Agile & SolidWorks

With Agile, prepare to flush a lot of $$$ down the toilet (open your wallet and hand it over to the consultants). Expect to get nothing but a lot of buzzwords with Agile: leveraging integrated supply paradigms, rightsizing engineered platforms, multi-faceted solution partnering, etc. What the hell does it all mean? I don't know...could never get a direct answer from the "solutions provider".

Devon,

I've been using Agile for 8 years. I worked at their first big client, Electroglas (no longer exists). And I've been using it at my current company for a long time. I am a very efficient and fairly knowledgeable Agile user.

In my opinion, it is not an enterprise wide solution. I see it barely be able to handle change control of PDF's and Word Docs, let along SW documents. I've not seen it be able to handle inventory control and part requesition. Sure, they will try to sell you modules that does this and does that, but ultimately, it is a big expense of money and time with limited value in return.

I would look seriously at true enterprise wide applications that can handle doc control, revision/change control, part requestition and inventory control in one package solution. If you are already must use Agile, start the drum beat to get replace it. The longer you have it, the less useful it is, but the harder it is to eliminate .

Ok, enough of the that, here's how you deal with the realities. Agile cannot handle take SolidWorks files properly. Agile is not able to maintain links between parts, other parts, assemblies, and drawings. Plus, if you try to put files that are too big (like over a couple of meg's) into Agile, Agile will crash consistently when accessing those file, becoming a very unstable platform. We have this issue with Word Documents. Imagine what it would do with SW files.

Use PDMWorks to handle your SW files. Tell those who want you to put SW files into Agile that Agile cannot handle them properly. SW files are all interlinked, and this will be lost in Agile, making many of the files useless or even corrupt, because of the blind way Agile stores them. I've had to stave off efforts to put SW files in Agile a couple of times. Of course, Agile's suggested work around? Print to PDF and store those instead. So that's what we do. Maybe you can use eDrawings instead of PDF. Either way, we manage our SW files very effectively with PDMWorks.

ms wrote: