Evan on Engineering Software

I don't think there's any question about which CAD software is the most popular overall.  AutoCAD LT pretty much wins that contest, hands down.

But, have you ever wondered what is the most popular CAD program for engineers?

I took an unscientific poll of one person, and asked this question.  Shayamal Roy has been around the CAD industry for a rather long time, and always seems to have an interesting perspective on the market.  His company, GEOMATE, sells a product called GraphiCalc, which is used by engineers to do up-front "what-if" analysis and conceptual design.

Shayamal's customers are generally engineers, as distinct from designers.  For them, CAD is just a tool they use to solve problems, rather than being the essential tool that defines their job.

In his experience, the most common CAD program he sees engineers using is...

... wait a minute.  This is so good, I have to savor it for a moment.

TurboCAD.

Deelip Menezes is a CAD plugin developer in India, who writes a blog discussing a variety of CAD related subjects.

He's pretty good at stirring the pot:  he writes long blog posts, with plenty of opinion, and lightly filtered rants.

His most recent rant is about CAD users who think that CAD programmers are not CAD users.  He points out that he has 44 or so CAD programs on his computer, which he uses.  Therefore, he is a CAD user.

Here is my thought: A CAD user is not merely a person who uses CAD. A CAD user is a person who is a domain expert in the use of CAD software to solve a design or engineering problem. It may be that a CAD user speaks only one CAD tool "language" (e.g, Solid Edge, ComputerVision, Anvil 4000), but if they can wield that tool skillfully to solve their design or engineering problems, they are a CAD user.

Deelip claiming to be a CAD user, because has a bunch of CAD programs, and can use them to develop CAD plugins, is like a person claiming to be a mechanic because they have a bunch of wrenches, and can use them to tighten bolts.

While Deelip is a domain expert in the development of certain types of CAD plugins, that expertise doesn't necessarily translate to related domans.  (Though that doesn't stop him from jumping in with both feet.)

In his post, and the related comments, a large number of  CAD-related domains are discussed:  CAD use, CAD programming, CAD development, CAD plugin development, CAD analysis, CAD writing, CAD reviewing, CAD QA, CAD testing, CAD demonstration, CAD usability analysis, CAD failure analysis, CAD UI design, CAD documentation.

If I were looking for a domain expert in CAD plugin development, I might put Deelip pretty high on my list. 

But the other domains? Not so much.  Here are a few possibilities:

SolidCAD use: Matt Lombard.

CAD programming: Mike Riddle or Tim Olsen.

CAD development (big picture): Chuck Grindstaff or Mike Payne.

CAD analysis: Ken Versprille or Mark Halpern.

CAD reviewing: Al Dean.

As for me: I may be a domain expert in some disciplines, but I'm not fool enough to think I could give any of these folks a run for their money in their particular domain. Well... except maybe Al. But, then, he'd still kick my butt in terms of how fast he gets reviews done.

Now, back to Matt Lombard's question, as expressed by Deelip:

"To the best of my very poor memory, all of the proponents of Direct Editing as the New World Order for CAD are non-users, and the proponents of history are users ...[snip]... Any comments on that?"

My answer is that it's not his memory. It's more likely to be confirmation bias.

His question is straw-man: Most serious proponents of direct feature modeling that I know have expressed the sentiment that a two-trick pony is better than a one-trick pony, unless the one-trick pony meets your needs.

Translated: A lot of people will benefit from having both modeling technologies. Some will do fine with just parametric feature-based modeling. And some, especially those for whom feature-based modeling is just too hard, will benefit from having just direct feature modeling.

Parametric feature based modeling isn't going away. At least, not for a long time.

Deelip Menezes has been talking in his blog about solid modeling technologies,  such as parametric feature-based, direct feature, and sometihng that appears to be feature-tree inference.

He seems to be hung up on technology.  User's don't really understand CAD technology.  All they really understand is that the CAD tools they have don't cut it.

One of the reason why I was (and am) so enthusiastic about Synchronous Technology is that it was the first major new technology from a top-tier CAD vendor, in perhaps 20 years, that wasn't mostly about pwning users.

Think about it.  Back in the days when CAD salesmen wore Gucci loafers and drove BMWs, they were selling a technology as addictive as cocaine.  They'd weave a powerful tale of how good it was going to feel once the customer got parametric feature based modeling... and customers, grasping for anything that would make things better, would gladly buy.  It was only after the customer was hooked that they realized the high was not as good as they'd hope for, and the cost to get it was more expensive than they'd ever imagined. 

Synchronous Technology, and all the other variants of direct feature modeling (especially those of Kubotek and SpaceClaim), are more like chocolate than cocaine.  Have you ever heard of a person screwing up their life because they're a chocoholic?

We can argue about technology -- whether feature tree inference is better than feature inference, or whether history-based modeling is better than amnesia-based modeling -- but , in the end, the most important question, for users, is can they get their jobs done better with this technology, or are they just trading one drug for another?

Yesterday, I had a little fun at Ralph Grabowski's expense, talking about a press release from SolidWorks, where their customer, Vault Structures, was quoted talking about how much money and time they saved using SolidWorks versus AutoCAD.

While I may have poked fun, Ralph did have a very good point:  SolidWorks versus Autodesk Inventor (or Solid Edge, or Think3, or Pro/E, or any other parametric feature-based CAD program) is a technically fairer comparison than SolidWorks versus AutoCAD.

One question I have (and for which I don't have a good answer) is how you'd go about doing a meaningful comparison of SolidWorks and Inventor?

Consider these factors:

• Is the comparison for a specific company, or more general in nature?
• Do you include externalities, such as the availability of trained users, the historical performance of the vendor, or the restrictiveness of the license agreement?
• Do you use a feature checklist, or focus on use cases?
• Do you have vendor application engineers run the benchmarks, or have your own people do it?
• How do you account for bugs?
• How do you measure the differences in productivity curves (i.e, the integral of individual productivity over the  population of users.)
• Do you grade based on cost, or based on return?
• How do you account for time-to-market? (Small differences in delivering products can make big differences in profitability.)
• How do you grade?  (And, even if you think you have a good answer for this, I'd recommend you take a look at Dr. David Ullman's book, Making Robust Decisions.

I think the bottom line here is that these kind of comparisons are really hard.

Let's go back to the example of Vault Structures.  They said that they were able to design and test a vault door 70% faster using SolidWorks compared to AutoCAD, saving $150,000 in prototyping costs. 

That savings estimate is based on what they expected it would have taken with AutoCAD.  But, let me pose a few questions:

• What if they would have hired the *best* AutoCAD guru out there (I can think of a few), and had coupled the use of AutoCAD with tools such as Algor and GraphiCalc and IDX?  How much time and prototyping savings could they have gained with such a best-in-class AutoCAD-centric approach?
• What if they would have hired the best SolidWorks guru out there (again, I can think of a few)?  Would the savings in time and prototype cost be even greater?
• What if they would have built a knowledge-based vault door design system on top of SolidWorks?  The initial design probably would have taken longer, but factoring in a nearly 100% savings in time and prototyping costs for subsequent vault doors would have changed the return on investment dramatically.

I'd guess that, had Vault Structures used Inventor instead of SolidWorks, the results would have been in the same neighborhood.  Depending on human and process factors.  And that's the interesting part.

As interesting as a comparison between products such as SolidWorks and Inventor might be, what I'd really find intriguing would be a comparison between the typical usage of a CAD program, and its usage where human and process factors have been optimized.

Those low-down agitators at SolidWorks continue to go too far.

"Using SolidWorks and SolidWorks Simulation helped us [Vault Structures] design and test the door about 70 percent faster than if we'd used AutoCAD, saving $150,000 in reduced prototyping costs."

Ralph Grabowski, in his WorldCAD Access blog, set the record straight, in a post titled "SolidWorks Disses AutoCAD," where he said:

"Who designs bank vault doors with AutoCAD? The time and cost savings comparison should have been, of course, with Inventor."

Good for Ralph! We can't let those troublemakers at SolidWorks diss AutoCAD!

Except... it was actually a customer, not SolidWorks, who made the comparison -- apparently because they previously used AutoCAD for such projects. (Which answers Ralph's question: "who designs bank vault doors with AutoCAD?" Apparently at least one of the top five security device manufacturers in the world.)

Possibly, Ralph's point was that SolidWorks and Inventor are more comparable products than SolidWorks and AutoCAD. That is certainly true. Yet, Vault Structures had experience with AutoCAD -- so that is the comparison they made. For the millions of people who also have experience with AutoCAD, it's more useful than a comparison with Inventor.

I do think it would be interesting to see a fair comparison of cost and time savings between SolidWorks and Inventor. Yet, how could it be done? I actually have personal experience in such things, and can assure you that it's far harder to do than you might imagine.

Of course, I have a habit of overly complicating things:  More than likely, Ralph's only point was that you can get blog traffic with a provocative headline.

Hence, my headline.

Of course, you can also get blog traffic with keyword spamming. But, just like Siemens PLM (NX, Solid Edge, Teamcenter), Dassault Systèmes (SolidWorks, Catia, Enovia, Simulia), PTC (Pro/E, CoCreate), Bentley Systems (Microstation), Autodesk (AutoCAD, Inventor, Civil3D, Alias, Algor, DWG, Face Robot), Alibre, IronCAD, Kubotek, TurboCAD, and Ashlar, I would never do such a thing.