Two Million CAD Objects Upgraded Over a Single Weekend
3DEXPERIENCE upgraded from 2015x to 2018x, with the full CAD migration parallelised across multiple machines and completed inside one weekend.
A German industrial equipment manufacturer
At a glance
- Industry
- Industrial equipment manufacturing
- Region
- Germany
- Platform
- 3DEXPERIENCE
- Our role
- End-to-end responsibility through go-live, and support
Results
2 million
CAD objects migrated
Full migration completed over a single weekend
The challenge and what we did
The challenge
- CAD migration was running significantly late, specifically on the migration of two million objects.
- The delay increased downtime and resource utilisation, holding up the overall project timeline.
- The full migration had to be completed over the weekend.
What we did
- Executed the full upgrade over the weekend to minimise disruption to regular operations.
- Redefined the hardware virtualisation configuration to improve efficiency and resource utilisation.
- Split the CAD migration across multiple machines to run in parallel.
- Introduced load balancing to distribute incoming server requests evenly.
What we found
The constraint was not the upgrade itself but the CAD migration inside it. Two million objects had to move, the process was running slowly, and every hour it ran added downtime and consumed resources that the rest of the project needed. The business would not accept a long outage, which reduced the available window to a single weekend — a fixed limit that the existing approach was not going to meet.
What we built
Three changes made the weekend achievable. The hardware virtualisation configuration was redefined so the available resources were actually used. The CAD migration was split across multiple machines and run in parallel, rather than sequentially on one. And load balancing was introduced to spread incoming server requests evenly instead of letting one node become the bottleneck. The upgrade from 2015x to 2018x, and the full CAD migration with it, completed inside the weekend window.
Filed under
- Industrial Machinery
- 3DEXPERIENCE
- Upgrade & Modernization
- Engineering Data Management
- Change Management
- System Integration
- EBOM
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