SOLIDWORKS Manage: Enhance Your Manufacturing Data Management

Keeping information up-to-date and managing data flow throughout the production chain is one of the biggest challenges for manufacturing businesses and teams of all sizes. Often narrowly focused, traditional data management practices can lead to extra data entry, errors, and mismatched information. SOLIDWORKS Manage addresses these issues and more.

Manage provides increased visibility to all stakeholders and valuable insights when managing projects and processes. With dashboards for analytics and resource management, users get a complete insight into associated data with a project. With a direct connection to engineering data, the benefits of SOLIDWORKS Manage are endless.

What is SOLIDWORKS Manage?

SOLIDWORKS Manage is a unique set of advanced data management tools that leverages the file management capabilities of SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional. Check out our recent blog on SOLIDWORKS PDM detailing its functionality. SOLIDWORKS Manage adds powerful project, process, and item management capabilities with interactive dashboards and reports.

Dashboards and Reports interface in SOLIDWORKS Manage

SOLIDWORKS Manage focuses on the specific analytics that your manufacturing team needs most. Having this pertinent information available at any time through Manage’s dashboards and reports is advantageous. Reports allow you to navigate the information you need effortlessly, significantly improving your product development process. Manage enables manufacturing teams to catch project issues early on and adjust to those issues as needed. Users also can view assigned tasks, get in front of problems, and evaluate risks within projects. The dashboards update automatically in an easily consumable and configurable graphical interface.

Project Management in SOLIDWORKS Manage

Manage’s Project Management capability allows engineering project managers to oversee projects without needing a separate, disconnected tool like Microsoft Project. Users can track changes on a specific project, which helps them avoid the errors they may experience while manually editing projects. You can assign tasks to users in different projects and determine how to allocate design resources across multiple projects. All while being able to relate SOLIDWORKS files and other documents to the project tasks.

Users can report time against the jobs, update their status, capture issues, track their resolution, and identify risks and project timeline impact. As users complete work, progress is automatically updated.

Process Management

SOLIDWORKS Manage streamlines your business processes, automates document creation, and brings together all involved stakeholders from sales and marketing to production and support for new products.

You can model an NPI (New Product Introduction) stage-gate process to determine how or if you will manufacture a new product. Along with its tracking functionality, SOLIDWORKS Manage maintains a complete, convenient history of a design’s evolution. This history allows you to see each step of a product along its lifecycle.

Configure states and decision points for all types of business processes such as Engineering Change Requests (ECR), Orders (ECO) and Notices (ECN), transmittals, and approvals.

Advanced Bills of Materials 

SOLIDWORKS Manage allows you to maintain, manipulate, and leverage Bills of Materials (BOM) information to support downstream applications and systems. Utilize engineering BOMs from PDM to create manufacturing BOMs by adding items not modeled in PDM, such as consumables and manufacturing operations. This functionality eliminates the frequent manual updates required when using spreadsheets.

With Manage, you can use customizable templates to display BOM information in multiple formats or to format BOM information to meet the needs of a user or group. You can relate components together as kits with their part numbers and create BOM variants to denote differences depending on where products’ manufacturing occurs. Manage allows you to compare multi-level bills of materials with ease. You can also export BOM information for consumption by ERP or MRP systems.

Closing Thoughts

If your organization manufactures products, you owe it to yourself to take a look at SOLIDWORKS Manage. Manage provides you and your team the functionality to take your data management to the next level. Track changes, manage projects, and create bills of materials while leveraging documents in SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional. Doing so will streamline your operations and increase profitability.

Are you interested in learning more about SOLIDWORKS Manage? Reach out to us with our Get a Quote Form!