The first Grid report for product and machine design software was published today by G2 Crowd, a business software review site that uses crowdsourcing to rank products. The Winter 2015 report ranks seven products to guide users in their purchase decisions.

This report is based on more than 170 reviews written by business and engineering professionals. The Grid report was created using G2 Growd’s software review platform, which factors in customer satisfaction reported by users and vendor market presence determined from social and public data to rank products.

Product and machine design software is a subcategory of computer-aided design (CAD) software, targeted specifically toward designers and engineers across a number of disciplines, including manufacturing, product design, automotive, and aerospace. These tools allow users to generate precision 3D models of parts, components, and assemblies to aid in engineering, manufacturing, and design processes.

To qualify as a Leader, a product must receive a high customer satisfaction score and have substantial market presence. SOLIDWORKS, Inventor, AutoCAD Mechanical and Solid Edge were named Leaders in the report. SOLIDWORKS earned the highest overall customer satisfaction score.

Across all product and machine design platforms, reviewers reported the product they use meets their requirements at an average rate of 82%, and on average reviewers said they were 80% likely to recommend the product they use.

What the users (crowd) say

Some highlights from the product and machine design software reviews on G2 Crowd:

“[SOLIDWORKS] is extremely easy to use. [It’s very] intuitive, efficient, and [powerful] software. I have used it to design complex surface parts, basic machined parts, complex sheet metal, buildings, and [more].”
– Aaron Jackson, Design Engineer at Spray Equipment & Service Center

“[Inventor] makes it very easy to build parts and pieces once, manipulate them through parameters and instantly have a series of parts that range in size that can be saved and cataloged for later use.”
– Valerie Gindlesberger, Home Plan Designer at Summit Custom Homes

“The best part about Solid Edge is the strong capabilities and intelligence that is part of the synchronous technology. It allows you to make a model without having to worry about order of operations, yet it still uses features that make for easy editing. This has been a game changer for me when roughing out a design; even while in the context of an assembly. Less time is spent thinking how to make the change to the model, which frees my mind to think about how to design the part.”
– Brian Stewart, Design Engineer at Apex Tool Works, Inc.

“I like being able to draw any object without having to close a loop of line segments. In many similar programs, the lines are only used as borders of a area, and so if the area is not complete, the programs has problems. With AutoCAD [Mechanical], a line is simply a line. I also like being able to customize the plot settings and appearance of every characteristic using layers and line weights. This allows for quick but uniform and professional final prints.”
– Troy Foster, Mechanical Engineering Intern at FES Group

Of the nearly 20 software vendors listed in G2 Crowd’s Product and Machine Design category, the seven ranked products each received 10 or more reviews to qualify for inclusion on the Grid.

Satisfaction rankings are generated from the user reviews, and market presence is calculated from vendor size, market share, and social impact. Based on a combination of these scores, each software solution is categorized as a Leader, High Performer, Contender, or Niche.

Premium research access can be purchased on the site for $599. These offer the original data for filtering and weighting, as well as individual profiles of each platform with the most helpful positive and negative product and machine design software reviews, detailed company information, user satisfaction ratings, feature scores and customer metrics. Future refreshes of the Grid will provide updated rankings based on the latest reviews and social data.

Get more info on the company and its research here.

Barb Schmitz

Jon Hirschtick is a very interesting guy. He’s also a very smart guy who’s been around the CAD world for a very long time. The MIT graduate was one of the founders of SolidWorks, is now in the process of starting up a new venture called Onshape as founder and Chairman, and from what I hear is also one hell of a Blackjack player.

I had the privilege of picking Jon’s sizable brain on the state of CAD, where it might be headed in the future as well as a few hints as to what his new startup might be rolling out in the near future.

I’ll admit my evil ulterior motive was to get some inside scoop on Onshape’s new product. While he did share his vision of what role the cloud, mobile and web will play in the future of CAD, he’s not ready yet to talk specifically about the new product.

So while I didn’t necessary accomplish my mission of getting the inside scoop on Onshape, you can easily read between the lines and see that OnShape is going to shake up the status quo in the CAD industry. I won’t conjecture too much about the new product, but I assure you that when I know more about it, so will you all.

Now we’ll dive into Jon’s thoughts on how the future of computing is helping to “shape” (pun not intended) the future of CAD.

Q: What pain points were you hearing from customers that started you thinking that CAD needed to change?

A: The problems I heard continually from customers all centered around administering and accessing the CAD system and collaborating with other people. Instead of talking about the cool shapes they could now model, they were talking to me about the difficulties of installation, managing licenses with network license servers and codes, purchasing, service packs and versions of the software.

Accessibility and administration of CAD and collaboration; sharing, working together as a team. These are all go hand in hand because all of these factors are a tax on the team. Especially with today’s distributed design teams. Everyone on the team needs their own copy of the CAD system and that copy of that big, brittle system needs to be the identical for people to share data well.

Q: Why do you think design teams are becoming so distributed?

A: Companies have had to become more efficient. Efficiency lets people do more with smaller teams. Permanent, full-time staff can cost more, especially in the age of specialization. Specialized functions, such as industrial design, have commonly been outsourced. It’s expensive, specialized and you don’t need it all the time, so you outsource it. That’s now happening a lot with other disciplines.

Paving the road for this trend is communication tools that we didn’t have before. Improvements in communication and/or collaboration have made it much easier to work with people outside of the company. Smaller companies today are developing pretty impressive products because of all of these things.

Q: What unique challenges do these small companies and startups face when it comes to CAD?

A: When I meet with some of the people who run these start-up incubators, they will tell me CAD software is the number-one expense item for these smaller companies. They can come in here–to the incubators–and prototype their product for $5,000-$6,000, and buy a computer for $1,000-$2,000, but the CAD software is $5,000 per seat. If they have three people on their team and they need three seats of CAD, that’s $15,000. It’s the biggest line item in their cost structure and that not unusual. Also, these days a lot of small groups are distributed so they are having these same problems.

Q: What is your opinion of the cloud-based CAD solutions currently on the market?

A: What I’ve seen in the market is what I would call “partial steps” where people are taking a desktop-installed piece of software and storing files in the cloud, which is better perhaps than not storing in the cloud, or having a cloud-based viewer. Cloud-based download of software has been adopted by most vendors and that’s all good things to do.

I have to laugh when I see “cloud-based such and such” and then it says “Go to our Download Center.” That’s not a true cloud-based tool.

Q: How will OnShape’s approach to the cloud be different?

A: We’re doing something much more comprehensive when you think of cloud, web and mobile computing, and how they will all work with CAD. We really started with a ground-up approach, with a clean sheet. We’re not doing installed software. We’re starting with a much fuller embrace of with what cloud, web and mobile can mean to CAD and teams that are using CAD. We have the advantage of a much more mature cloud. It’s about having the vision that said ‘let’s bet fully on cloud, web and mobile.’ It’s a very different vision.

Q: How does this “vision” differ from current CAD solutions?

A: We just sort of assume that CAD systems should write to files on a disk because that’s what they have always done. We don’t do that as a fundamental paradigm. We can take this new approach because we’re free of legacy constraints and have a very clear vision of what cloud, web and mobile can provide.

Q: What are the benefits of these true cloud-based solutions to users?

A: You’re going to see a different set of benefits that we can provide with a true pure Cloud solution. There’s no file with pure cloud solutions. There are lots of true cloud-based business tools that I use daily, like Google Docs. All of them have several things in common:
* No install.
* No software to download
* Easy to use
* Can be used on any computer

Q: What about cloud-based CAD? What will be the specific benefits to users?

A: The bottom line is it doesn’t matter to users where the computing is done, what matters is what are the benefits. Can people access the CAD system easily? Can people share CAD data more easily? We think we have a much easier approach to sharing than you’ll see with file-based, installed software products that try to share files in the cloud. That’s one way to do it but we think we have a better way. Users only care about is if I need a CAD system, how hard will it be to get it and administer it? How easily can I work with other people? And, what CAD functions are available—both capabilities and user experiences—and how do they suit my needs?

Another big advantage is that you can run it on any device and it has decent performance. That’s one test of a true cloud system is can you pick it up and run it on any old computer and have decent performance. CAD is like the land that time forgot. Other than CAD, if you talk to most recent university graduates about how they use computers, and they tend to be running on Mac books or tablets or their iPhones, and they expect to use software on any of these devices. They don’t even think about the kind of old issues, like how big a computer do I need to buy, how much memory do I need? They just want a fast platform.

Stay tuned for Part II of our Q&A with Jon Hirschtick, which will cover security issues with the cloud as well as the headaches around data management and how they might be solved with a cloud-based CAD solution.

Barb Schmitz

Many of you remember the early years of CAD when a simple design change could be a day destroyer; forcing you to have to recreate the model or go back and update multiple views of a drawing. Parametric or feature-based CAD systems changed all of that. With these powerfully automated 3D CAD systems, the task of making changes was greatly simplified by the fact that a design change could be propagated throughout the design or assembly, updating all associated parts to reflect that change.

There is little doubt that today’s 3D CAD systems have come a long way since their humble beginnings. In fact, most are quite capable at the tasks at hand and can help engineers and designers to get their jobs done in a fairly efficient manner. Despite all this progress, there are still things that make engineers repeatedly bang their heads on their desks in frustration. There are still shortcomings that create bottlenecks in product development; things that can bring progress to a screeching halt.

The reality is that users have a somewhat of a love-hate relationship with their CAD software. These fairly sophisticated tools are what enables them to accomplish their jobs on a daily basis; to evolve and vet ideas, create 3D models, virtually test those models and ultimately build products. Unfortunately there are still inherent weaknesses in all CAD systems that continue to torture users.

The writers at SolidSmack surveyed their readers back in the fall to get a better understand of the types of things that still frustrate users when it comes down to their CAD systems. The resulting blog, The Most Annoying Thing in CAD: Survey is definitely one worth reading and one that will resonate with many engineers so I felt it was worth sharing some of the key takeaways.

First off a disclaimer: SolidSmack is a SolidWorks training resource so most of the responses to their survey (2/3) were SolidWorks users, with a sprinkling of other CAD systems (Rhino, NX, Solid Edge, AutoCAD, CATIA, etc.). While the majority of respondents were SolidWorks users, most of these complaints are not specific to that system and most likely would apply to other systems as well. With that said, let’s get to Adam OHern’s synopsis of the results of the survey.

The Top 5 Most Annoying Things in CAD

1. Getting 3D data from one CAD app to another

Right out of the gate, this one came as a bit of a shock. Sure, file transfer is irritating, but the most annoying thing in CAD? Surprisingly, this one comes out as the clear winner for causing users to want to “gouge out [their] eyeballs in a raging fury.” This is clearly a serious pain point for CAD users and should be pretty obvious to anyone who’s ever done real-world design in a multi-CAD environment. It sucks.

STEP support is nice in theory, but it’s extremely limited in its usefulness, and surprisingly error-prone. Sure, it gets (most of) the raw geometry from A to B, but we lose all design intent, associativity, assembly relationships, and boat loads of metadata in the process. It also has a tendency to fail, producing strange geometry errors, inverted surface trims, and tolerance problems–so much so that I know a surprising number of people who prefer old IGES files simply because they seem to be more reliably accurate in many cases. Native format importers have the same problems, but more so in my experience. I find that the promise of interoperability almost always comes with more fine print than actual content.

2. Creating physical simulations of working parts and assemblies

Again, a dark horse. And again, I suppose it should be obvious to anyone who does a lot of simulation. Are CAD companies actively trying to make simulation easier? Well, this isn’t my area, but from an outsider’s perspective I’d say yes and no.

Simulation is obviously a big area for R&D in the MCAD space, but I’ve yet to see anyone release–-or even talk about releasing–-a product aimed at making the process easier for non-specialist users. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that simulation is complex by nature, and that making the tools easier to use will yield less benefit than focusing on features and performance for power users.

3. Sharing files with collaborators

Wow, another data transfer topic in the top three. Noticing a trend? Shoving data around between collaborators is a royal pain in the posterior. Four of the survey participants claim to “keep a cheese grater at my desk specifically to mutilate my own elbows whenever file sharing comes up.” It’s a jungle out there, folks.

So while “sharing files with collaborators” is probably the single most ballyhooed feature of basically every Cloudy new release, I’m not sure that these tools actually address the root problem. To be frank, it’s always been easy to share files with collaborators who use the same tools and techniques as you do. That’s really not a big deal. Where things get difficult is sharing in a heterogeneous design environment, and that’s something that the Cloud has not yet addressed.

4. Making late-stage changes.

Ahhhh, and now we come to something expected. Consensus agrees, in other words, that this is a big problem, even if it’s not the kind that makes me “feel like inserting my finger-nublings into my ribcage and ripping the beating heart from the depths of my bosom.”

What’s more, I don’t have much faith that it can be solved: rework will always be annoying by nature, at least so long as we work in the current operator-driven CAD paradigm. It won’t be long before the concept of literally defining actual geometry in a CAD environment seems as cumbersome as carving your designs in stone, however. Instead, we will define input and output parameters, performance metrics, materials, and manufacturing methods, and the geometry itself will be algorithmically generated to solve for those inputs. Then and only then will the annoyance of rework become a thing of the past.

5. Sharing files with clients

Arguably this survey shows that three of the top five most annoying things in CAD have to do with sharing data. Are CAD companies trying to solve this problem? Yes, absolutely. And this is an area where I genuinely believe that cloud services will actually make significant progress. Since client deliverables require much less interoperability than does active collaboration, the tools being proposed by… well… everybody, should work quite well.

“But I can’t work in the cloud. XYZ Manufacturer doesn’t allow it for security reasons.” That’s true for now, but that will change. And in the meantime, sharing data will continue to be difficult, and XYZ Manufacturer will become increasingly isolated until it changes its ways.

We’ll be waiting to see if SolidSmack does a follow-up to this survey. In the meantime, are there any other shortcomings of CAD that drive you batty? We’d love to hear your comments; share below.

Barb Schmitz

We all know that engineers are a special breed of people, and as such, they need special gifts. Though many of you reading this post probably are engineers, share this list with your loved ones, who let’s face it, don’t get you and your left-brained nature. You love gifts that make you think, that challenge you and put your particular brand of smarts to use.

So without further delay, let’s get to those gift ideas that you can both give–and hopefully receive–that will keep you busy and happy on Christmas day.

1. OWI Robotic Arm. Let’s face it; most engineers have a thing for robots so don’t you think most of them would love a robotic arm to help them with their work? While, this one might not be able to do too many sophisticated things, but it’s still fun to build and to play with once it’s done, like shaking hands and getting it to pick up items. Find it here on Amazon for just over $50.

2. The Parrot Rolling Spider. This ultra-compact drone, controlled by your smartphone, will impress even the biggest technophile on your list. The Parrot Rolling Spider, which was designed using SolidWorks software, flies indoors and outdoors with surprising speed and stability. Learn how to pilot via the FreeFlight 3 app, which can be downloaded for free on iOS, Android, and on Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1. You can find it a list of available retailers here.

3. Math Formulas Tie. OK, so we all know that engineers as a whole are not known for their flair for fashion, but wearing this tie, which is loaded up with math formulas, will let everyone know that there’s an engineering brain at work. Just when you think ties are a passe gift, you find one that suits them to a tee and is something they’ll really enjoy wearing. Available for $45 at Uncommongoods.com.

4. Cams & Cranks. This one is perfect for those future engineers out there. Engino Mechanical Science: Cams and Cranks will help them learn all about cams and cranks and how they work together to convert energy. This line of toys is particularly made for those looking to help kickstart a child’s imagination and scientific reasoning. Get it for less than $25 here on Amazon.

5. Remote Controlled Machines. These Thames and Kosmos machines will do their bidding once they’re built and programmed to do so. Half the fun is making them and the other half is getting them to do what you want them to do. The engineers and other gear heads in your life will have fun tinkering with them and figuring out how they work. They are available here on Amazon for $70.

6. Hanz Inventor’s Kit. A smartphone holder is just one of the things that you can put together with this kit. Budding engineers can create gadgets using it to create cool stuff, promoting originality and inspiring future designers. Includes 10 “Brains,” 20 Beams, 4 Wheels, 4 Tires, 6 Rubber Bands, and instructions on how to build ideas. Find it on Amazon here.

7. I’m an Engineer Mug. Alright, so the engineer in your life may have to rely on the spellcheck, but they don’t need much assistance when it comes to math problems. It shows that engineers can have a sense of humor, even if they’re paid to be very pragmatic. Order it on Amazon for less than $20 here.

8. The Coolest Cooler. Though not available yet, get your loved ones on the preorder list—and save $50—for the Coolest Cooler. Launched via Kickstarter, this cooler features an 18-volt, battery-powered rechargeable blender, 5-watt Bluetooth speakers, a USB charger, an LED lid light, locking gear tie-down, a divider/cutting board, and extra wide, easy rolling wheels. When it’s time to party, this cooler parties hard.

9. The Jawbone Up24. This cool fitness wearable is an incredibly easy-to-use and enjoyable fitness tracker that counts steps, sleep, and calories. The Up24 is water-resistant, light, and comfortable to wear. The device syncs with iPhones and Android phones over Bluetooth. Only wearable rated as Excellent by CNET.com on its list of the Best Wearables of 2014.

10. Rocket Launch Set. Though it’s not exactly rocket science, they’ll have a lot of fun getting this rocket off the ground. Understanding the physics behind why it works will only add to the enjoyment for an engineer. Uses a standard Estes engines, this rocket can be blasted up to amazing heights of 1,000 feet. Available for approximately $20 from Amazon. Find it here.

Do you have any other creative gift ideas for engineers? If so, please feel free to add them below.

Barb Schmitz