things better. But they tend to be notoriously manual, paper-based process. They tend to be tortuous and not very reliable. And most important of all, they're not very easy to track or monitor. So one of the really amazing things in SOLIDWORKS Manage is the ability to capture those processes. So not just the bits that are done in design, but the actual request from somebody on the shop floor. Maybe some requirements for the change. Maybe some analysis of what people are asking to do. And then once you've made the change and controlled the change in Manage in the engineering around SOLIDWORKS PDM and SOLIDWORKS CAD, you can then manage the process of actually delivering that change through the manufacturing. So deciding what to do with the stock and the work in progress and publishing the information in the form of maybe a change order through a report that allows those people to work on the change that's going on. One of the other big areas where SOLIDWORKS Manage can help an organisation is with project management. A lot of companies that do make-to-order or do big projects or do new product introduction processes have a very formalised, well-thought-out way of delivering designs. But again, it tends to be a paper-based approach or a manual approach to look after those projects. So SOLIDWORKS Manage brings all of the capabilities of project management to the party. So not only can you manage the processes, the engineering change, the new product introduction process, not only are you managing all the deliverables in terms of CAD data documentation, but you can also create a project with stages and tasks and ad hoc tasks. You can apply your resource so you can work out how many projects you can deliver in a year. And this is all seamlessly joined together. So unlike Microsoft Project, which tends to be a standalone thing, in SOLIDWORKS Manage, when people add deliverables and sign off their tasks, it automatically updates the project so everybody knows all of the time where you are. One of the other big challenges in SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional, because it's a document-centric tool, it relies on documents to represent the physical components like a CAD model or a CAD assembly, is that the bill of materials that you generate in SOLIDWORKS can be limited. It doesn't really have all of the things that you want to include in the bill of materials. And the classic things are packaging, bubble wrap, Loctite, grease, the things that you'd never model. But also for people that make products that vary, so maybe they vary by colour, or they vary by electrical variant or country variant, so a whole range of products, it would be mad in SOLIDWORKS Professional and SOLIDWORKS to have a top-level assembly for all of those. Whereas in SOLIDWORKS Manage, we can represent those by records and items. We can very quickly create bond variations without having to do the CAD model. We could design a product before we've even got to CAD at the early stages during requirement definition by using items and records within SOLIDWORKS Manage to represent the things that we're going to design, assuming that the project goes ahead. And I guess the best thing of all inside SOLIDWORKS Manage is this capability to access all the data in the system with user-definable reports that are actually interactive, which allows managers and project managers and just the people that are involved in the design to track and monitor the design to see where they are, maybe to see how many engineering change requests are coming in and how many we're processing. Do we have enough resource? Can we do another new product this year? And when I was in engineering, that was our biggest challenge. We could create key process indicators for our sales department or our manufacturing department, which is all about numbers and how many machines are going out and how many leads are coming in. In engineering, it was notoriously difficult to create those KPIs, so nobody really knew where they were. And so in SOLIDWORKS Manage, that all comes as an end deliverable. And actually, for me, that's probably the most important thing, because we can see how well we're doing. We can make informed decisions about where we're going to make changes to our processes or our projects.