Dassault Systèmes has launched the latest version of its SolidWorks 3D design and engineering application.
The company says SolidWorks 2018 features an integrated, end-to-end solution for the design to manufacturing process that enables businesses of any size to rethink their approach to how parts and products are made and quickly bring innovative ideas to market in today’s experience economy.
Powered by Dassault Systèmes’ 3DExperience platform, which is probably a product lifecycle platform, SolidWorks 2018 is said to support a business’ complete design through manufacturing strategy with solutions that simplify the interactions between disciplines across the product development workflow.
This unified process leverages smart manufacturing – a connected and seamless flow of data that is available to all teams involved in product development whenever, wherever and in whatever format is needed without having to port data from one system to another, says Dassault Systèmes.
Edson Gebo, owner, Digital Detail & Design, says: “Lots of designs involve welding plate and sheet metal parts and most people use ‘tab and slot’ techniques for self-fixturing the parts for welding.
“The new tab and slot feature saves a lot of time versus having to create these features manually. This will really help get designs to the shop faster.”
Dassault Systèmes says it recognises that in today’s marketplaces, competition is fierce and consumer loyalty is nurtured by businesses that can create compelling experiences that go beyond simply purchasing or using a product.
While this inspires businesses to innovate in all aspects of their operations in order to thrive, obsolete organizational structures, processes and tools separate the design and manufacturing aspects of product development and can lead to mistakes impacting collaboration, schedules and budgets.
With SolidWorks 2018, teams can collaborate concurrently to more rapidly and cost-efficiently design a product or part, validate its function and manufacturability, manage its data and related processes, streamline and automate its manufacturing, and inspect it, says Dassault Systèmes.
Any changes in design or manufacturing are fast and easy to manage and automatically flow to all related models, programs, drawings and documentation, thanks to intellectual property embedded early on in the design process.
A key feature of SolidWorks 2018 for this process is SolidWorks CAM, or computer-aided manufacturing, a new application that provides rules-based machining with knowledge capture to allow for the automation of manufacturing programming.
Designers and engineers can gain a greater understanding of how their designs are made, make more informed decisions, and quickly create prototype parts and manufacture in-house to control quality, cost and delivery.
This application also enables teams to execute new “build to order” strategies with custom parts that are automatically designed and programmed in seconds rather than hours, says Dassault Système.
Gian Paolo Bassi, CEO, SolidWorks, Dassault Systèmes, says: “A successful consumer experience must have a well-designed product at its core and an efficient way to produce it.
SolidWorks 2018 brings more than just a smarter approach to manufacturing parts or products, it helps businesses translate imagination into innovation and build ecosystems.
“As with past releases, many of SolidWorks 2018’s new tools and enhancements respond to the SolidWorks community’s insight and feedback, equipping them with more power and capabilities to bring great designs to manufacturing faster, with higher quality and at lower costs.
“Over the next few months, we will roll out additional end-to-end process solutions aimed to help the community further improve its business outcomes.”
