Engineering VP Leads Cloud CAD Transition at $2B Company

Transitioning from SOLIDWORKS

KYLE: Coming from a place of somebody that doesn't like SOLIDWORKS. So I used it for almost my entire career.

However, in the past several years, SOLIDWORKS has been very clear about their direction that they're pushing the business.

They're clearly pushing people toward the 3DEXPERIENCE.

They've had price increases for the desktop application, and they're extending maintenance contracts to two plus years and making it more difficult. So, you know, their direction for the business is clear. And, from our evaluation and, from what we've talked to people in the industry, 3DEXPERIENCE is not ready. And I don't believe that's a very, you know, controversial statement.

That has come from their own VAR. So, anyway, those are some of the reasons. And, as far as performance goes, we were experiencing some very slow performance from SOLIDWORKS and the PDM vault. It was just taking our engineering department and kind of grinding it to a halt especially on some of the larger assemblies.

And so the efficiency of our engineers was just becoming very, very low. So that was part of it. And I guess at the end of the day, it was less about CAD-to-CAD, feature-to-feature comparison and more about data release management, some of the foundations on which the CAD system is built. So, anyway, that's just a really brief overview of why we started transitioning over from SOLIDWORKS to Onshape.

Cloud Security Confidence Powered by AWS

KYLE: Certainly, I had concerns from a security standpoint. 

My executive team, my boss, and, you know, all the way up to our CEO had concerns about it. And, I guess, we talked a little bit about it, but what makes me rest assured is that if Amazon can't get the security right, like, what do we think we're gonna do as Custom Truck? Like, we're not security experts.

You know, we got Mark here. Maybe Mark can go into a little bit about the, you know, the depth of the security. But, like, there's nobody in the world that's gonna be able to keep our information more secure than Amazon. If Amazon can't, then nobody can. So, like, that kinda helped us, you know, at ease a little bit.

CHRIS: To piggyback on that just for a second.

One of the things that I thought was very interesting was, we had some questions from the executive leadership, from the CEO and others. But then when we went to the IT team and said, Hey, we want to go to this cloud platform that's hosted on AWS, where I butt heads with them hourly on other things, they said, yep. Done. Do it, please.

So that, that speaks volumes on the IT and security side where they were all in and excited to to get to that because they know we're gonna be more secure.

MARK: Yeah. Let me add that, you know, at AWS, we actually consider job number one to be security. Because absolutely as you're saying, there is no one out there who's gonna trust the cloud unless it's secure. And, in fact, you know, I remember working with one, Silicon chip manufacturer who wouldn't put their projects into the cloud based on IP. And once we talked about how FedRAMP, its certification is built in, SOC 2 compliance, all of these things are built in, there is no better place to put your data. Your data is much safer in AWS than it is on your premises.

AWS has a GovCloud. We provide these technologies in a compartmentalized way to the government, the highest level of government, most secure types of government agencies.

So you know if that technology is powering the federal government, it can handle what you need to do on your side.

Navigating CAD Transitions

KYLE: But I have found that maybe the more difficult portion of the transition was the actual personnel side because engineers love their CAD systems and that, you know, they're just so tied to them. It's part of who we are as our being, and so you have to recognize that and kind of understand where people are coming from when they have their resistance to change. 

Everybody's resistant to change. Right? We get comfortable. We know what we know. So recognizing that and understanding that, over communicating, helping people work through their questions about, you know, I've been doing this for 20 years and now you're throwing this, you know, this new CAD system at me and I may not be as effective as an engineer or as a designer. You know, you just work through those things. So I think it's really important as a manager to have a good understanding of the way the new CAD package is going to work and be able to understand a lot of those, a lot of those questions and be able to kind of answer on a personal level.

Training and Transitioning to Onshape

KYLE: You should do training. But I feel like learning a new CAD software is like learning a language. It's learning a new language. You never you're not gonna learn Spanish by going to, you know, your Spanish I class. You do learn it.

Spanish, you know, that is good, but you learn it by practicing. So, so, yes, fantastic training from Onshape. The training that's available, you know, through the training module is fantastic. All of the guys did it, and it was very, very helpful.

But they didn't really start to, you know, ingest it and internalize it until they just did it.

CHRIS: So, how does it apply to me?

KYLE: Yeah. How does it apply to me?

CHRIS: So, I mean I highly recommend the Boot Camp and the top-down modeling [course]. Because that gives you the multi-part Part Studios and the basis of why Onshape is what it is. Being able to do those things in context and drive these changes between this part and that part based on changing one dimension.

So those are two that I highly recommend. And then it's gonna be industry specific. Right? If you have a lot of sheet metal in your industry, they have a great sheet metal learning path and, you know, there's a ton of stuff out there on the learn.onshape.com. Highly recommend using it. There's some great stuff in there.

KYLE: As far as the time, it depends on what you mean by the time.

You can get in and you can start using Onshape and you'll be doing stuff in hours. Like, that's it's, you know, if you're an expert in SOLIDWORKS, how long is it gonna take you to become an expert in Onshape? You know, it kinda depends on your definition, but a month maybe, and you'll be pretty well up to speed, I guess, is kind of been our experience.

Transforming Crane Design with Configurations

CHRIS: So what we're attempting to do here is take a base model and drive whether it's a three different models of crossover, a 50-, 60-, or 80-ton crane.

So we have a bunch of Configurations in here on what's your wheelbase. Is it a single or twin steer? How many axles do you have?

The spacing between them, do you have a single or dual exhaust?

Like I said, what's the what's the crane? Does it have any or 50, 60, etcetera, axle spacing?

How many counterweights are on the deck?

So where'd you go?

So we'll just say, hey. We actually have three of these and let that drive for a second.

So this is going and rebuilding the background data and saying, oh, I need to suppress, unsuppress, remodel some things based on these parameters. I'm not gonna drive a whole lot of dimensions because it can take some time, especially on Wi-Fi here. But, just the ability to be able to have these configurations in a full blown chassis and crane model is really the driving force here. So, we would have in the past, a customer would say, hey. We want a 50-ton crane with a pusher axle or tag axle, which is this guy here.

So no pusher one, two, etcetera.

We can add those in on the fly, and be able to drive the actual model. Oh, my default didn't save there.

So say, 180 inches there.

And you can see it was actually set at 1-inch, so it's actually way up here. But, it's adding that in there. We have some interference. That's the nice thing about this is you're not just in Excel.

You can actually see, OK. We have some interference here, and be able to drive some of those design parameters and say, OK. We need this to be 160 and drive that design. These can go up and down.

One of the nice things that kinda drives more towards the design automation and being able to limit what's out there and what's being done is the ease of configurations in Onshape.

Being able to come in and say, alright. That particular gotta scroll down here. We have a lot.

That particular pusher of axle two, I accidentally didn't have the defaults on. Oh, and I have my branch locked. That's why it's not letting me. But you can, right-click and say, set defaults and be able to drive that with mins and maxes, which is really nice.

So with that, the other piece that really drove us down this path is not having to put in that request with our product engineering team that would then put the data into Excel, run some calculations, go back to the customer and say, Hey, We have some issues, because of bridge requirements. We're gonna need to add a pusher axle or a tag axle, and going back and forth.

Each one of those can take, you know, a week, two weeks depending on our workload. So here we have, these are some real numbers from a scale that we have, where it will tell us the weights on the front axle, rear axle, and then we can specify pusher axles and calculate.

And this does take a second to load, but thinking about what it's doing here, it's going through and looking at the center of gravity of all of these things that we just selected. Where do these axles live? Where is this boom at?

Does it have a jib on it? This guy here.

How many counterweights are on the deck? How many counterweights are back here? And it's calculating all of those weights, center of gravities, and what the effective weights are on the front axle, rear axle, etcetera.

So, you know, it took, I don't know, 30 seconds there, but we have a total weight of roughly 95,000 pounds, 61 percent on the rear and 40 percent on the front. This is actually looking pretty good, from being able to drive on the weight drive on a bridge. Excuse me.

So if we wanted to say, OK. Let's try and reduce cost and go down to one pusher axle. That's pretty easy now. And we can say, OK. Let's move that, kinda center it a little bit. That's 200 inches.

And then we can come in and oh, jumping way over there for some reason.

Fifteen eight sixty, eleven thousand twenty, and we'll say that's 5,000 because we only have one this time. Calculate. And, again, it's going through and relooking at those numbers based on, OK, we've changed the parameters here. So there's now only one pusher axle.

And going through, looking at, OK, where does that live? Recalculating all these centers of gravity and taking that and crunching the numbers in the background.

And just for reference, you know, trying to create one of these, open one of these in SOLIDWORKS, and it would be, it could be 45 minutes to open one of these sub-assemblies, let alone an entire chassis model.

That was a huge limitation for us – not being able to build these upper levels, which is why we built it into Excel and a configurator outside of SOLIDWORKS is trying to get the boom assembly mounted on a chassis assembly with a tag axle and all of those things. It was just so intensive on our PCs that we just simply couldn't do it.

So this is kinda taking us to that next level of being able to grab and drive our design parameters of wheelbase, single steer, twin steer.

All of these different things are driving into this model and down into sub-assemblies in the bed and different things, which is pretty exciting. Being able to do that in any other CAD system, I've never seen that possible.

Visual Validation Revolution

KYLE: One of the biggest problems that we've had in the past is that, you know, we would do these layout drawings in 2D in AutoCAD, and then we would have an Excel calculator that would go through and do the weights. And if the engineer that was working on it forgot to update the AutoCAD to match his Excel calculations, then no, you would never know. Right? Maybe he forgot to show that he moved the pusher or the tag 10 inches.

And so, you know, there was an inherent disconnect there. With this, like I said, what you see on the model is exactly what's being calculated, as far as the axle loads. So there is almost no chance of getting a calculation that's incorrect because you can see it right in front of your eyes. So what you see, it's calculating that.

That's what you're getting as far as the axle loads. Yeah.

CHRIS: And that's a huge point because we, like, we kinda saw a minute ago where I added a second, pusher axle. In the past, we haven't always had as much detail in the layout drawing. So the fenders were interfering, but we couldn't see that in AutoCAD because we didn't have fenders in there. So our layout drawing looked like it would work with those two pusher axles, but it actually didn't when we went to go build that. So, being able to build in some of that validation and visual validation is also a huge thing.

So, yeah, it's very exciting to be able to look at this live and actual data of the model, here's the actual chassis we're getting from the manufacturer, and the outriggers we use and and all of those things. We're looking at the real thing, not a draft side or AutoCAD variation.

Advice for a Smooth CAD Platform Transition

CHRIS: So my biggest advice would be communication, communication, communication.

Making sure that not only the engineering team knows, but, obviously, our data impacts everybody in the business. Right? Whether it's a shop floor, whether it's procurement, whether it's supply chain, or or any of the above quality team, making sure they know what's coming, how the transition is going to happen. There's definitely a lot of different methods out there when it comes to migrating data versus remodeling data versus … what's that cutoff point? Are you doing changes if they're small still in SOLIDWORKS?

Are you bringing over, quote, unquote, dumb solids, importing them, and doing a direct editing, move face, delete face, all those things, which those tools are phenomenal in Onshape.

And a lot of people actually prefer to just bring it in and do that. It's sometimes easier.

But you do lose that design intent and a lot of the capabilities of what Onshape has to offer. So my advice is as much as you can for things that are going to be changing and driving change in the future, I like remodeling and having the features done and remodeled in a Onshape methodology and utilizing Part Studios and top-down modeling and and those different things that we touched on a little bit here.

When you bring in dump solids and you import everything, just do a data dump from your old system, whether it's Teamcenter or SOLIWORKS PDO, whatever it is.

You're getting one part and one part studio and, so you're not leveraging Onshape for what it is. So driving the change, I would recommend doing as much as you can in-house.

I know a lot of people will farm it out and let a third party churn through that stuff. But also you lose some of the training opportunities for people to get used to Onshape. You lose some of the visibility of I can't count how many things that we start remodeling and we get in there and we start assembling. It's like, wait a second, how have we been building this for 5 years? That interferes there.

So the workarounds that are happening on the shop floor and, well, it's easier for us just to grind this out than try and put in a change request and all those things.

It's really been nice to get the data remodeled and from our engineers into Onshape.

And I think as we get more and more data into there and release onto the shop floor and have them looking at live data, being able to, you know, easily comment and and make those change requests of, hey, you're calling for a 4-inch bolt here. It needs to be four and a half-inch. We don't have enough thread engagement. Whatever it is. A lot of times in the past, it would just be, I can just go grab a four and a half-inch bolt, and I don't have to take the time to put in a change order and all those things.

It's a whole lot faster for me to do that.

But I don't want you doing that for the next two years.

KYLE: Yeah. I'll just add one more really quick thing to that. To me, the most important thing when you start talking about a CAD transition is an idea of plotting. This is if this is anything, it is a marathon. It is not a sprint.

So, you know, you're not going to be able to do your implementation in 30 days or 60 days or maybe even 12 months depending on the size of your organization. But you have to get started, and if you do a little bit of work each and every day, then, you know, and you have your whole department help you, then you're gonna look back in a month or six months and you're gonna say, “Wow. We did a lot of work here.” You know? And whether that's training, whether that's redrawing, or whatever it is, if you just keep plotting, then then you'll get there.