Across divisions and multiple locations
Life Fitness, a Brunswick company headquartered near Chicago, is a manufacturer that realizes the benefits of standardizing on SolidWorks software across several locations and product development facilities. The company designs and manufactures commercial and consumer health, strength training, and physical fitness products.

Standardizing on SolidWorks at Life Fitness enables collaboration amongst its four design centers.

Historically, the company has developed separate product lines at four facilities, according to Michael Kurent, Engineering Systems Analyst. Commercial cardio equipment is developed in Illinois, strength-training products are designed in California, plate-loaded weight equipment is made in Kentucky, and consumer products are developed in Minnesota.

"While each facility makes unique products, we are starting to see more collaboration among the divisions because they all use SolidWorks," Kurent says. "They are starting to cross-pollinate the product lines, leveraging proven and tested design concepts, which helps to reduce our design cycles and make us more efficient. Standardizing on SolidWorks not only gives us the flexibility to move designers across divisions when necessary but also to move an entire product line and get it running a lot faster."

Standardizing on SolidWorks also benefits Life Fitness from an IT perspective. "In addition to the discount we receive on maintenance, by standardizing on SolidWorks we have only one CAD application to support, which means we can manage the distribution of service packs and ensure that all of our divisions have the latest version of the software immediately" explains Kurent.

The Swagelok Company, a global manufacturer of fluid system components headquartered near Cleveland, Ohio, has standardized on SolidWorks across its 22 product development locations, enabling engineers from different facilities to leverage existing designs.

Swagelok leverages existing SolidWorks designs across its 22 product development locations.

"We don't want our people trying to reinvent the wheel," says Steven Sackett, Manager of Engineering Systems. "We make models of our tooling and fixturing accessible across the enterprise, which not only supports specialized applications, such as finite element analysis and fluid dynamics, but also enables engineers at different locations to reuse and leverage existing designs and models.

"Because we have implemented SolidWorks as our corporate standard, we have the flexibility of transporting product design data, people, and processes throughout the company," Sackett adds.

From concept to completion
Standardizing on SolidWorks across the supply chain carries many of the same benefits enjoyed by vertically integrated manufacturers. Consider the case of Thule USA, the North American arm of Thule, Inc., the world-leading Swedish manufacturer of sport racks and car-carrying solutions, and Nexus Design LLC, a contract design firm and Manufacturing Network Partner based in Connecticut. The two companies collaborate on the conceptual design for some Thule USA products, which are modeled and refined from concept to completion exclusively in SolidWorks.

Thule USA prefers working with partners who use SolidWorks, like Nexus Design LLC, who collaborated with Thule on the "Fat Mouth" universal mounting bracket.

"We work with Nexus Design because they are local and give us the ability to have our design aesthetic and industrial design done on the outside, providing a fresh look at things," says Vin Bove, Vice President of Operations for Thule USA. "Their deliverable to us is a full SolidWorks CAD model in the SolidWorks format. The ease of sending the design back and forth in the native SolidWorks format is a tremendous advantage to us. If we had to go back and forth, IGES-to-IGES, or using translators, it would be much more problematic."

John Laverack, General Manager of Nexus Design, adds, "Efficiencies become evident when we are able to provide native SolidWorks files to clients and vendors. On a recent Thule® universal mounting bracket called the 'Fat Mouth,' we interfaced directly with Thule's tooling vendor with native SolidWorks files. All parties having access to the same model on screen during conference calls allowed for efficient discussions of molding and specific draft details."

"We prefer that our external partners and tooling vendors use SolidWorks," Bove notes. "We experience fewer difficulties that way, and if a change needs to be made to the design, we get the modified SolidWorks file back for our records."

Product designers in training
While the emergence of SolidWorks as the 3D CAD standard improves communication and generates efficiencies in manufacturing environments, the growing application of SolidWorks in the educational realm is producing a whole new generation of SolidWorks-savvy engineers. With over 100,000 copies deployed at more than 4,000 colleges and universities, including 60 percent of the top engineering schools worldwide, SolidWorks is rapidly becoming the preferred 3D CAD application for engineering curriculums.

"SolidWorks is helping academic institutions to modernize the way students learn engineering," says Rosanne Kramer, Director of Education Markets at SolidWorks.

"There were times when engineering curriculums were dominated by instruction on drafting and CAD applications. Before SolidWorks, many engineering students spent more time learning how to use a CAD package than on how to design components and mechanisms. Because SolidWorks is so easy to use, students are now exposed to more instruction on the principles of design and learn how to innovate products and solve design problems instead of how to use a piece of software."

The surge in SolidWorks use in engineering curriculums is producing young designers and engineers who both know SolidWorks and have a better grasp of the overall principles of product design.

"Our focus is not on training them in a particular piece of software," says Ted Branoff, an assistant professor at North Carolina State University. "We want to immerse our students in a real-world assembly environment where they understand the relationships between parts. We want them to modify and redefine designs rather than simply modeling them. That's how engineering design is supposed to work."