3DEXPERIENCE WORLD 2022 Highlights

3DEXPERIENCE World 2022 took place from the 7^th to 9^th February, and this event gets better each year! MECAD share the interesting topics covered at 3DEXPERIENCE WORLD that you would find useful.

3DEXPERIENCE World is an event held annually in which attendees can register and join to watch content showcasing various aspects of products offered by Dassault Systèmes, a French company that owns multiple brands, including 3DEXPERIENCE, SOLIDWORKS, CATIA, and many more.

During 2021 and 2022, due to the COVID-19 pandemic,  the events took place virtually. Online attendees were able to register, for free, to attend live sessions and have access to content after the evenst.

In this year’s event, 3DEXPERIENCE WORLD 2022 consisted of the following:

• 3 Days of General Sessions
• 6 In-depth interviews on how clients are using the 3DEXPERIENCE portfolio to deliver amazing experiences to their customers.
• More than 290 breakout sessions, showcasing various tips and tricks and other valuable information to help you improve your skills with the use of Dassault Systemes products.

Some of the topics include Cloud Technologies, CAD Management, Simulation, Design/Engineering, Data/Project Management, Manufacturing, SOLIDWORKS ERP tools, AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction), and Education & Research.

• More than 35 MeetUp sessions, allowing various individuals ranging from SOLIDWORKS Experts and executives, influencers, students and makers, to meet each other during the event and have discussions about interesting topics.
• 2 Great Panels, with one panel tackling issues with the manufacturing industry and the other highlighting the challenges engineering services and providers face.
• 20000+ Attendees from more than 100 countries.

The Mecad team had a great time attending 3DEXPERIENCE WORLD 2022, with great excitement having pumped through our veins just waiting for the countdown to finish each day for the commencement of the sessions.

One simply cannot do justice to cover all the content that was presented at this event in one blog, however, we have listed some of the interesting topics covered at 3DEXPERIENCE WORLD that you would find useful.

MECAD also recently hosted a webinar; What made us say WOW at 3DExperience World 2022! Be sure to have a look at the content that was covered in this webinar HERE.

SOLIDWORKS Cloud Design Roles on The 3DEXPERIENCE Platform

The 3DEXPERIENCE Platform consists of different Roles and each role has access to different Apps.

There are various cloud CAD apps (otherwise known as xApps) under the SOLIDWORKS brand, on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, such as:

Image from the 'An Introduction Plus What's New in the SOLIDWORKS Cloud Design Roles' session

These apps have all the capabilities of the SOLIDWORKS desktop application and more, allowing you to:

• Design on the cloud on a single platform across the business.
• Design using your PC, tablet, or smartphone. No more specific hardware requirements!
• Collaborate seamlessly with different departments, whether it is a Mechanical Engineer sending designs to a Marketing employee, or even the Electrical Engineer sending electrical designs to be used in a new assembly to a Mechanical Engineer.

However, one can view what these apps can do on various platforms such as YouTube, but I want to list the things that WOWed us at this year’s event, especially with the xDesign app.

App: xDesign

Role: 3D Creator

As mentioned by Mark Rushton in the ‘An Introduction Plus What's New in the SOLIDWORKS Cloud Design Roles’ session, the xDesign app includes “Patented Super Features” which allows the user to switch between different features when editing a feature. A built-in Design Assistant, which is an AI-driven accelerator, can guide the designer and can help to inspire brand new designs or to optimize existing designs.

Instead of having to make many manual selections when applying features, such as fillets, the AI-driven accelerator predicts your next selections on the model based on your first selection. This is a very powerful tool to use and can greatly save you a lot of time!

For more information about this topic, please view the replay of MECAD’s webinar, in which this was discussed in more detail HERE

Image from the 'An Introduction Plus What's New in the SOLIDWORKS Cloud Design Roles' session

Collaboration on the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform

Previously we touched on how you can seamlessly collaborate with different departments when using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, because the platform is cloud-based.

As mentioned by Salih Alani, "Collaboration is the core value of the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform, because design is not an isolated process. There are many project stakeholders up and down the enterprise but in order for the collaboration to be valuable and effective, it is crucial that all the right data is available to all the right people for all aspects of the design, in order to move product to market FASTER and at SCALE.”

According to Salih Alani when he presented the session; ‘Collaboration With the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform’, one easily and securely connect data and ideas between employees, partners and customers on a single platform, anytime and anywhere in the world.

Image from the 'Collaboration With the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform' session

With the Collaborative Business Innovator Role, one can leverage many different apps to:

• Create a centralized workspace, on one dashboard.
• Collaborate with various communities in your company's field.
• Search, navigate and discover CAD designs as a non-CAD user.
• Store, organize and share information with vendors, suppliers, peers and stakeholders.
• Visualize models in 2D/3D.

Image from the 'Collaboration With the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform' session

If you are an engineer reading this, you are probably wondering how can I better communicate and collaborate with my fellow designers and engineers?

Once again at this year’s 3DEXPERIENCE WORLD event, Mark Rushton emphasized more on this topic in the session, ‘An Introduction Plus What's New in the SOLIDWORKS Cloud Design Roles’.

As an engineer, you can set up Collaborative Tasks between yourself and other CAD users, or even use the 3DLean app in meetings and use a whiteboard with sticky notes that can be stuck onto the board my multiple meeting attendees. One can easily and quickly stay up to date with what has to be done on a project.

Simply create and assign tasks to yourself and seamlessly use multiple collaboration apps on one dashboard, as can be seen in the image below.

Project planning can also be done with the Project Planning app – click HERE for more information.

Image from the 'An Introduction Plus What's New in the SOLIDWORKS Cloud Design Roles' session

With all this being said, one can seamlessly collaborate with many people and departments on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, even when working from home, with an easy-to-use, hassle-free platform that requires no VPN. No is that not what any company wants?

SOLIDWORKS Collaboration with the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform

As we all know, there can be many challenges that SOLIDWORKS designers face, daily.

These challenges can range from product data management, slow loading times for files, whether saved locally on the machine or the server.
According to Allesandro Tornincasa in the session, ‘Take SOLIDWORKS to the Next Level Thanks to 3DEXPERIENCE Platform’ a lot of time is spent on non-value-added work and other challenges instead of innovation in SOLIDWORKS.

Image from the 'Take SOLIDWORKS to the Next Level Thanks to 3DEXPERIENCE Platform' session

These were some of the challenges that Allesandro mentioned:

1. Concurrently designing on the same project.

Many of the problems that our clients face when designing concurrently on a project are as follows:

• When renaming files that are related to an assembly, relations of those files with the assemblies are broken.
• Working on a project in a multi-user environment, sometimes results in the same files being worked on simultaneously by different designers, overwriting each other’s work.
• Keeping track of the history of files by using many different file names for the same design – these tend to be very creative...

Does this sound familiar?

As many of MECAD’s customers have said, it takes a significant amount of time to solve these problems and with deadlines approaching, this simply will not suffice.

Image from 3DEXPERIENCE platform, using Allesandro from ‘Take SOLIDWORKS to the Next Level Thanks to 3DEXPERIENCE Platform’ as inspiration

Sharing information with non-SOLIDWORKS users can be very tedious since they do not have the same level of access to designs and drawings as the designers.
This is especially evident between designers and manufacturers.
To share design information with non-SOLIDWORKS users, meetings will often have to be scheduled to show design progress, inefficient communication is evident between people when sharing information – especially via email – and sometimes there is no traceability of information that has been changed by the manufacturers.

Managing the IT infrastructure of a company can be very tedious, especially for a group of CAD users.
One has to:

• Manage the server and perform server maintenance(whether it is the SQL server or the PDM server)
• Utilize and manage database software
• Utilize and manage vault software
• Utilize and manage client data management software
• Keep track and perform server OS updates
• Perform an annual vault migration
• Perform client updates for both CAD and non-CAD users

One has to become an expert with IT to perform all these tasks without the support of an application engineer at Mecad or an IT representative at your company.

Making sure the IT infrastructure is secure with the latest anti-virus software, firewall updates, full file backups, etc, is very time-consuming and if not done properly it can lead to file loss, due to server breakdowns or even hackers.

All of the above-mentioned problems are evident daily with CAD users, however, with the correct 3DEXPERIENCE tools, one can prevent these problems from ever occurring and achieve faster and more secure design processes. Let’s look at how 3DEXPERIENCE solves these problems.

Using the 3DEXPERIENCE add-in in SOLIDWORKS

By using either the SOLIDWORKS Connected or the Design with SOLIDWORKS app, one can work with the 3DEXPERINCE add-in in SOLIDWORKS.

This app allows you to save and store files in the cloud within the SOLIDWORKS Task Pane.

This add-in allows you to keep track of various properties of a file, namely:

• Saved status (whether the file has been saved on the cloud, or locally).
• Revisions.
• Maturity statuses and more.
• File history with full traceability.

When using this app, one can ‘lock’ and ‘unlock’ files, similarly to how one can check-in or check-out files when using SOLIDWORKS PDM.

One can also adjust the maturity state of a file to either Private, In Work, or Released, giving you the ability to only view the files yourself when using Private, adjust the visibility of the file to other designers when using In Work and making the file visible to Manufacturing when using the Released state.

By using the Relations app in the 3DEXPERIENCE add-in, one can easily keep track of changed revisions and what files’ revisions need to be changed.

This can be very time-consuming, however with the Relations app, one can quickly access a summary of all referenced parts, drawings, and assemblies and change the relevant options within a few clicks of a button.

Images from the 'Take SOLIDWORKS to the Next Level Thanks to 3DEXPERIENCE Platform' session

This app, also allows you to directly communicate with your colleagues or other members whom you added to your network, whether it involves having a video call and having to share your screen, sending text messages, creating tasks, sharing other media such as photos or videos, and much more!

Communication via 'conversations' directly in 3DEXPERIENCE

Adding bookmarks to important files, sharing important files on the fly with other CAD or non-CAD users, managing product data and importing existing files from the company’s cloud storage is easy with this add-in since you can quickly access different 3DEXPERIENCE apps via the add-in.

Simply select the app that you would like to use and the browser tab opens automatically.

For more information regarding this tool, please watch the session ‘Take SOLIDWORKS to the Next Level Thanks to 3DEXPERIENCE Platform’ HERE.

In summary, this tool has the following benefits:

• Less time can be spent on fixing bad references.
• No more confusion about the file history and full file traceability.
• Stop wasting time re-creating parts that already exist with powerful search capabilities.
• No IT knowledge is required since you only need a PC and an internet connection, no VPN is required when working from home!
• No need to secure your data, since Dassault Systèmes takes care of it.

Conclusion

 3DEXPERIENCE WORLD 2022 covered many interesting topics covering vast product disciplines. This year’s event was outstanding with the content that was presented, with many company case studies having been shown with the projects that they are currently working on, interesting announcements regarding new product packages available to purchase and so much more!

Feel free to send any questions to us at support@mecad.co.za and we will gladly answer.

Should you want to watch content that was presented at this event and you have not registered, please click HERE  to register and create a 3DEXPERIENCE WORLD 2022 account.

Feel free to watch the replay of the What made us say WOW at 3DExperience World 2022! MECAD webinar HERE.

More interesting 3DEXPERIENCE WORLD 2022 recommendations:

Read more about 3DExperience Works HERE