Dassault Systèmes S.A. is a French company and a world leader in the production of 3D design software, 3D digital mock-up and product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions.
$15
per month
Solid Edge
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Solid Edge is a software solutions for product development — 3D design, simulation, manufacturing, data management, and cloud collaboration. Solid Edge aims to combine the speed and simplicity of direct modeling with the flexibility and control of parametric design.
Very well suited for direct integration with CAD packages (Solidworks/ Auto desk Inventor or AutoCAD) and version control of CAD Model/Assemblies and Drawing files) and creating parts and document objects directly into Enovia and controlling their lifecycle from CAD Interface. Similarly, Enovia's Engineering central is already equipped with Industry standard ECR/ECO process which needs little customization for implementing Engineering Change management process. The hardest part in Enovia is controlling the disposition of released material for the downstream process in other ERP systems. For example, if a released material has gone for production or purchasing in ERP system/MRP system then dispositioning that material with Major revision (which may need manufacturing to stop the production due to faulty design) have no direct control to stop the downstream activities. Most cases its manual process to communicate with ERP team to for taking action. Similarly, revision of Documents (material Spec for example) linked to thousands of parts required special process (some time needs to schedule in the weekend).
It has very good user interface in classic or ordered environment.
In 2D or drafting, you can give any Geometric tolerancing and symbols to any dimension. There is a wide range of options available.
You can convert any files in step file (.stp) and can open it in other designing applications easily.
After converting 3D drawings in 2D you can make changes in 2D drawing by converting it in the draft. You can also add details like cross-sections and detailed view.
You can directly make threads without creating holes.
When a part/assembly has been released in Enovia and gone for production or downstream processing, Enovia doesn't have much control, hence, Enovia should come up with an easy controlling mechanism for various disposition of parts and seamless communication with an ERP or downstream process.
If a document is linked to thousands of materials then revising this document takes long time gets floated to the BOMs where the previous document versions are used. So, Enovia should have an efficient way to replace the floating process or another efficient mechanism for document revision processing.
Being used to 2-key and 3-key commands from the keyboard, it would be nice if this was more robust in Solid Edge. The capability of programming keystroke commands exists in Solid Edge, but it would be more user friendly in that regard.
Editing hatches can be a challenge.
I'm not a fan of the ribbon bar, but that seems to be a feature across software platforms in Windows.
As mentioned previously, Siemens Solid Edge is not the most user-friendly of products at all. It requires intense training to make sure that the basics are understood, and after that, there are numerous other training interventions needed to be able to perform expert-level CAD functions. The GUI is not intuitive, as many other packages are, and the features built-in are not well defined. The process to use many of these features is counter-intuitive and requires a mind-shift.
I have been involved with support and training of Solid Edge for 24 years. Given that I based my business model on support, and have been successful for all these years, I know excellent support. Siemens support for Solid Edge, "GTAC", is the definition of support for a product in every aspect.
FreeCAD is often better than Solid Edge 2021 when converting files, but I hope this changes with 2023 NX is overall more powerful, but that is to be expected (and you cant add it above because it is too short for whatever reason).
Easy learning curve for the users- Very user-friendly Interface for Engineering central make the users happy and easy to learn the BOM creation and Engineering change management process.
Time-saving - Seamless Creation and revision process of objects saves a huge amount of time compared to other systems.
Easy to copy existing business data and modify them as required.
It took about 20 hours of use to get the basics of Synchronous Technology, and with just a basic competency I was able to make useful changes to the design. One of those changes was impossible to do our other CAD program.
My use lately has mostly been on personal time and self-driven, so learning other aspects and features of Solid Edge has been slower. Creating a drawing for a part required a few hours to learn and do the first time, but luckily there were YouTube videos for examples. With practice, I would expect the time to reflect what it takes in SolidWorks (about 30 minutes).