Been there, done that!!!
Being a CAD Admin, I know this situation/fight all too well.
SW has flooded the colleges with free software over the years and such, most engineers coming out of school only know of SW and it's a comfort thing. These are the people that will bend the ear of the managers claiming SW can do this and SW can do that better than Inventor. In all actuality it boils down to they don't know how to do the same thing in Inventor and thus they lash out claiming IV can't do the task rather than try and find out how.
Numerous times I've heard this claim from an engineer, asked them what they were attempting and then sat down and showed them how IV does it. Some were rather impressed saying IV does it much easier and then there were as always, others that even though they just saw it done in IV, insist IV can't do it.
We typically have tight toleranced parts (.001/.0001), when we compared files converted from one to the other, this is what we found:
(On 10 identical models)
Files converted into Inventor = 10 out of 10 (100%) accurate to the 9th decimal
Files converted into SW = 4 out of 10 (40%) were accurate to the 9th decimal
That's a 60% failure rate for us. Of those files that were inaccurate, the worst was off by .003".
All 10 files were created in their native software prior to conversion.
The software used: Inventor, SolidWorks, Pro/E & Catia and all were accurate prior to conversion.
This was one of the deciding factors to stay with Inventor as our CAD software of choice. We still have SW, but we only use it when needed and we don't export the files. Considering Inventor will import all of the above mentioned files, there isn't much need for us to keep SW anymore.
I also can only speak for our situation, again, we deal with rather tight toleranced parts, you may never have a need for a part to be accurate out to the 3rd decimal.
The key factor is training. I don't care what software you work on, you cannot utilize it if you don't know it. A majority of those people who have gone thru training and have used Inventor for a while, prefer Inventor over SW now.
One key thing to remember, have both come in and do their typical demo. If your resellers are anything like ours, the SW people will NOT go off the canned demo and will NOT do things "on the fly". They will request all questions at least two weeks ahead of time and will also request models. The Inventor people have ALWAYS been willing to do things "on the fly" (after the demo of course) and will field your questions as you come up with them. Ask real world questions and situations with management present for both demos, then do your math and figure out the costs associated with converting softwares like downtime during training, the typical learning curve, licensing, etc. Point that out to a bean counter.
Good luck, either way.
Just be aware, changing over to SW these days is frankly a step backwards in my opinion and experience.
