With companies that offer a customizable product or a wide range of configurations of a similar product, significant time can be wasted in the design. For each of these custom designs or individual configurations, a designer needs to update the models, assembly, and all drawings. DriveWorks is an incredible CPQ (Configure – Price – Quote) tool that has the power to automate much of your design process. It gives you the ability to pair it with SolidWorks and link dimensions, features, and more to a form in which the designer or customer can fill out to automatically generate all relevant part, assembly, and drawing files.

If you’re new to DriveWorks, you may want to check out the DriveWorksXpress and DriveWorks Solo. You can read about these packages here. Like many software packages, as you upgrade, the features in the new tiers accumulate with those prior. DriveWorks Pro gives you more tools to customize and automate your design process and offers many tools for linking your sales process to your design process. As for the design automation tools, you can compare the features in all three tiers with the table below.

You can find a full list of comparisons of features available between packages here.

Being that DriveWorks Pro is such a powerful tool, it can be customized to your needs by selecting one of the four available modules. The options are DriveWorks Administrator, DriveWorks Autopilot, DriveWorks User, and DriveWorks Live. You start off with the Administrator package and can add functionality as needed.

DriveWorks Administrator

With Administrator, you are given the basic ability to set up and configure the automation desired for your projects along with the added functionality of specification flow. With specification flow, you can have a workflow set up for your automation, allowing engineers to be notified when design documents have been modified and provide feedback before releasing if needed.

DriveWorks Autopilot

The Autopilot module allows you to create your automated design documentation. It gives the power to automatically create custom 3D models and 2D drawings along with providing instant quotes for sales. Although, keep in mind that a license of SolidWorks will be tied up during the creation of these files. Once completed or any attention is required, relevant users will be notified via email.

DriveWorks User

The User module creates a more user-friendly environment for non-technical users, such as sales. Provided with this package, there is a standalone package, allowing users without a SolidWorks license to customize products. It can be paired with the Autopilot module to create all relevant design documentation upon design customization.

DriveWorks Live

The Live module provides an emphasis on bringing your design customization and automation to the web. This allows consumers to customize products on your website from the comfort of their homes. If all of these modules are paired together, you are provided with an extremely powerful tool that provides the customer with an interactive experience, frees up your designers to innovate new products, increases sales, and reduces potential errors.

Coming next in the DriveWorks series, I will be going over some case studies to show real-world applications of this remarkable software.

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