Money investments are easy to comprehend, we’ve been around them all our lives. I put $1 in the bank. A year from now that dollar will be worth $1.0045. (If you’re lucky.)
DriveWorksXpress takes a different kind of investment. A time investment. Same concept, but for some reason people are more hesitant to make time investments.
Imagine you have a common standard sub assembly like this frame. You use it as part of a larger assembly all the time. Figure it takes about 30 minutes to make a copy of this frame, tweak the model dimensions, generate drawings with customer names on them, etc.. You do this several times a year.
I could take this existing assembly put it into DriveWorksXpress and fully automate that copy process in about two hours. Now it takes me 30 seconds to generate a new frame. The return on investment is pretty easy to calculate, by the fifth frame I’m coming out ahead! It may take a few months before I need five frames, but if there are several designers in my company, my two hour investment comes back even faster.
I’ve been using DriveWorks for several years. It probably isn’t fair to think that everyone could put that frame into DriveWorksXpress in two hours.
SOLIDWORKS’ DriveWorksXpress tutorial is estimated to take you two hours to complete.
I feel confident that most engineers could go through that tutorial and build that frame in DriveWorksXpress in an eight hour day.
So maybe it takes sixteen frames to break even? However, now that you can build a frame, there are probably other little sub assemblies you copy…maybe there are bigger assemblies that you copy over and over that takes you hours to complete. Those hours could go to minutes with DriveWorksXpress.
It isn’t free, it takes a time investment, but you’ll do better than your savings account.
(DriveWorksXpress is already installed with SOLIDWORKS standard. Look in the Tools menu. You own it, go make some time with it.)
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