SOLIDWORKS Electrical Self-Assessment:

The purpose of this form is to efficiently determine whether time should be invested to
investigate SOLIDWORKS Electrical in greater detail. This document is in no way a full picture of
capabilities to address common issues in electrical design but rather a quick reality check.

Your Email: ______________________________ (we will send assessment findings to)

1. Check types of schematics your organization create? (Check all that apply)
 Electrical power and controls
 Pneumatic
 Hydraulic
 Piping & Instrumentation Diagrams

2. What software do you use for creating these schematics and their respective
layout drawings?
 General-purpose CAD package (AutoCAD, DraftSight, Visio, etc)
 Specialized schematic capture package

3. In addition to schematics, what types of supporting documentation do you include

with your projects?
 Bill of materials
 Wire (or cable, tube, pipe, etc) from/to list
 Labels for wires and devices
 Terminal and field wiring documentation

4. What tools do you use to create this supporting documentation?

 Manually build tables in our CAD system
 Manually create report tables in separate spreadsheets
 Auto-generated by your schematic design tool

5. Check the statement that most closely describes how you balance your
documentation time:
 Schematic design takes significantly longer than related documentation
 Schematic design takes about the same amount as related documentation
 Related documentation takes significantly longer than schematic design
6. In your estimation, what percentage of your electrical engineering time is devoted
to creating, editing and maintaining schematics and related documentation?
 Less than 25%
 Between 25% and 50%
 More than 50%

7. Do you experience challenges keeping your electrical design, mechanical design

and manufacturing teams in synch?
 Frequently
 Sometimes
 Rarely

8. Is the creation of a single, unified electrical and mechanical BOM time consuming
or problematic?
 Frequently
 Sometimes
 Rarely

9. Would the ability to create accurate wire and cable lengths automatically save
time or reduce material waste?
 Frequently
 Sometimes
 Rarely

10. In your application, could 3D visualization and interference checking between

electrical and mechanical components improve packaging efficiency and/or
reduce errors?
 Frequently
 Sometimes
 Rarely

11. Fill in the blanks below so we can send you an economic impact analysis recap?

#____ Hours EE’s spend weekly (Reports, Documentation, Schematics, Auditing Reports)
$____ Hour for Full Time EE Burdon Rate (US Average is $70.00)
#____ Quantity of Electrical Engineers (EE) that work at your corporation
SOLIDWORKS Electrical Survey Answer Key

1. What types of schematics does your organization create? (Check all that apply)
 We want to understand the range of schematic capabilities they require. We
frequently find that customers may use one tool for electrical schematics, a
different tool for P&ID, and yet another for pneumatic systems. If they are
SOLIDWORKS customers, they may be also modeling the system with high
detail in 3D. SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic products (Standard, Pro, ESX)
can handle all of the types of schematics listed, simplifying design, reporting and
management tasks while reducing redundancy and eliminating points of failure.

2. What software do you use for creating these schematics and their respective
layout drawings?
 Many customers rely on general-purpose CAD software and MS Excel to design
and document their systems. While these programs are well known and require
little training or support, they are very error prone and significantly slower than an
intelligent, parametric, purpose built system like SOLIDWORKS Electrical. As an
example, simply giving each wire a unique number can consume as much as
10% of user’s time in a general-purpose CAD system, while SOLIDWORKS
Electrical does this automatically – just press the “number wires” button, and
you’ve saved 10% of your time.

3. In addition to schematics, what types of supporting documentation do you include

with your projects?
 The examples provided represent common reports that complete the system
documentation. Often when discussing schematic tools, prospects focus
entirely on the schematic drawing, and not the mountain of additional
documentation required.

4. What tools do you use to create this supporting documentation?

 We find that most customers create these reports in spreadsheets. Even
customers who have ECAD tools like AutoCAD Electrical rarely use the software
properly due to a combination of inadequate training, little or no VAR support,
and undisciplined users. Our automated reporting is always up to date and can
generate all these reports and many more, automatically and accurately. While
most customers manually create reports, SWE users simply tell the system which
reports to include and click “Draw reports”

5. Check the statement that most closely describes how you balance your
documentation time:
 We want to gauge how much time a user spends designing (creating a
schematic, thinking through how the system will work), vs. how much time they
spend formatting the details of that design into discrete reports, like BOMs and
wire lists. Most general-purpose CAD users will spend as much or more time
 generating, maintaining and checking reports, tasks that SWE automates 100%.
The key to SWE’s high ROI is the amount of error-prone, manual data entry the
tool replaces with automation.

6. In your estimation, what percentage of your electrical engineering time is devoted

to creating, editing and maintaining schematics and related documentation?
 It’s very simple – if they don’t spend much time creating schematics, we can’t
save them much time! An occasional user will be a tougher sell, where a full-
time designer could effectively double their productivity in a year.
 Remember the “Gut Check” ROI test:
SAVINGS = (HOURLY RATE x DOCUMENTATION HOURS) ÷ 2
Our customer Select Tech is saving 500 hours PER SEAT PER YEAR using
SOLIDWORKS Electrical. At $50/hour, each seat they own represents a $25k
return on a $1,700 annual investment

7. Do you experience challenges keeping your electrical design, mechanical design

and manufacturing teams in synch?
 An Engineering.com study found that 71% of teams lost time due to using
incorrect design versions of parts in electromechanical projects. Additionally,
79% noted lost time due to lack of communication between electrical and
mechanical design teams. Engineers work with outdated information as much as
20% of the time, which is extremely costly and wasteful. Using an integrated and
associative solution mitigates these issues. Tight integration between our
solutions ensures departments stay in sync. Challenges in this area could
indicate a need for PDM and/or Electrical 3D (Desktop) or ESX (Platform
customers).

8. Is the creation of a single, unified electrical and mechanical BOM time consuming
or problematic?
 Electromechanical design process issues cause delays. This is often due to lack
of integration between different vendor’s electrical and mechanical design tools.
Many organizations are forced to use an inefficient serial design process due to
limited integration and system compatibility. Integrated systems speed up
communication and leverage parametric and associative architectures to allow
for rapid and accurate changes, thus enabling a better, more efficient parallel
process. Since 70-80% of product cost is locked in during design, early
identification of problems can have a significant impact.

9. Would the ability to create accurate wire and cable lengths automatically save
time or reduce material waste?
 For some of our customers, the calculation of accurate wire and cable lengths is
of critical importance. Many technicians to use a ball of string and a tape
measure to determine the length of the cables and wires and their designs. They
will spend hours measuring, cutting, stripping and labeling each wire individually,
which is neither efficient nor consistently accurate.
  SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D calculates wire and cable lengths, and feeds that
precise data back into the wire reports and even calculates mass properties.
This gives the user a high-fidelity “digital twin,” encompassing not only the
mechanical but also the electrical components. Another powerful advantage of
this is the wire reports can drive wire processing equipment, for fully automated
cutting, labeling, and stripping of all system wires.

10. In your application, could 3D visualization and interference checking between

electrical and mechanical components improve packaging efficiency and/or
reduce errors?

 The trend in almost every industry is for more components to be placed in

smaller areas. Is increasingly difficult to visualize spatial relationships between
components and enclosures using 2D tools. SolidWorks has long had superior
visualization and interference checking capability that allows our users to better
visualize and understand the full picture of an assembly, enabling more efficient
packaging of components. In design, 3D is superior compared to 2D CAD to
accomplish this task. In one study 75% of customers reported losing time to
accommodate a shape change. It was also found that 77% polled lost time from
having to reduce design volumes in their projects. Poor visualization and lack of
robust automatic 3D interference checks can also result in additional prototypes
being made. This can result in increased cost end time required to validate a
design. A complete 3D product definition can produce more “first time right”
outcomes.

11. The financial break even analysis is typically between 3-6 months (Best in
business). Margin lift depends on answers; quantity of engineers, hourly rate and
percentage of day EE’s spend doing paper work (reports, documentation and to
from reports, updating reports, making BOM’s accurate, auditing data, etc. etc.)