Glen | DriveWorks

I think my mouse is getting a complex..........

I'm staring at my computer mouse far too hard.

It’s not moving on its own or anything like that, and I haven't given it a name.  I just find it fascinating.

It cost me $10 from Dell.  It has two buttons and a wheel, a bright red light underneath and a long tail.

It’s travelled over 100,000 miles with me and seen some sights.

It’s quite ordinary really.  Very functional, a bit scratched, and because of the number of times it goes in and out of my laptop bag, will probably only be with me for another 6 months before I have to bury it in the garden with all the ones that came before it.

But what did my mouse cost to design?  Probably tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds.

But mine has way less than 1% of its $10 ticket attributable to the fine art of design.

I then started to think about the brilliant engineers around the world that design custom products.  What percentage of their products’ cost is the design element?

Bear in mind here, that for every product they design, they probably only sell 10% of them (They often have to design some or all of their offering during the quotation process)

So they have to design 10 products to sell 1.

They also have a pile of documentation to create too. Quotations, Bills of Materials, Cutting Lists, DXF etc.  Every one of them is different for every customer.

How much of their products’ cost can be attributed to design?

I asked a few people.

It can be as high as 50%

That’s huge, and I didn't believe it.

I then spoke with one of our customers who, through using DriveWorks to automate the design of one of their products are now selling it at less than half the price that they used to.

They have taken their market by storm.

Now that IS huge.

For companies like them, cost savings in manufacturing, though important, pale into insignificance when compared with the saving gained by eliminating design costs through automation.

So bring on a world where the design cost of a custom product is way less than 1% of the overall costs.

So bring on Lean Design.

Manic week in New Zealand

I’ve just spent a week in New Zealand which started with a visit to the InterCAD office in Auckland.

Steve has a great team including Rida, this quarter’s winner of the DriveWorks Applications Engineer award. 

Rida has done some fantastic work with DriveWorks and really enhanced the work that DriveWorks customers throughout Australasia have been doing through training and support.

Rida is one of those special engineers that not only explains feature and function well, but also has the ability to understand the best way they can be used in different situations.

On Tuesday morning (Very Very Early) I flew to Wellington at the south of the north island.  I met Sales machine Ben at the airport and spent the rest of the week with him both in Wellington and then in Christchurch.

They say that you are always 6 degrees of separation from anyone else in the world.

In New Zealand, its 2.

Ben does a fantastic job of building on relationship after relationship in his sales activities and truly understands the concept of quality service and going that extra mile.

It’s been a pleasure spending these 4 days with him visiting many many customers and prospects.

Thanks Ben

Sunshine State

The sunshine state of Queensland certainly lives up to its name. 

It’s HOT HOT HOT and apparently, still winter.

Early start this morning (Thanks Matt!!!) to set up for a DriveWorks seminar at a Toyota 4x4 Dealership.

What an excellent venue, with a showroom full of 4x4’s complete with a whole array of SolidWorks designed optional extras.

This time my presentation was videoed.  Lets hope it doesn’t find it’s was onto YouTube.  I get excited when talking about DriveWorks and often wander away from the main presentation to talk War Stories.

I’m not sure I’ll be able to get one of the new 4x4’s home in my suitcase. Shame.

The afternoon has been filled with another great customer visit.  They were the first DriveWorks customer in Australia and are getting on great.  They have chosen the right path, to automate their designs product by product, getting DriveWorks into production very quickly and then adding more and more products as time goes on.
The last activity of the day was a prospect presentation for a company whose products are ideally suited to DriveWorks. 

It wrapped up a fantastic week.  Thanks again to all of the guys at InterCAD.

I get a day off tomorrow in Brisbane (I can think of worst places to be) and then off to New Zealand on Sunday.

I Love Customers

Sydney today.

Big place.  Great Weather.  Nice Beer. Fantastic Customer.

I visited one of our newest customers today on the outskirts of Sydney (To Be fair - I think it was on the outskirts of Sydney, but actually I have no idea.  Alan (Sticky) Wicket was driving that leg of the trip and we could have been anywhere)

This is a customer that have had a DriveWorks training course and then just got on with it themselves.  And boy have they got on with it.

Stunning results.

Before that I visited a DriveWorks prospect with Julian Spencer (InterCAD Sales supremo).

Julian couldn't have found a more perfect fit for DriveWorks technology.  It was a joy to be there.

Left Sydney, just landed in Brisbane.

Its Wednesday, so this must be Adelaide

I've just spent the day traveling round Adelaide in Southern Australia with Guy Wallis from Intercad.

Guy is a great guy, and had lined up a DriveWorks prospect and an existing DriveWorks customer.  The prospect was new to SolidWorks so the visit was about showing them DriveWorksXpress and how it can impact their design times.

It was such a joy to see their reaction.  As ever, they are run off their feet in the design department creating both sales and production information.  Everything they do is based on a theme.  Their products were perfect for DriveWorks.

This afternoon, we visited Steinhoff an existing DriveWorks customer who recently won a Technology Application Award for their use of DriveWorks.  Again it was a pleasure seeing others demonstrate their passion for DriveWorks within their business.

Sydney tomorrow.

Design Automation Down Under

DriveWorks was one of the sponsors at SolidWorksWorld Australia yesterday in Melbourne.

Congratulations to InterCAD for hosting a very professionally organised and well attended event.

It marked the start of my annual tour of Australia and New Zealand taking in Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane, Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, with some 56 hours of flying time in total on 13 flights.

Australia is becoming a good market for DriveWorks, and it’s a pleasure spending time with InterCAD staff, prospects and customers.  InterCAD MD Scott Frayne seems equally as excited about the future of DriveWorks in Australia and New Zealand in his recent article in Manufacturer's Monthly.

Today I visited an existing DriveWorks customer who designs Truck and Trailer bodies and chassis.  I was stunned at the progress that one of their senior engineers has made with DriveWorks in a very short space of time.  I was impressed that one individual can make such a dramatic difference to the way a company can design and manufacture their products and it reminded me that the best results a company can achieve will only be realised if they are truly committed and focused to improving productivity through design automation.

I look forward to revisiting them in the future to see just what a difference it has made.

More customer visits tomorrow in Adelaide.

Music, music and more music

A few weeks ago, I have a brief departure from DriveWorks to spend a day as a session musician at a local recording studio.

I have always been interested in music, having played in a brass band at school and then in a 13 piece soul band at University.

I have sung with Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and supported Ultravox on stage.

This time I was helping out my brother Craig as he recorded his first album with The Scaremongers

If you want to have a listen, I'm playing the base guitar on both tracks with hand claps on the track "Nodding Dog"

I really like the tracks, and I'm very proud of my brother.

I'll not be giving up my day job though!!

Words, words and more words.

Having failed to get a qualification in the written word at school, I am now fascinated by words.

I enjoy using words to position products and explain ideas.

Have a look at the DriveWorks tag line.  We have spent 6 years refining this, and have been guilty of over complicating it in the past.  So – here it is

DriveWorks is THE Easy-to-Use Design Automation choice for SolidWorks.

Hopefully this gives you a good clue as to the major benefits of DriveWorks.

Easy to Use

Ease of Use is what we base everything on at DriveWorks. As a company we strive to be easy to work with. We continually strive to develop software that is easy to use, easy to sell and easy to support.

We used to refer to DriveWorks as Rules Based Design Automation. The main reason for this was to help people see how we differed from Design Tables in SolidWorks. But rules can sound scary and more to the point that we don’t need to differentiate against Design Tables anymore as SolidWorks themselves have made that distinction by including DriveWorksXpress inside core SolidWorks.

DriveWorks IS easy to use – that is our position

Design Automation

Our crown jewels.  We feel we know design automation better than anyone else.  It’s what we do; it’s what we specialize in, it’s what we do best.

Choice for SolidWorks

DriveWorksXpress inside SolidWorks 2008. But more than that, you know the benefits of the SolidWorks Partner Program and we are the ONLY SolidWorks Certified Gold Partner in our category. Even more than that DriveWorks only works with SolidWorks.

We focus on one CAD platform – SolidWorks, because focus enables us to excel at what we do.

DriveWorks is the easy to use design automation choice for SolidWorks.

It’s what we do and who we are.

Scrapheap Challenge

I was walking round a prospects factory one day and decided to ask how much scrap they produced, thinking it would give me an inside line into how much savings could be created if they improved their quality through good automation.
“How much scrap do you produce each month?”
The owner told me that they typically get $500 to $1000 per month from the scrap metal merchant.
I whistled, thinking that that was a lot of money, but then started to question further.  I was midway through my next question when we walked past the pile of scrap.  It was immense.  It also didn’t look like the kind of scrap I was expecting.  I was expecting small slivers, off-cuts that could not be utilized anywhere else or the odd item that had been manufactured wrongly, with too many holes, or with incorrectly welded seams.

No – this looked more like a full product inventory piled high and randomly.
I pulled out a stainless steel door from the scrap pile and asked
“…so what’s wrong with this?…”
“...not sure, I guess it was the wrong size and didn’t fit...” came the reply.
I held the scrap door right next to one coming off the production line.
“…so these two doors cost the same to produce, the only difference is that one fits, and this one doesn’t...”
“Right” said the owner.
“So how much are each worth” I asked, curious now to see what logic he would follow.
“I guess the good one is worth $170 and the other is worth around $5 in scrap”
I felt I was on to something, so continued   ”and how much did each cost”
I could see the logic now starting to run in his head. “$90 to manufacture”
As I started the next sentence, it dawned on him where I was going with the conversation.
“Do you mind if we start the conversation again”, I rephrased my original question “How much are you wasting in errors each month”
He was already doing the calculations, based on the pile of scrap in front of us and the amount that was work in progress and had therefore already incurred cost.
“I’m too embarrassed to work it out.  I don’t even want to work it out”
I had a stab at it myself.
Each month they were wasting more in errors than the initial cost of DriveWorks.
They bought DriveWorks within a month.

Mass Market

Taking Design Automation into a mass market has been a great challenge.  Spending time with some of the main players in the 3D cad industry has helped enormously, as has the work done in DriveWorks over the last 12 months.

When I look back over the last 12 months, and compare where we are now to last April, I do have a great sense of achievement.  If you are interested, here are a few of the changes we have made (if you are not interested, I'm listing them anyway)

1. Dedicated staff in the USA (Jason and Lucinda are doing an excellent job)
2. Implemented CRM to help us in our communication with our Resellers
3. Employed the use of a company wide Support system to manage support questions.
4. Trained over 50 applications engineers worldwide to a good level of certification.
5. Decreased Services revenue from 50% to 3% of our annual revenue.
6. Increased Product sales by over 100%
7. Moved all our key systems to a data center in central London
8. Signed a contract with SolidWorks to have DriveWorksXpress delivered in every seat of SolidWorks worldwide.
9. Released a significant enhancement to our product range (DriveWorks 6)
10. Purchased and implemented Flex licensing software
11. Purchased and implementing TestComplete to assist in automated testing
12. Broken into markets in Asia Pacific and South America as well as strengthening sales in North America and Europe.

So what of our plans for the next 12 months?

Sorry - another list.

1. Create a SQL utility for making the use of scalable databases even easier
2. Create Template Groups and Projects to further speed up implementation
3. Release an advanced theme for DriveWorks Live to speed up implementation
4. Implement SharePoint for our VAR desktop - with a single point of authentication for all our externally facing systems
5. Further integrate our different systems in the data center
6. Certify another 50 application engineers

These changes will have a significant effect on our ability to both distribute information and to react to questions, while further enhancing the ease of use of DriveWorks.

Looks like we will be busy.