"Note, no one here, other than myself has ever been trained on Inventor.
Everyone is basically "self taught" and that causes about 90% of the issues
we have here with Inventor. So you can understand that all you'd hear around
here is how Inventor can't do this and can't do that."
There is your problem in a nutshell. Period!
You can bet that they will be saying exactly the same thing about
Solidworks, if they have not had training. In 99% of the cases both
software is equally capable of creating the same type of designs. So, it's
not the software.
I've done these head to heads for years against ProE, SolidWorks, UG and
other software and have only lost one battle, not on features, performance,
accuracy, and certainly not on time to complete a task. The battle I lost
was due to internal politics, for which there is very little defense.
I note that you are still on release 11. That tells me that your company
has no interest in spending the money to get up-to-date, or to properly
train their employees to actually be productive on Inventor.
What makes you think that they will do any better at switching to
SolidWorks, spending large sums of money to purchase different software from
scratch, train the existing users, and deal with all the legacy inventor
files that you have created four years?
Here's a couple suggestions: get on the comp.cad.solidworks newsgroup and
compare the gripes that you read there, especially the ones regarding bugs
and frequent service pack regressions. Solid Works has just as many if not
more problems with their software as any other software vendor. So, the
grass is not greener on either side of the street. Build a solid defense
backed with facts. Solidworks reps cannot handle factual information..:)
If you need help in battling the demons, including management, give me a
call. Let's see what we can do!
--
Dennis Jeffrey, Autodesk Inventor Certified Expert
Autodesk Manufacturing Implementation Certified Expert.
260-399-6615
Instructor/Author/Sr. App Engr.
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