Glen | DriveWorks

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.