CAD, PDM & PLM: What’s Really Slowing Down Your Product Development
Full Transcript
Mike LaFleche
Hello, everybody. Welcome to today’s live stream on what’s really slowing down your product development processes. My name is Mike LaFleche. I’m a Principal Product Marketing Manager here at Onshape. I’m a CAD person forever.
I’m joined by my good friend Mike Halladay on the Arena PLM side. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, Mike?
Mike Halladay
Yeah, thanks, Mike. So yeah, early career, definitely CAD focus, CAD and PDM. But about mid-career, I transitioned from PDM to PLM and now I’m in the PLM world, been with Arena for about eight years.
Mike LaFleche
Oh, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Yeah, we’ve worked together a lot over the last few years here and being partner products to each other, it’s really great to work together and help educate people on what’s happening out there and what we have at Onshape, Arena and PTC. So don’t be shy everybody. This is a very casual live stream. We want everybody to ask questions, use the comments, whether you’re watching through our website or through YouTube or wherever you’re watching from, add your comments. We’ll see them. We’ll try to answer questions as we see them, but we’ve left plenty of time in the session to answer questions on Onshape and Arena PLM. And anything that you see today is recorded. So if you want to watch it later or forward to your friends, feel free. All right. With that said, let’s just get started.
All right, so let’s whiteboard a few things out. I don’t have too many slides here. I just want to set the stage for why we’re all here today, why Onshape and Arena exist, and the things we solve, and it’s because we keep hearing these things over and over again. You would think in the year 2026 these things would be easier, and they are if you’re using Onshape and Arena, I think. But these are things I just hear all the time and I’m sure you do too, Mike.
So, like design reviews. Design reviews are a topic of conversation. People work from many different places nowadays. It’s kind of hard to do a design review unless you use some kind of Teams or GoToMeeting or something like that type, Zoom-type software. But you’re kind of limited in what you can do there. You’re sharing files, you’re marking up things with PDF. I’m sure you’ve heard it all, Mike, too, with design reviews and things like that, right?
Mike Halladay
Oh, yeah.
Mike LaFleche
Yeah. But change management, that’s another thing that maybe Arena PLM, really your users buy Arena PLM quite a bit for change management, but what are some of the things in change management that you hear that we could solve for?
Mike Halladay
So yeah, you mentioned design reviews. If the design review is part of the early change management process, we can accommodate design reviews. Maybe you do your design reviews in a change request. We can accommodate a design review from a change request, and you’ll get a look at how easily I can pop into Onshape from Arena and do design reviews and pop right back to Arena and so on.
Mike LaFleche
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Yeah, we’re going to really, hopefully, blow some minds when you see that. Another thing that’s really different in our system that we think we’ve solved for is this issue with siloed development. Everybody’s kind of working on their own computer, on their own files, doing their thing. They might have a PDM system where you check in files into the PDM assemblies of hundreds of files, sending them to these faraway servers and then checking them out again when you need to work.
It creates kind of this really linear process though, where you can’t really try out a lot of different things together when you have that process. PDM is sold as collaboration, but I think it’s actually the opposite. It keeps things under control, which is important. You’re making things. These are expensive products that people manufacture. You want to make sure things are under control, but at what cost? At the cost of coming up with the best design because you’re not able to collaborate together, that doesn’t sound like a good deal.
So this is because of file-based workflows. Files only let one person at a time work. If you could do things differently with modern technology like we have here, that can really be a big help. So that’s what we did at Onshape and Arena.
So Onshape’s been around; we’re the former people that used to be at SOLIDWORKS. I used to be a SOLIDWORKS reseller for a long, long time back in the old days. Most of the people I work with on the CAD side are former SOLIDWORKS people or used to work at SOLIDWORKS Corporation. VPs of product development, the last five of them I think, are here. So we have a strong heritage. We work at PTC, which invented Parametric CAD back in the late ‘80s. So Onshape was acquired by PTC some time ago, but we spun off from SOLIDWORKS as a separate company, all those people, and we started Onshape.
And it was because of some of these things. And Arena has actually been around even longer. BOM.com. I mean, tell us a little bit about Arena PLM and how it came to be?
Mike Halladay
Yeah. So a lot of drivers went into making the decision to start up Arena. Like you said, BOM.com, we own that URL. First and foremost, we wanted it to be in the Cloud because that enabled so many streamlined processes, especially the collaboration part of it, not just internally with your own employees, but with suppliers and supply chain and so on. So Arena is a great platform for collaboration simply because it lives in the Cloud.
Mike LaFleche
Yeah. I mean, I remember when I first saw it, being able to manage your bill of materials on the internet, being able to share with a supplier, get your parts made without sending spreadsheets. And back then it was like fax machines and stuff, barely able to read the thermal film paper and stuff like that.
It was crazy. So Arena, things like that were really innovative. And Arena is now a trusted PLM system for many, many organizations around the world. And we work together. Because we’re both cloud-based, cloud-native, we can share and exchange information very, very easily. Much better than you would be able to connect Arena to other perhaps CAD systems. So we’ll see that. Let’s take a look at one issue that I think Onshape and Arena do a really good job at solving, is this metric called cost of delay and cost of change.
So if you look at a traditional PLM system, if I hide this for a second, hide Onshape, going through the concept to design the prototyped production stages in your production of a product, the later you find an issue, the more expensive that issue is going to be. So because you’ve put hours into it, you send it out to a vendor, parts start getting made or things are waiting for another thing to get done. The later you find something that needs a design change, the more expensive that change ends up being.
But what we’re positing here in this live stream is that if you can find the problems earlier, fail fast and agile precept, and by working together, sharing earlier, by working in the same database, you’re going to find problems earlier. You’re going to have problems. There’s no doubt about it. You’re going to have problems. You need systems that will help you find those problems, document those problems, take corrective actions on those problems. So a system that says they have no problems is not a system I believe in. So you need to just find the issues earlier to get your products out to market quicker and at the least cost. That’s what we’re talking about right here.
So let’s get into a little bit of a demo of how we can do this. So I’m on my Mac computer. I’m running Onshape on a Mac in just a Chrome browser here. I’m just in a browser with different tabs. I have different windows open of different designs. Here I have this large assembly of this particular machine that I’m flying through. Here’s an assembly, here’s a drawing, here is other things, renderings perhaps. Onshape documents are kind of like a manila folder with a notebook with different things that you can store in it. Maybe I have a PDF of the pallet that goes through this machine and there’s the pallet and it goes through the machine. So that’s just one example of an Onshape document. Onshape documents all have full version control under the hood so you can even have these nice branches to try out different things.
Onshape runs on any device. I see a comment here from Howard here. He’s running Onshape on Linux and Firefox. Very good way of running it. So let’s go ahead and go through this demonstration here.
So we have this satellite tracking system and I have lots of heat-generating components here. We have some things with some fins, some heatsinks, some stuff like that. I want to actually put… I’m going to go off on a branch and try out a new design. This is what it will kind of, sort of, look like. I just wanted to show you the finished thing first. But if you take a look at this version and history thing here that we’re looking at, I have a branch called Heat Issue.
So from any version in Onshape, everything’s version controlled in Onshape. Every single thing is saved, essentially. So as you do work in Onshape, don’t have to remember to hit Control S on your keyboard. You just work like Google Docs kind of, right? You don’t ever think of saving in Google Docs, you just kind of keep working. There’s a heat issue here. We had a comment from the field. Comments can be added in Onshape. They can come from many sources. You might have an internal comment on the engineering side. You might have a comment that comes from the field that gets logged through Arena PLM to take a corrective action. But I’m just going to put a user in here and say we have a heat issue here and assign that as a work order to somebody.
I might click on the electronic stack, maybe even do a little markup right in here and assign that task to me, I guess. So that’s a pretty cool way of kind of having some collaboration where you can share and collaborate. Emails are obviously flying around going through. We have tasks that we could take a look at. This is the task management list right here so I can see all the listed tasks one by one in here and view that comment from there too.
So, really cool. In fact, maybe let’s see, let’s do this. Let’s go in and let me go back to our branches here. We’re on this heat issue branch right now. You can see every single thing that I’ve been working on here on this heat issue has changed, but I also have a change in Arena PLM.
So Arena PLM, here it is as just another tab in my browser. We could even separate these windows out so we can have one on one side and one on the other. Here, let’s do that. So we’re not flapping back and forth too much. A change in Arena, Mike, why would we want to do that? What are the benefits of creating a change order in Arena PLM, while I’m getting my windows here set up?
Mike Halladay
Yeah, definitely. Well, I mean, Onshape is a very usable system. You can assign tasks, you can do changes in Onshape, but typical use case is that’s the engineering work group that’s going to take care of that. Arena is the collaboration tool that takes that to the entire enterprise. And so being able to link that from Onshape to Arena just enables a streamlined process that without hiccups, without stopping one process to start another process and so on.
Mike LaFleche
So what we’re looking at here, I have a corrective action here, but I want to create a change order because we have this issue of an overheating issue on this particular satellite system. We even have a nonconforming part serial numbers here, so that’s pretty cool. Here’s the actual item of the product assembly that was affected by this. Notice what we got going on here. We have beautiful thumbnails automatically here, information about the design, bill of materials should be here. I could even look at this in many different ways as different BOM views to kind of take a look at what’s going on in here. We have all the different history of everything. We also have a link right back to Onshape too.
So it’s really amazing that we can have one system for both PDM, CAD and… Or, PDM, PLM, and CAD. And the PDM is really all your version control in Onshape as you’re doing your work. You continuously kind of make changes, and then you can push this information right in to Arena. We can even pull things like part numbers based on categories. There’s lots of really cool back-and-forth that can be done with this. So let’s get into it. I’m on this heat issue branch and I’m going to go into a subassembly that I have here.
I’m going to switch to the electronic stack here. And I can see that I have several subassemblies. This should not look like an alien experience. If you’ve used the CAD system before, it’s really nice that you can see subassemblies parts, assemblies like you’re used to.
You notice how quick it is though. We’re not downloading files or anything. All this is running on AWS on extremely powerful data center-type servers that are enabling this experience to be so pleasant, essentially, on my Mac.
You can run it on Linux, you can run on Windows, of course, iPad or whatever. So let’s go ahead and design something in here and I want to do it in the context of the assembly. So this is a pretty cool thing you can do in Onshape is we’re on this heat issue here, branch, and I want to create a new part in the context of the assembly. So I hit this button right here in our assembly mode to say, where’s the origin for that new item going to be? And I’ve created an origin where I think I want to put a heatsink. So it’s creating a brand new part studio for me and it’s creating a context for me to work in. So you can see a ghost graphic of what the assembly looked like right there. And what I want to do, if I take a look, I want to put the heatsink right here, and let’s create it.
Now, of course, Onshape has the ability to draw things. I could draw a rectangle, I could create an extrusion. I could go in and start creating ribs and cutouts and holes. That is fine. We can do that all day, every day, I’m not going to waste your time on that. So what I’m going to do, Onshape is built in this incredible language called FeatureScript. So every time you hit extrude, or create a loft, or do a boundary surface, or anything as far as feature geometry creation goes, it’s using this thing called FeatureScript that we invented, and that’s what drives all of the features in Onshape.
Now you can even make your own features. So you can get custom features, you can make your own, you can have AI make them for you. That’s what I do because I’m not like a coder type person. So I use Claude, I use Onshape, why not do things like that to build custom features that suit my needs.
Instead of creating extrusions and sweeps, why don’t we just have it create heatsink? So Onshape’s been able to do custom features from the very early days because that’s what Onshape was built off of. It’s only very recently that you can instruct custom features to be built through AI and things like that on your own infrastructure.
Onshape is working on building out automatic services too to help users do this. This is something coming in the near future and we have some sessions that we’ve done recently on this. But what I want to do is just create this heatsink based on information that I know about heatsink design and stuff you learn in the third year of engineering school. Do I want a square or a round heatsink? What’s the size of it? 35 millimeters, right? How do I want it calculating my surface temperatures? You notice it’s actually giving me a message at the top right here saying that this is exceeding my design max of 85C.
So 85C is my design max right here. Ambient temp, here’s my heat power for the chip I’m putting on top of it. Maybe I can change that and that’s going to change the calculations. Is it anodized or not? What do I want for my fins? Round, square. It’s calculating the temperature as you can see. In fact, I even have a little table on the side, so you can create these tables and custom features in Onshape. This is really CAD now design assistance and stuff on the side.
So we’re violating the temperature here. So maybe if we increase the surface area, of course we need to make this fit underneath here. That’s why I’m doing this in between two circuit boards, make that 12 high, but maybe these should be one. We’ll see if that drops our temperature down with natural convection, still not enough. We go to linear ribs in thickness one. Still high. So we would just keep on working.
Now, maybe we need a fan, right? So that means we need to change our thermal modeling method. And now if we use a fan, now we’re within range using that particular method. So I like the way this looks. Let’s add some MVD dimensions to this.
Onshape has model-based definition in it. Let me just insert this heatsink into the assembly so I can come back to the heatsink by itself. There it is in place. But here in this part studio, I can kind of go back to the part studio by itself that I created. And if you look at this, it had the model-based definition dimensions in it. So Onshape added this recently and I’m just going to apply a tolerance scheme to this. So that way we can see all of our dimensions.
So in one feature, I had it build an entire heatsink with mounting, with model-based definition that was looking at temperature. These are things that you can do in custom features in Onshape. You can create your own custom features that do exactly what I did. This one only took me an hour to make because I had the help of Claude code and things like that. So this is really nice.
Now we need to share this information with Arena so that we can procure this particular part, right? Let’s go back to our electronic stack. I know I need two of these actually. So I’m going to copy and paste just, control C, control V or command V on a Mac, right? And I’ll just mate this right to here. These are two different boards. That’s why they didn’t automatically have two heatsinks on them because one board is for one thing and one board is for another thing. They’re two separate boards.
All right, we have a bill of materials, right? Of course when we’re working in a CAD system, and our BOM is now up to date with those two heatsinks. Now it automatically established a material because of the feature, custom feature, I told it to include that, right? I need to just categorize this though. Is this a machined part or a casting or something like that? And this is important because now I need to give it a part number that makes sense for machined parts.
That’s the way this company works. So I just clear out the automatic part number that I had my custom feature give me and I’ll just tell Onshape to generate the next available number. I could even have Arena pull that number for me, right? That is something that through categories you can enable, you set it up in Arena and that way you can have some rules-based part numbering based on categorized information. So I have this beautiful BOM.
How do I get this into Arena PLM? Well, you see these buttons right here? All I had to do is tell my Onshape account, because Onshape runs as like a company-level system, right? You sign in as a user, and I’m part of a company and I run with the company’s rules and settings and all that. And my company rule is set so that Arena PLM is the change management system and it establishes rules for me. So Onshape has built in… In fact, let me just kind of go over here to kind of talk about this just a little bit.
Onshape has Git-Style version control in just basic Onshape. You can use Onshape and it has these versions and branches. You can track every change, you can branch in parallel, try out things on these branches, even compare and merge these changes. We can do this because we’re not based on files. We can do this because it’s a database driven system, and we were inspired by the way software engineers kind of do their version control and we made a system that works for mechanical design for versions.
So that’s what I have going on here on this heat issue branch where we’ve been doing all our work on that branch, not on the main design, which is locked currently. I locked it. And I want to get this into Arena PLM. So I just hit the one single button right here, BOM sync to Arena. And as soon as it’s done doing that, it will actually be there with all the information from the stuff in Onshape in the Arena PLM side.
And you see right there, BOM sync to Arena. Now I can get there really quickly by clicking that button. There we are. And there we are, we have the full bill of materials. We went from AI generated custom feature with real manufacturable geometry to a model-based definition to bill of materials in Arena PLM.
This is real stuff. We’re not dealing in… Yeah, this is a real process and you can see there’s rev C of the PVCB frame, the rev B of the guidance system, our new heatsink that is unreleased, right? So it understands the structure of what’s in the system. And if I click into the heatsink, there’s the preview right there. There’s a 3D preview tool built in. We can click into it and get that, or we can click right to the…
There’s the 3D here. So you can get a view here or you can get the actual view from Onshape, because how cool is this, right? Well, Mike, I mean, if I’m a quality person, if I have this part, and obviously we need to send this out to a vendor to be manufactured, we need incoming inspection, we need to check the dimensions.
This is something that people would do, right.
Mike Halladay
Mm-hmm.
Mike LaFleche
Okay. Okay.
Mike Halladay
Yeah, for sure. And so you showed the Arena 3D visualization tool, but why use that when Onshape just links to Arena and all the model-based definition is in Onshape? So click in Onshape, get all that information.
Mike LaFleche
Exactly. Now I can click right there from Arena and I have my tolerances all right here ready to go. Now, I’m looking at this and the tolerances are a little bit wide because I chose the course scheme here. I’ll go to the medium scheme. So it’s given me a list of all of my dimensions for inspection. I also realized that I forgot to put in my custom feature the actual datums that I should use for inspections.
So I’ll just continue my work on this in Onshape. I need datum C here. Maybe I know I want to round off the top corners of these right here. I’ll call that 20 for whatever reason I might want to do that. So I’m making a few changes. In fact, I should make that a model. Let’s see. Yeah, that looks good. All right. We have our customized heatsink right here. We got our datums, we’ve got our tolerances. I can export this as a CSV for an inspection list, right? I can export it to Google Drive if I want to, or Office 365, or whatever it might be. So pretty cool. So I have that, and we need to release this for production, this particular item.
So we’re still here in this document. We’re working on the heat issue. Let’s release it. So look what we have. This is releasing, we’re initiating the change order from Onshape. Onshape has released management, but we could use Arena’s too. So when you have a company that’s connected directly to Arena and you have a change management process where you want to get approval outside of the engineering department, like you have quality and manufacturing, that’s where you really want to take advantage of the nice workflow process.
So I’m going to just release this heatsink. It’s already got the part number on it. I can see what it looked like in Arena from our release candidate in Onshape, but I can also establish a change action right here. So right here in Arena, I can create changes. I say I want to fast-track a change under an ECO process, heat issue, new heatsink today. And I’m going to use this routing. A routing is just like saying who’s going to be included in the change order process. And I can have different change control boards and things like that. So there we are. We have ECO 400, 457 was auto generated.
And if I go back to Onshape right here to the change order and click this Arena button four, five, seven, there it is. Heat issue, new heatsink today. And now we have a linkage between Arena and Onshape, but even filled out all of my release notes and Onshape.
How cool is that? And yeah, I could even include other observers that aren’t part of the routing if I want them to just know what’s happening, and submit it. Mike, this is actually a good question while I’m getting this change order process coming in.
If you have an Arena-only user, do they need a Onshape account to view the part from Arena? I think we just need a view-only account, right?
Mike Halladay
Yeah. If that’s all you need is just view-only, then you can have a view-only account and access it that way.
Mike LaFleche
Yeah. We have a light user essentially is what you would get, which is far lower in cost than a full CAD editor. When you’re using the enterprise system of Onshape. There’s different tiers of Onshape. You can go to the website and see what you have there.
Also, while I’m just taking a look at questions, Neil had a good question about perimeter-based modeling and control, any workflow? Any similar features? Of course, parameter driven modeling is what Onshape is built for, essentially. That’s really the goal of Onshape.
Variable tables are nice too. Here’s a variable table showing all my declarations for wiring. Here’s Part Studio too, and I can say min radius. And this is a global variable. I’m going to say five millimeters. And if I go over here to this fill it, I can tell it to use that variable instead. And here’s a list of all my variables in the system. Onshape’s the best system for variable driven design on the planet.
I can stand by that because it’s unit based. If you did this in Excel or whatever, you’d have to be thinking about units and things. But this is just directly in here as variable tables, variable studios. You can even have an entire variable studio inside of a document that keeps your calculations under version control. It’s really good. And even link it to external systems so it pulls in. There’s all sorts of fun you can have. Anyway, so we have our thing ready to be released. You notice, I started a release. This is actually a really important thing.
A lot of people were probably cringing as I was doing this, if you’ve used any other PDM system. Because I started a change order 400, 454, 400, 457, but I started making changes to it after I started that change order. And that’s totally okay in Onshape because this one is still migrating through its change process. This is the open workspace work in progress where anything that’s a triangle or a dot is a version that’s immutable and cannot be changed in the future. It’s just a version. So this 400, 457 is still going to be good. I could always restore back to here like I was just playing, right? I just restored back to where that was. I have unlimited restore.
So easy. Anyway, let’s continue our change process. In fact, let me go into the change. You can actually click right into the change and have comments and look here and all that. All of that can be saved in that ECO. Comments, conversations. And as this change order progresses, you can see where it opens “submit approval, effective, complete.”
I submit this change now in Arena. Obviously, I need a password, so let me just get that. Use one password, of course. There we are. And you’d think I’d remember my password, but I have lots of passwords. There we are. So we’re at 400, 457, submitted, it’s pending in Arena, and in Onshape things are happening too. I go over here and go over to here, you can see we have a list of notifications. It’s pending in Arena there. It’s pending in Arena in Arena. Now we’d submit that change… On the wrong page. Yeah. Okay. Now I can say, “Yeah, I like that.” Put my password in. There we are. Completed change. And of course Onshape is going to know that’s happening too. There it is. It’s already just released. And if I kind of refresh this little panel, you’ll see it be a solid filled-in triangle.
I look at the release here, I can see that it is indeed released. All the comment history is here. I can click that back to go to Arena as well, so I can see the full change action and who was part of the approval process.
And that’s the change process at a part level and of course, at the assembly level, we would have our assembly needs to get the latest and greatest information as well into the system. We just released that, right? And it’s doing a check now to ensure that we’re not releasing things that haven’t really changed. One of those things in PDM that a lot of people wish worked really well and it does pretty well here.
So I can actually tell it not to update anything that’s not really changed, right? It’s checking that information now. It’s pulling revisions instead of the workspaces. There we are. And that looks much better now. We’re just up revving the electronic stack. Nothing else is changing at this moment now because we just released a heatsink today, right? And of course you’d release all that under a change order as well.
You just have a change order, release that, so on and so forth. So this ends up creating a nice, closed-loop process. I mean, that’s really what’s happening here. I mean, let me bring this slide up here to kind of illustrate this. Maybe you can summarize a little bit more what this is telling us, Mike.
Mike Halladay
Sure. So let’s start at the upper left. You see an issue, EV fails to charge, we capture the issue, we track that issue, we make assignments for actions that need to be taken against that issue. If it’s determined that a corrective action is necessary, at least root cause analysis and potentially corrective action, we’ll associate that with a corrective action report. If there are permanent corrections that are required based off of the results of the root cause analysis and corrective action, then we do the document update. This is the Onshape part of it, the document update.
Onshape plus procedures, any other documents that go along with this process, part of that. And then what you’ve just seen Mike do is the change order release and it brings us right back around to the final step is preventative actions, right? Training plans, updated procedures and so on, from the preventative actions. And then we sit back up there waiting for the next thing.
Mike LaFleche
It’s great. It just completely closes everything up and makes everything without having to do a lot of manual steps. A lot of this stuff, you would have to manually upload things and do things. You can still do all that stuff.
I mean, you can manually upload anything you want and do stuff like this, but this is just a nice automatic change thing. Relating to that, let me just go back to that heatsink. I’m looking at the heatsink here as an Onshape user. I’m trying to figure out where I get to this in Arena. There’s a couple of ways I can get to Arena from this action. See anything with a triangle? That is a release in Onshape. That’s creating a new, but let me look at the revision history. That’s the revision history of this item. We can look for things like that way. We can also look for things from the top level. I’m looking for a part in our system. 3360 is the part of the SKU. Look how quickly it returns that search.
By the way, you can look at other information here on the heatsink, all the custom properties. If you use enterprise PDM or other things like SOLIDWORKS and things like this, this is like your data card, where the releases are, where used information, things like that. But if I view the release here, you notice what I have, I can just click right into Arena from there or from here. By the way, even internal to a part like this, if I go to the properties of this individual item, I go to the heatsink itself, I could get to Arena. Yeah, there it is. I can pull information, go to Arena. I can sink it to Arena right from here. So it’s always connected when you have this set up, but I want to go back to that heatsink.
I keep threatening to go back to that heatsink. Let’s see. Let me switch back to it, because I want to do an inspection plan, right? I want to take all that CSV stuff I got from the model-based definition information, right? All this is here. I want to export that as a CSV and then I want to do an inspection plan. Usually you’d have an Excel spreadsheet. I’ve been in the coding world lately, so I had AI write me a tool for doing inspection. I’ve already done that.
So what I’m going to do is go back to heatsink here and you can attach anything you want to this. We have these files that are already here. How did those get there? Well, Onshape and Arena automatically generated them. It generated a PVZ viewable file and a step file when I created that heatsink. And so that way if a supplier needs a step file for whatever reason for manufacturing, they don’t use Onshape for whatever reason. If they can’t, they would just go in and export it, if they have a step, they can do whatever they want. Or I can add new files and things to my design. So let’s do that. Working revision here. Not going to add files to something that already is released, but look what we have here. Mike was nice enough to set this up for me today. We have Office 365, Google Docs. You can go from your cloud systems to another cloud system.
So let’s see. Just going to search for a PDF of a PPAP, a quality inspection process that I had recently run. There it is. Oh, no. Recent. I know I just put it there earlier. So I put it in Google Drive. I know I did earlier, but I have another one in Office 365. There it is. Oh, I got to hit that button and add it. There we are. And you can categorize these things too. This is compliance information.
Get that. There we are. So now taking that inspection information from Onshape, I exported a PDF, I did stuff as a quality inspector, did all my measurements, exported a PDF. That’s stuff I didn’t show you, but I can actually see that we have that file right in here and it came from Office 365 too.
So we’re kind of doing a… How would you describe this, Mike, what we’re doing here? We’re not duplicating files anymore, right?
Mike Halladay
No. Yeah, we’re not duplicating files. You essentially are marking the version of that file in Office or Google Docs and saying, “This is the version of the file that is currently associated with this item.” And then if you need to update it at any point in time, make some modifications and everything else, there’s an option to update file and it’ll present to you all subsequent versions of that file. You pick the one you want to update it to, and it just updates the reference.
Mike LaFleche
Yeah. There’s the PDF right there so I can get to that. All right. Time is flying and we have tons of questions, so we should probably start taking a look at these questions. Because what I did is I did get through the main parts of the things I wanted to get across here today. We did CAD with extremely awesome AI-generated custom features.
We did design reviews. We shared bill of materials information, automatically generating step files and thumbnail images and metadata, did corrective action process and reporting, connected to vendors. We did a lot of work actually in a very short amount of time.
Let’s go through the question list here. I see a ton of questions, and I see Martin is here. Thanks for showing here, Martin. Thanks for answering a lot of questions. A lot of good stuff here. Things like, let’s see, let me kind of go through here. A lot of stuff about importing from other software with capturing the Feature Tree.
No, I would say there’s something new that we have that you can get to do feature tree importing again. We used to have something, but we have a new way of importing SOLIDWORKS files with Feature Tree. I’m sorry, not a Feature Tree, but just importing SOLIDWORKS files in bulk, no Feature Tree, okay? No Feature Tree. You’re getting imported Parasolid information because Onshape runs on Parasolid as its modeling engine. So the SOLIDWORKS as far as the desktop CAD goes, the cloud one is not Parasolid.
So you can bring in data. Onshape has extremely good direct modeling capabilities for doing changes to those designs. Move face, replace face. You can even do it with meshes and surfaces. It’s really cool. Imported PCBA files can be huge. This is a good point. Onshape has this thing called a PCB Studio that will help you deal with that information. PCB Studio is like a tool that runs in between your ECAD system and your MCAD system.
So this is a board I imported from Altium. Onshape in the last release or two, has the ability to direct import from Altium 365 and push and pull to it. So I can push and pull information from my Altium 365 account and bring it right in Onshape. I’ll just show you what it looks like here, but I won’t go through the whole thing probably. There’s one right there. There are the variants that are in Altium and that will bring it in. And I’m on a Mac, I don’t have Altium on… Well, I do have Windows on a virtual machine that I can pull up and run Altium on, but I’m not doing that right now.
It’s just pulling from that cloud and pulling in this board and there’s the board. There are the components on the board. It even brings in real parts because that’s part of the Octopart service from Altium, and you can replace parts with other parts, of course, as well. And then you just tell it to build it in Onshape as a full B rep build materials solid model essentially. So you can do that not just with Altium. You can pull in IDF, IDX… Or, IDF. Yeah, IDF files. IDX in the future.
But there we are. So it’s just going ahead processing that board and it’s building that. It’ll be done with the board here in a second. It brings in the outlines and the traces as decals. There’s the board itself and the assembly should be done now.
So that’s essentially the process for dealing with circuit boards. And then if you don’t want to have a huge board, the question was, you don’t want to have all the resistors on it, for example, you might not need the little capacitors and things. So what you can do is just suppress those things before you import them. So here I am in this tool that’s almost like a viewer, it’s like a really fancy viewer that lets you suppress, un-suppress, and then you would push that to Onshape and then build your board with just the things you need, essentially.
Hopefully that makes sense. Then of course, like Mike and Altium, in Onshape world, the PCBA is like one rev controlled item and we probably wouldn’t rev control the components in Onshape on the board because it’s typically a vendor purchased item.
Mike Halladay
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That doesn’t really make sense because we can connect to Altium and we can publish a finished project to Arena and have all that information published directly to Arena from Altium and have that as separate objects not connected to Onshape. The whole purpose of having it at Onshape is capturing the physical aspect of it, the clearances, the interferences, the connect points, all that kind of stuff. But we can go directly from Altium to Arena and have all of that metadata published and updated directly from Altium.
Mike LaFleche
Yeah. There’s also, if you’re dealing with just a really complicated board and you want to simplify it onto one part, there is a cool custom feature that Martin is calling out here as well. So you can find that it’s been around forever. It’s a good tool. Large mesh files from my Creaform laser scanner. I mean, what you want to do is obviously… There might be tools you could pre-process it in before bringing it in Onshape to kind of clean up the mesh, because we don’t have like point cloud tools in Onshape, but you can import the mesh into Onshape and if it’s a good mesh, it’ll act great.
It doesn’t have to be closed. It could be open mesh. But I would say if there was something you could do to clean it up before, bring it in Onshape, there are things in Onshape you could do to delete portions of the mesh, but if it’s like too slow on import, if it’s too complicated, it might just be a terrible experience. So try to clean it up in some other software first. There are some open source ones out there and some fairly expensive ones too, depending on what you need. Let’s see.
All right. See if there’s any other questions here. Sketches imported from other CAD software, remain editable in Onshape? I mean, you can import a sketch like a DXF file too and bring that in. Of course, you would add your own dimensions to it parametrically in Onshape, but it would retain the scale factor. You would just put dimensions on it. What else? Back to the main screen here. Go back to this. Nobody asked any questions about drawings or assemblies, Render Studio. Of course, Onshape can build drawings of these objects too and store all that here. Large production assemblies with complex configurations. All right, you remember, let me pull open a good size. Actually, this one has a nice configurable setup here. It’s just one of these onsite generators.
Let’s see if I… Well, that’s just a trailer assembly. I want the top-level assembly. I mean, somebody’s asking… I mean, Zach, you’re asking this question. I’m opening up a full system for a trailer for a generator. So this is what the performance would be like on a full thing that I haven’t opened in like a year. Okay? So the first time it opens, it’s opening it from AWS. It’s building a cached graphic on my local browser and there it is. I have the full thing open. Let’s open the doors. There are mates in here. What I want to do now is change the size of it. This has variance, of course. We have different sizes available for that, maybe different colors.
Of course, anybody can share directly. I can share with people. I want to give somebody view or edit rights and we can edit on this design together. That’s what Onshape does since day one. There’s a different model right there. How are we doing all these configuration work? We even have exploded views here on this. How do we replace the axle? How do we service the engine? Got to remove the cover, right?
Here’s the configuration table. We’re configurating sketches. That’s what we’re doing. And of course, Onshape and Arena all fully work together with this too. So if I was sharing the bill of materials and it was all set, ready to go for Arena, all categorized, I could share each one of these configurations because each configuration gets its own part number and the part number is the main thing that controls the relationship here, and then it would just sync the BOM to Arena and have it there too.
So it’s a really nice system for that. If I design a casting it would kind of just clean up… Oh yeah, Onshape does that too. Where’s my automotive folder? All right, there we are. Oh, this thing’s flying.
So this throttle body, if I switch to that, of course we have a configuration of the machined version of it and a configuration of the casting version of it. So that’s just configurations. Yeah. We have 30 seconds left, Mike. There is …
Mike Halladay
We managed to eat up all the time.
Mike LaFleche
Yeah, a lot of good questions from everybody. Oh, this question I don’t think I answered correctly. Can I share or use between two different documents? Yes, absolutely. 1,000%, and that’s what we do most of the time in Onshape. I think you can see here this particular fuel injector lives in this document, but if I wanted to, I could say insert from other documents, go to my company, go into my library of things that I’ve built up.
I’ll do a search for it. There it is. I can pick the rev-controlled version that I released in Arena. Oh, that’s the throw body. I didn’t want that. But you see what I mean? I can open up from any document I want and drop it in. And then you just mate it up. Easy as that, right? See how we use it as to mate two in Onshape?
All right, here we go, Martin. I’ll answer this one sec because he’s asking, how do suppliers and manufacturers interact when they require native SOLIDWORKS deliverables? Well, that is a question that I would love to answer, but I would say send them a link to Onshape. I know it sounds like a stupid answer, but if you could just send somebody a link to something that was always up to date, wouldn’t that be better than sending a SOLIDWORKS file?
I know people demand SOLIDWORKS files, but just give that a shot, see what happens. Give them export rights if you share them into something. You can share somebody into this, give them view and export and they can get their own SOLIDWORKS file out of it. Okay? I mean, this is just one way. There’s many ways you can share. Yeah, Native Weld feature. There is a custom feature for welding that does a very good job, but I hear your point on that.
And can we lock an assembly or document we’re working on? Oh yeah, you can lock. That’s what I did on my original design here on the satellite tracking system. So on the workspace that you’re in that you want to be locked, like I have my main workspace, you can lock the workspace. Let me lock under workspace protection. You can just enable that. Now it’s not going to let you do it when multiple people are in it at the same moment. You just got to wait until everybody leaves and then that takes effect. But yeah. Yes. I’m glad you agree.
All right. Mike …
Mike Halladay
Yes, sir.
Mike LaFleche
I was doing a lot of talking. I apologize.
Mike Halladay
That’s fine.
Mike LaFleche
I hope we had a good time here today and we showed everybody what they came to see in a closed loop process. Any final thoughts on how to best get started with Arena, if people are interested?
Mike Halladay
Yeah. So if you’re interested in going deeper on Arena, need more information about Arena, just put something in the comments. We’ll make sure we contact you. It’s pretty easy to get on board with Arena.
Mike LaFleche
Cool. Cool. I believe just go to Onshape.com, go to Arena.com. These are the signup links if you want to get started and try it out, or you can just go to each of the websites. There we are. I think we had a good time.
I hope everybody did on the stream. I really enjoyed it. I hope everybody else did too. Don’t be shy. It’s been recorded. Comments, we’ll keep looking at the comments on the streams as well. So thanks everybody and have a great day.
Mike Halladay
All right. Thanks everybody.