SolidWorks Ups PDM Ante With 2008 Release

SolidWorks wants to have more of a position in the PDM market. The vendor, best-known for its 3D CAD tool that’s relatively easy to use compared with some of its competitors, has launched a major upgrade to its high-end PDM offering aimed at improving the productivity of global design teams.

PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 offers a host of new features around bill of materials (BOM) management not to mention, improved replication across multiple sites, data connectivity enhancements and performance boosts, among other capabilities. The 2008 upgrade is the second major release to the platform since the May 2006 acquisition of the Conisio PDM tool from Swedish developer CS Scandinavia AB.

PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 has been enhanced to allow engineering to better share information with other functions such as manufacturing, quality assurance and purchasing, officials said. For example, with the new release, organizations working on an assembly can now customize BOMs for individual departments, routing them approvals and allowing multiple reviewers to edit them without having to install SolidWorks software. In addition, BOMs can now include units of measure for non-modeled items such as glue and can display part thumbnails when a user hovers his or her mouse over an item listed in the BOM.

The upgrade also features more powerful replication of design files across distributed organizations. In addition, out-of-the-box tools simplify data connectivity to other enterprise systems, including MRP and ERP, via XML files Finally, the 2008 upgrade offers faster performance in such basic operations as deleting, accessing, moving and rewriting files as well as clearing caches. Search within the PDM repository is also quicker due to support for Microsoft’s Indexing Service.

PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 is available now in 14 languages from SolidWorks resellers.