News and Announcements

Have you worked your SolidWorks Subscription Service into your 2012 Budget?
The primary benefits of Subscription Service are:

To request the details of your subscription service investment for next year, please contact Cindy Flemm at 732-669-0055 ext. 200 or cflemm@design-point.com.

Join the EPDM User Group!
DesignPoint is sponsoring the launch of the EPDM User Group for EPDM users and administrators. The first meeting will be held Q1 of 2012. This is an opportunity for training, to share ideas and success stories, and to voice your thoughts as a group to DesignPoint and SolidWorks. Click here to express your interest and we will provide updates on the upcoming meeting.

DesignPoint Solutions Expands Product Offering to Include On Demand 3D Printing Services and 3D Printers from 3D Systems!  Contact us to learn more.

DesignPoint Solutions is Offering New Training Classes!
This is a unique opportunity to receive advanced training through our Certified SolidWorks Training Instructors.  We are offering courses such as:

• Routing - Piping and Tubing
• SolidWorks Motion Simulation
• Simulation Nonlinear
• Enterprise PDM
• 3DVia Composer

Urgent Hotfix Alert for SolidWorks 2012 Toolbox Customers
This message is an alert to inform you that a Hotfix solution is now available to address two SolidWorks 2012 SP0.0 Toolbox upgrade problems that could potentially impact many customers.

SolidWorks World 2012
SolidWorks World 2012 will be held February 12 - 15 at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California
Click here to Register

The Small Business Jobs and Credit Act of 2010 Increases Tax Benefits Through December 31, 2011!
Please remember that section 179 is in effect but will expire at the end of this year. We strongly encourage you to make capital investments this year.
NOTE: In order to take advantage of this - the goods have to be received by the purchaser, a placed PO is not enough.

Here is more information about what qualifies:

http://www.section179.org/

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Product Spotlight

Enterprise Product Data Management

Do you ever ask yourself…

• How do I control the revisions on our drawings/files so that our engineers are not working off the wrong version or overwriting someone else's work?

• How can we get our CAD Bill of Materials into our MRP system?

• How can we share files with our plants in other locations?

• What can SolidWorks do to help with our Engineering Change Order (ECO) process?

As an Engineering Manager or VP of Engineering these are important questions to ask. Designers should spend their time developing products, not looking for 3D models, images, renderings, and documentation. Storing design data on different servers at different locations throughout the organization means time spent manually searching for information, re-doing work, or re-creating the latest version of a file after it has been accidentally overwritten with an older version or just can't be found.

20% of an engineer's time is spent looking for files!

Click Here to continue reading this article.

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Tech Tip

Using EPDM to Automatically Watermark the State of Drawing

Did you know that EPDM Workflows and Transition Actions can automatically place (or clear) a watermark on a drawing? It's pretty simple. Once you have an EPDM Workflow in place, a transition actions can update an EPDM Variable that captures the workflow state of the drawing. This variable is then mapped to a drawing's custom property that contains the watermark, and finally onto the drawing sheet. Here are the details:

Let's consider this two state workflow below.

 

The first part of the process is to set up an EPDM Variable to capture the state. The dialog box below shows an example of this definition.

 

Next, Workflow Transition Actions are defined to set the Variable's value to the destination state. See the steps in the image below for guidance. This must be performed for each transition. (Note: if you want to clear the watermark for released, then set the variable value to a space (i.e.: " " without the quotes).

 

Now create an edit control (field) on the file card to hold the variable for the document. Make sure the control is read only, its default value is equal to the initial state of the workflow (in this case, "Work in Process"), and default overwrites is checked.

 

The rest is just setting up your SolidWorks drawing template to map the File Property to text on your drawing sheet (Use the SolidWorks Link to Property command when formatting text on the drawing sheet and select the State property). Good luck!

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