Evaluating Alibre . . .

[Cameraman]

Evaluating Alibre . . .

Hi All,

I've just accepted a position at a new company. We use MDT now and are planning to move to Inventor, but I saw the award that Alibre got from Desktop Engineering and decided to take a look because we could potentially move the entire Engineering Department to AD Pro for less than what it would cost to buy me a seat of Inventor Series (at least if we buy it before June 1).

We manufacture relatively simple products, but have a lot of molded and formed plastic parts, so solid modeling is a must for us. And we are moving into much more complicated parts and assemblies as we grow.

I installed the demo Monday and have played with it as much as time has permitted. My initial impressions of the software are mostly positive -- my initial impression of the company is very positive, based on the responses to my questions and such. My thinking is that if we like AD enough, we may sort of use it along side MDT for a while to really work out the kinks, and then transition to AD as time and resources permit.

So with that long-winded preamble out of the way . . . it's not possible to do a proper evaluation of a CAD package in just two weeks, so I would appreciate any "but look out for this" type comments to help me flush out potential hangups before we decide whether we want to buy the software. In the mean time, I am continuing my personal evaluation and am looking forward to swapping some posts with all of the knowledgeable folks here.

Regards,
Greg

 

[jwknecht]

AD suitable

AD Pro will do what you need. I have designed very complex injection mold parts using AD. If your company is not tied in to a customer-defined CAD program you are lucky. Our company is required to have expensive seats of I-DEAS, UG, CATIA because we do direct business with the major automakers. I can tell you as a user of I-DEAS, which I think is a super program, AD compares even to it! I wish I could talk our CAD admin group into getting seat of AD, but they must follow the corporate strategy (which follows the customers requirements). I use AD at home with my consulting business.

Some things to "look out for" with AD:
1. When designing injection molded parts (and other parts for that matter), a method using boolean operation is desirable. Version 8, coming this summer, is going to support booleans within part design.
2. 3-D sketches and surfaces are not support, but again are supposed to be supported with version 8.
3. You can see some of the complaints on the 2-D capabilities. I don't have those complaints high on my list because I am using a digital product definition method as defined by Y14.41 (Model + Drawing together define the product design). Simple drawings are all that is required for mechanical part design with this method.... to learn more send me a private message.

The above complaints all have work arounds, and AD continues to impress with added functionality through new releases.


If it were me, I would stay away from MDT and get on with the switch to AD Pro. You may get some complaints from the users... but make your strategy clear and they will follow. We went through the same process at work changing our core package from CV CADDS5 to I-DEAS a few years ago. I look back and laugh.... we all couldn't believe we even wanted to use CADDS5 once we made the switch.

 

[mr.ska]

Hey Greg,

My company (the place where I work, not MY company) just decided to go to Alibre. As a former user of Pro/ENGINEER, SolidWorks, and Unigraphics, I can tell you that Alibre is truly a great product, but will also caution you that it's still a bit of a work-in-progress, in that it may not have some of the functionality you're used to. Thus far I haven't found anything that would want me to use our moneyback guarantee, but they're still annoyances (however minor) nonetheless.

For a full list of my complaints, just look through the Enhancements section.

Happy evaluating!

 

[Cameraman]

Thanks for the input.

We decided to compromise and just get 2 seats or AD Pro for now (to sneak in under the price increases) -- I will use it for the project I am working on right now, which is one of the most complicated products we've offered to date, and then we will go from there.

So, I guess I am now officially a "user"!

Regards,
Greg

 

[rbrian]

Evaluating AD

Greg,

For the others - new to CAD - like the non-engineer decision makers, there are many good sources for Training in AD - like - Penn State University.

Also - Good News! I have (Finally) Completed and Posted the Tutorial "Loft-Tube-1 Exercise - Compete *New June 7/04 (28 Pages)" and added the link into the Tutorials Base page.

I managed to squeeze (Steal) an extra 20 hours or so out of every thing this week and get it done! (Lot's of graphics work to go from 8 pages - text only, to 28 pages!)

It is one of 6 tutorials I have posted, each one is in Text Only or Complete with Screen Captures, for fully walking a new user through these steps. They are designed to be supplemental to the Included AD tutorials, and to provide a lot of repetition in commands, variations in selections of commands, and varieties of ways to model the same thing.

You may not need them, but they are good to look at anyway - and see if they cover something you might have missed.

Robert Brian Weekley
User Name: rbrian