After hearing of SolidWorks’ new sustainable product tool, code-named “Sage”, at this year’s SolidWorks World conference, I decided to learn a little more about it.  So I contacted Mr. Rich Chin, Director of Product Innovation at SolidWorks.

After a few rounds of email tag over the last few weeks, I am pleased to bring you this dialogue on the day that SolidWorks Labs has released SustainabilityXpress.  I hope you find it informative!

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CADFanatic:  Hi Rick, thanks for agreeing to do this interview. Before we begin, could you please tell us a little bit about your background?

Rick Chin:  I’m a 23 year veteran of the CAD space. I’ve worked for UG, PTC, Pratt & Whitney (as in-house CAD expert), SolidWorks, and Xpress3D (my own startup). Jon Hirschtick hired me in 1995, and I left in 2001 to start Xpress3D. I returned in 2005 when SolidWorks acquired the FeatureXpert technology from me. eDrawings has been one of the most notable achievements I have been involved with. Currently, I am working with the team that is developing our new SolidWorks Sustainability product.

CF:  How did you become involved with SolidWorks?

RC:  Prior to joining SolidWorks, I was a demo jock and product manager for PTC. I left PTC in 1994 with the hope of one day starting a company focused on creating a MS Windows version of Pro/E. I soon learned about a startup that was already developing that product. The company was venture capital funded and had rock stars like Jon Hirschtick and Mike Payne (who I had worked with at PTC). I realized that there was no way to beat them, so I decided to join them. This was one of the best career moves of my life.

CF:  At SolidWorks World 2009 in Orlando earlier this year, Jeff Ray mentioned an upcoming tool called Sage to help SolidWorks users create designs that have lower environmental impacts, or sustainable design. What exactly is “sustainable design”, and how is it implemented?

RC:  From our perspective, all design will soon be “sustainable design”. This is all about minimizing the total environmental of the products designed by our customers. To accomplish this, design professionals must be able to measure those impacts, and then proactively work to reduce them. Ideally, it should be a natural part of the design process.

We have equipped our customers to do this by building Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) right into SolidWorks. LCA is a very comprehensive way of looking at a product’s production, use, and final disposal; and the environmental impacts that result. The environmental impacts we measure are: carbon footprint, total energy consumed, effects on air, and effects on water.

We have taken this very sophisticated analysis and made it “SolidWorks simple”. We accomplish this by limiting the number of inputs, and providing real-time results in an easy to understand dashboard.

By the way, “Sage” was the code name for our project. The official product names are SolidWorks Sustainability and SustainabilityXpress. SustainabilityXpress allows our users to analyze individual parts. The full Sustainability product allows them to analyze assemblies, compare configurations, and works with our new Assembly Visualization tool (very cool!).

CF:  Who is the target audience for Sage?

RC:  Our target audience for SolidWorks Sustainability and SustainabilityXpress is just about anyone who is using SolidWorks to design product. SolidWorks SustainabilityXpress will be available to all SolidWorks users, and is a great way to easily try out sustainable design. SolidWorks Sustainability is for our users who are interested in understanding and improving the environmental impact of the complete products they are designing.

CF:  Jeff Ray mentioned that a version of Sage will be rolled out prior to the release of SolidWorks 2010. Can you give any details of that?

RC:  Yes, we are providing a preview of the SustainabilityXpress product. It is going to be available THIS WEEK on our SolidWorks Labs website. It is an add-in to SolidWorks 2009 and is available to all SolidWorks users who are running that version of the software. That also includes students who are using our educational products. The product isn’t perfect yet, but we are looking forward to getting feedback from our users on it.

CF:  What is the timeframe for the product release?

RC:  SolidWorks SustainabilityXpress will be available this week on Labs and in the 2010 Beta. Full SolidWorks Sustainability will be available in a later Beta build around August. Both levels of the product will be completed and released with SolidWorks 2010 this fall.

CF:  What level of SolidWorks will be required to have access to the full Sage tool?

RC:  Great news … SolidWorks SustainabilityXpress will be built into every seat of SolidWorks 2010 for no additional charge. Every SolidWorks user will be able to make sustainable design a part of their every day process.

SolidWorks Sustainability is an add-in to SolidWorks that will be sold separately for a price that we will announce later this summer. Please note that it is NOT a part of the Professional or Premium bundles. It is a separately packaged product with its own price.

CF:  How will utilizing the Sage tool impact a user’s workflow?

RC:  We are designing the product so that it can be effortlessly included in today’s design flow. Material choice is an important consideration for all design professionals. It is also an important influencer in the environmental impact of products. We built a very cool “Find Similar Material” tool into the Sustainability products. I think everyone will find it useful, whether you are interested in sustainable design or not. As you use the tool to help you find the material for the job, you will see the magnitude of your part’s environmental impact change in real-time. As you evaluate materials for their mechanical properties, you will simultaneously see their impacts. No extra work or time required.

CF:  How dedicated is SolidWorks to continuing to work to develop Sage?

RC:  Like I mentioned above, we feel that all design will soon be sustainable design. Slowly, more and more of our customers are asking for this. And their customers are starting to demand it. We see the SolidWorks Sustainability product as the first of many products we hope to develop in the near future.

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I would like to thank Mr. Chin for taking the time to answer our questions.  If you have any other questions, please leave a comment and I’m sure that Rick will be glad to follow up here.

The free Xpress version of the Sage add-in mentioned at the Wednesday General Session of SolidWorks World 2009 is now available at SolidWorks Labs.

The add-in enables users to perform an environmental impact study of designs by means of a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).  The LCA considers all aspects of a products life cycle from drawing board to end-of-life.

The Environmental Dashboard enables tracking of four data points: Carbon Footprint, Total Energy Consumed, Effect on Air, and Effect on Water.  As changes are made to the design, the user can see the potential environment impacts in real-time.

SustainabilityXpress includes a Find Similar Material tool that will enable users to quickly find a similar materials from the built-in SolidWorks material library and see the results.  There is also a publishing feature than enables users to create customized reports to document the LCA.

SolidWorks 2009 is required to run SustainabilityXpress.  I am disappointed that only 32-bit is supported (as of this writing).

I am intrigued by this tool, and am all for lessening the environmental impact of designs.  In my industry, with quick turn-around times sometimes required, the mantra is often, “When in doubt, make it stout!”  I am curious to see if this tool will help.

Do you think that this tool will have a significant impact on your designs?  Will you use it to try to design “greener”?  Let us know in the comments!

UPDATE: SolidWorks SustainabilityXpress allows analysis of parts only.  The full Sustainability add-in will be required to analyze assemblies and compare configurations.  The full product will also work with the new Assembly Visualization tool.  The full SolidWorks Sustainability product will not be included in a SolidWorks bundle; it will be sold separately at a price to be announced later this summer.

Last edited on 06/24/2009 @ 2:28PM CDT.

Last night, Dana Parrish made his second trip to Huntsville this year to give the North Alabama SolidWorks User Group (NASWUG) a look at COSMOSWorks 2008.  (He was here back in March showing COSMOSFloWorks.)  This was a fairly top-level overview of the software, with mostly video demonstrations, but there were some hands-on demonstrations.

There were several interesting questions posed, and Dana was able to answer them all to everyone’s satisfaction.  I was very impressed with the new alternate mesher, and there were several new capabilities shown, such as improvements to bolt connectors and the ability to add forces at any location on a surface without having to create split lines.  You can read more about the new additions and enhancements in COSMOSWorks here.

As Ricky has already mentioned in his blog, this was the first time that the new SolidWorks 2008 interface was shown publicly in Huntsville.

I think everyone was excited to see what SolidWorks 2008 has in store.  I know I can wait until we roll it out here!

Free CSWA Exams for User Group Members!

There was also an announcement made last night that everyone in attendance will be able to take the Certified SolidWorks Associate (CSWA) exam for free!  SolidWorks has created a beta program for the CSWA exam, which is normally only proctored by authorized educational institutions, and is rolling it out to user group members.  The CSWA certification can be used as a stepping-stone to train for the Certified SolidWorks Professional (CSWP) exam.

Last night, the North Alabama SolidWorks User Group (NASWUG) got a special treat!  Dana Parrish, the South Region SolidWorks Territory Technical Manager for COSMOS apps, gave an awesome overview of COSMOSFloWorks.

After everyone’s appetite was sated with Guthrie’s chicken fingers and fries, Dana gave a very informative PowerPoint presentation on COSMOSFloWorks describing what the package has to offer and its technical capabilities, how it is implemented into SolidWorks with a familiar interface, a sampling of market and industry users, and some examples in action. Then it was time for the live demo.

Dana used a model of a Venturi tube assembly with methane being injected into a stream of air.  He went through each step of setting up the study in detail and then showed the different ways that you could graphically demonstrate the results.  He also showed how easy an Excel file could be generated with the results, including plots.

He then gave a "bonus" plug for COSMOSWorks by showing how easy it was to integrate the results from the COSMOSFloWorks analysis into a COSMOSWorks study.

I don’t normally do much analysis in my work – we have certain people that perform that task – and I definitely don’t recall much CFD knowledge from my college years (I know just enough to be dangerous in both respects!), but after this demo, I feel confident that I could sit down with COSMOSFloWorks and come up with decent results if I had to.

Dana did a very good job of representing the COSMOS line of products – and it definitely didn’t feel like a "marketing spiel".  Although if I was the one writing the checks, I believe I would have bought a seat right then!  Sometimes I think I am the only one at my company that can see the benefit of having design and analysis tools that can easily talk to one another…but I digress.

After the demos, NASWUG president Ricky Jordan talked about some important upcoming events.  The SWUGN Technical Summit in Nashville, TN on May 22, 2007 was discussed and based on the feedback from the attendees, it looks as though our user group will be very well-represented!  NASWUG VP, Gary Hall, has thrown down the gauntlet as he said that he has gotten approval for all 13 SolidWorks users at his company to attend the Summit!

It was also announced that the next evening NASWUG meeting on June 11, 2007 would have some very special guests:  John McEleney, SolidWorks CEO, and Richard Doyle, SolidWorks User Group Community Coordinator, will both be present!

Finally, there was a review of SolidWorks World 2007, along with the awesome "Space Station" video created by SolidWorks Product Manager, Mark Biasotti (on his own time, nonetheless), and a sneak peek of SolidWorks 2008 was shown.

All-in-all, it was one of the best user group meetings I believe we’ve had!