Customer Success Story

David Hall -- NAVAIR

Located in China Lake, California, in the desert east of Bakersfield, this center has more than 2,000 engineers. David is part of a group that evaluates areas where weapons can be improved, for safety, ease of use and effectiveness.

David recently began using Alibre Design, and says, "Alibre Design paid for itself in about two weeks. Before I got Alibre Design, I had designed a support framework for a firing ring for a submarine-launched trident missile booster." Although the Navy had been using the firing ring without a framework, the new framework would make it safer to use--prudent since 40 tons of high explosives, millions of dollars of equipment and a number of lives would be at risk.

It only took David a couple of weeks to install Alibre Design, learn it and model several parts for a job that was in production. The speed with which David became productive led him to save tens of thousands of dollars for the Navy. David says, "I had sent drawings to the fabrication shop already, but I told them 'no hurry.' Then, as I was playing around with Alibre Design, I decided to model the framework in 3D because the original drawing had been confusing to the shop. Well, modeling the framework was so easy that I decided to model the other parts it interfaces with. When I did that, I realized I had a BIG interference problem. I immediately called down to the shop and said, 'DON'T make that part.' We would have had four $10,000 parts that were useless."

"I'm not a hard-core CAD user, maybe two to three hours a week. Pro/E is too complicated for the occasional CAD user. I had to relearn it every time I sat down to use it. Alibre Design is easy to learn, pretty self-explanatory. And, I can pull our legacy files from AutoCAD into Alibre Design.

"The training session with Alibre Design was great. I had played with the software already, but the trainer did show me three or four features I hadn't found yet, so it was definitely valuable. I've used the Alibre Assistant, too, and I like it--I usually get an answer to my questions in two or three minutes.

David originally investigated CAD options because he had been using a popular 2D design application, but he says, "I wanted to get into solid modeling; I had already worked with Pro/E back in 1995. I went to a mailing list group on the Internet for amateur rocketry and asked if anyone knew of a good, inexpensive CAD application. I got several recommendations and checked out the Alibre web site. I requested a demo CD, showed the application to my boss and pleaded to buy a seat.

"I knew that five grand was going to be a tough sell given that I already had AutoCAD. But at $495, Alibre Design became a slam-dunk with my boss, an easy sell. If I'd gone to him and asked to buy software for $5,000, well, I'd still be using AutoCAD. Alibre Design has about 95% of the things I need, which is fine with me. Now, a couple months later, we have two other engineers using it and others have expressed interest, too.