Glen | DriveWorks

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.