Why Migrate Your SolidWorks PDM Data?
Many organizations have chosen 3DEXPERIENCE as the enterprise PLM platform, but many of their local sites are still using SolidWorks PDM as the CAD data management tool.
- Having separate PDM and PLM leads to digital discontinuity. Business processes such as Configuration Management, Change Management, Program Management cannot be effectively implemented in the engineering group.
- Enterprise templates, design libraries, and product configuration definitions cannot be used effectively.
- Cost of maintaining PDM and PLM systems.
The other category of the organizations are those who chose SolidWorks PDM when their design teams were small but as the organizations grew, need for enterprise PLMs has been felt for designers and engineers to collaborate across locations. For these organizations, 3DEXPERIENCE acts like a single platform to manage CAD and PLM business processes and leverage 3DEXPERIENCE platform services such as social collaboration, reuse of design parts, program management, configuration management, 3D model comparison for BOM comparison, index-based fast searches, connectors for ERP systems and more.
Key Considerations When Migrating Data From SolidWorks PDM
- What data to migrate – all or only released?
- Site by site migration versus all sites together?
- Product by product migration versus all products together
- Should we migrate non-engineering data to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform?
- Configuration/customization of 3DEXPERIENCE platform
- Robustness of migration – process monitoring, logging & failover strategy
- Budget and timeline
Key Challenges
- Maintaining data integrity of structured CAD data
- Anomalies in source data
- Multiple vaults with duplicates
- Data model transformation between SolidWorks PDM and 3DEXPERIENCE data model
- Validation of the migrated data
- User adoption of 3DEXPERIENCE platform
- Ability to migrate data in scope over the weekend (go live window)
- Ability to perform migration product by product or site by site and still maintaining referential integrity
- Not all information could be in EPDM, some data may be in files
About SolidWorks PDM Migration Adapter
SteepGraph’s SolidWorks PDM Migration adapter is one of the adapters from overall 3DEXPEREINCE data migration suite. It migrates SolidWorks PDM data to 3DEXPERIENCE platform. The adapter is robust and developed to meet the challenges of large scale CAD data migrations.