Category Archives: SolidWorks

Welcome Felder KG to the 3DVIA Composer Family!

Felder KG

We would like to welcome Felder KG to the growing community of companies that have chosen 3DVIA Composer to enhance their assembly documentation and become more competitive.

My absolute favorite quote from the press release is when a SolidWorks VAR introduced Felder to 3DVIA Composer:

…our previously installed documentation solution didn’t have a chance, because it was an isolated application.

’nuff said about that! See the SolidWorks press release from last week for the full details.

A warm welcome to Felder!

3DVIA Composer featured in Desktop Engineering

Desktop Engineering Online

SolidSmack blogger and Desktop Engineering contributor, Josh Mings, took 3DVIA Composer for a test drive and has written about it in the latest issue of Desktop Engineering online. Continue reading

Acqualux Drains Wasted Time out of Shower Design with SolidWorks and 3DVIA

In these economic times, imagine what a 25 to 40% documentation process reduction could mean to the competitiveness of your company.

Take a look at what Acqualux, a UK based company, has been able to achieve with 3DVIA Composer. The full press release can be viewed here. The following is a notable highlight from this announcement:

“We have to provide layman-level instructions to the end customer as well as detailed instructions for our service and quality control people so they can walk consumers through the build when they don’t understand something,” said Aqualux Design Manager Neil Harrison. “3DVIA Composer was a huge leap forward for us in producing documentation. Before, we had to bring isolated views from SolidWorks into an illustration program and clean them up to show the tools and the bathroom views so customers could see them in context. That was very labor-intensive and time consuming. 3DVIA cuts 25 to 40 percent from that process, depending on the product, and with much less aggravation and higher quality manuals with extra instructions and graphics.”

3DVIA your iPod #76: “Automatic Layout Positioning, and Project Mode” (English Version)

This week I would like to welcome a guest podcaster from SolidWorks Germany,  Markus Koechl, who not only brings us a great tip, but also brought us our very first German-language podcast last week!

Today Markus demonstrates how to use 3DVIA Composer to import CAD sub-assemblies and have them automatically and properly positioned relative to other sub-assemblies. This powerful ability allows massive assemblies — along with multi-CAD assemblies — to be broken up and easily imported into 3DVIA Composer. You may never have seen the full assembly before, or may not even have the full assembly at all, and now you can bring all of the data together into a high-performing 3DVIA Composer environment for repurposing into 2D and 3D documentation.

Markus also describes the “Project Mode” of 3DVIA Composer, and cites some of the benefits of using this mode. Many thanks to Markus for this excellent example!

If you have ideas, like these, for future 3DVIA Composer podcast episodes, please let us know!

3DVIA your iPod #59: “Knocking out the competition”

muhammad-ali-knock-out.jpg 

You’ve heard us rant about the exceptional qualities of 3DVIA Composer, and how we make better reuse of CAD data than other competitive products such as Isodraw. I’ve shown 3DVIA Composer to people hundreds of times, and I never grow tired of the look of amazement on peoples’ faces when they see what we can do. But what really amazes me is how quickly our customers can go from purchasing our product to being productive and generating positive returns: it’s a tribute to our architecture and ease of use.

It’s why we win benchmark after benchmark, why customers continually choose 3DVIA Composer over other products, and why customers actually turn off those products in favor of 3DVIA Composer.

But don’t take it from me… take it directly from one of our newest customers, Miller Formless. When I heard that they recently purchased 3DVIA Composer to replace Isodraw, I wanted to learn more. This mid-week Podcast is the unedited conversation I had with their VP of Manufacturing and Engineering, Jim Szamlewski. This call was not rehearsed; I had no idea what Jim would say about 3DVIA Composer. My initial plan was to pull some sound bites and quotes from the call, but there are so many good points made by Jim – and in the interests of bringing you truly authentic content – here is the full 9 minutes of audio. [Editor's note in the interests of full disclosure: there are 3 edits to clean up audio not related to this particular conversation]

What may surprise you most about this conversation is the enthusiam of the customer only 2 weeks after installing the software, and how the users actually enjoy using it. Imagine your employees using a product that makes them exceptionally efficient, and one that they actually like to use: what would that do for your productivity?

Not only are we faster, easier to use, and more flexible, but our users are passionate about our product. Talk about the ultimate knock out punch to the competition.