Introduction

If your engineers can’t work smoothly from anywhere or your CAD workstations are slowing down releases, then this video is for you. Today we’re talking about moving from on premise to cloud-based CAD and what that journey really looks like. my name is Michael Roberts. I’m the vice president of sales and marketing for SPK and Associates and I’m here with Daniela. Daniela, feel free to introduce yourself. Thanks, Michael. I’m Daniela Alcantar and I am the CAD PLM for SPK and Associates. And Daniela has done tons of videos, but we haven’t talked about the migration to a cloud-based CAD platform yet. So, here’s what we’re going to talk about today. Why companies are are should consider moving to a cloud-based CAD system. what that migration from maybe Solid Works to 3D Experience or from Creo to Creo Plus would entail and how companies could even compare moving to SPK VCAD as a as an alternative or an intermediary step. So, first Daniela, can you walk us through maybe why companies would even consider moving from an onremise CAD platform to a cloud-based CAD platform? Absolutely, Michael. So companies consider moving to a cloud-based CAD platform for a variety of reasons. I’ll go through a few highle ones right now. First, collaboration and accessibility. This is a big thing especially with so many companies adopting global teams where everybody is in a different site. some of these platforms can offer real time collaboration. So multiple users are able to work on the same design simultaneously from different locations. this also allows for remote access. So designers, engineers, stakeholders, everybody can access designs and projects from anywhere with that has an internet connection. This is again ideal for global teams and some hybrid work environments as well as those engineers who travel frequently and are on the go. also something to call out is version control. So you may ask, well what if the user or the engineer saves locally to their machine or saves to a drive, a shared drive? Why do we need the the CAD platform necessarily? we definitely always advise to keep version control because it really allows for tracking and reducing the risk of working on outdated files or sharing outdated files. So the collaboration and accessibility portion is huge. Also there’s some cost efficiency that comes into play. along with a cloud platform comes reduced infrastructure costs. You may not need those expensive onprem servers to maintain your software and along with it those hardware upgrades to support those installs as you as the years go by and you need to upgrade. a good plus as well is subscriptionbased pricing. So a lot of these platforms offer SAS models or subscription as a service, software as a service where you spread out these costs monthly rather than paying a big chunk for licensing fees. also scalability comes into play where you can provision licenses a bit easier as needed. so something to take into account there. drawing alongside cost efficiency or maintenance and upgrades. I spoke a tiny bit about upgrades. upgrades are often automatic when it comes to CAD platforms on the cloud. This is great because you don’t have to worry about bug fixes, security patches, manual installs. This is all done automatically for you. similarly, it helps reduce the downtime. you know that this upgrade is going to happen at this time. You have time to prepare your users and you don’t have to do as much prep work as possible as you normally would for an on-prem system. Now another reason here is data security. when it comes to the cloud you have a lot of built-in security protocols already. This often comes with backups and redundant storage. So, it’s less of a concern and less of a burden on your IT team as well. , finally, some competitive things. , you may see a good return on faster time to market because your team is able to work simultaneously on a design. You may see some talent that wants to work with these tools. And we’ve we are now seeing some AI tools being deployed to these cloud platforms specifically it’s cloud only. So we’ve had our customers reach out with some interest with some of the AI tools that are being adopted by these software companies like solid works do and PTC oftent times these AI tools are at least currently mostly available only for cloud. So if you have the desktop clients, that’s not something that’s accessible right now. so that is also something to consider. You have some extra tools at your disposal. But overall on a high level, those are some of the reasons why companies are looking to move over to the cloud platforms. That those are some compelling reasons. I’m glad you kind of went through that. Now, I I’m 100% sure that the the next question I ask you may upset the the cloud is awesome apple cart. So, I’m going to be very careful on how I ask this one. So, what would be involved if you were looking at moving from an on-prem solid works environment completely to 3DX or from maybe Creo to Creole Plus? What would that look like? What would that migration involve? Absolutely. This is a great question, Michael. And we actually have some folks that are customers doing this change right now. So we we have that visibility. But it is not a short process. I would say especially if you have a lot of CAD data. So keep in mind this is likely not going to be a short-term project. It’s going to take a lot of teams, a lot of insight and stakeholder overview. I’ll go into a very highle example of what that could look like. first you have evaluation and planning. You want to look at your options whether it’s 3D experience Creole Plus or another platform. you want to evaluate and make sure it fits your CAD needs, it fits your PDM needs and licensing models. If we switch, how much is this going to cost us? Does it cost us more, less? can we do that SAS model? How is that going to impact us financially? also evaluating bandwidth and IT readiness. Is it ready to support this new system? Is there validation that would need to be completed on this new system? As well as security needs. Every company has their own security requirements and that would be a consideration. So that is a a lengthy process in itself is determining what platform should we choose and what does that look like. Now, once you’ve decided this is the platform we’re interested in, you’ll likely want to go ahead and engage with your reseller and talk to them about licensing, get those numbers, and also determine how you will be moving your CAD data over. This is this is where the real fun begins. Now, you picked your platform, you’ve gotten some licensing numbers, h how do we begin? It’s that CAD data. this also takes some good effort. You’ll have to determine whether you want to move everything over. If you want to keep some things as legacy, what’s the metadata you want copied over? That is a conversation for a couple of teams. Once you’ve decided this this is everything we want to move, we strongly recommend doing a test migration. Now, this may look like spinning up a copy of your production. Let’s say that you have a few PDM servers, for example. if you want to test this migration, we definitely recommend making a copy of your current production, making that a QA instance that in no way, shape, or form interferes with your current production. and testing that migration. Set things up. have a list of files to migrate along with the metadata. and start mapping it. See how files come over. Is there something missing? Maybe something came up, maybe you don’t need certain pieces of data. Looking at the version history, verification, right? You want to do a lot of testing. We recommend starting with a small number of files to migrate and gradually migrating further. once you get past this migration testing where you are comfortable with what the system looks like, you’re happy with the metadata, we would then look at making sure that all of your workflows map accordingly to this cloud system, making sure that users user permissions are mapped adequately. So it’s more of the interface at that point. and and I’m I’m shortening it here for time, but it takes quite a bit of effort, quite a bit of back and forth. Usually folks are dedicated at some point to testing this out and to giving feedback on the process. So keep that in mind. it’s I’m I’m going high level, but it takes quite a bit of coordination and different teams to get this really going. so once you have your your migration and you’re happy with that looks like you have your process reconfigured on your platform of choice you’re happy with the workflows metadata access roles all of that you’ll want to start planning for a cut over date as well as user training. So you pick out your cut over date, you have your delta migration plan for that and let’s say that goes well, no issues. Now you’re on to user training. you’ll want to train your user on a brand new user interface, brand new roles, brand new steps. and it’s overall this this is where we see a big impact is making sure your users are ready. we’ve dealt with a lot of engineers who have been doing things a certain way for x amount of time. You want to make sure they’re comfortable. You want to allow them time to get used to that system. and that’s an ongoing process. So once you’ve completed all those steps, you want to keep up training and adoption. You want to make sure you continue to to to give users the opportunity to learn the system and train on some of the features that may now be available and maybe even determine a person who is for this product so they can feel some of those questions to make sure ongoing use is smooth. So at a very high level this this is what it would look like. and I tried to simplify it for the sake of our time but it it really does take a lot of collaboration from v various teams. This is not a one team effort. Yeah. Yeah. this is a lot and and doing that’s a lot and almost to the point where it potentially could negate some of the benefits right because it it’s it’s it’s a longer term process. So obviously those things need to be considered in terms of time and effort and and you know the number of people involved as you were talking about because it’s not just a a one team thing. It’s a lot lots of different components. So in contrast to that what that migration would look like what would moving Solid Works or Creo which would be the on-prem versions over to something like SPK VCAD what would that look like in terms of level of effort maybe in comparison or you can talk a little bit about about that. Sure Michael happy to. So I’ll break it down in a similar fashion. First you do want to evaluate and plan. You’ll meet with our team and determine what do you want your VCAT instance to look like. And you may look at our previous videos on VCAT. It’s very similar to a user desktop. the info that we need to know basically revolves around application usage. Is it Solid Works? Is it Creo? Is it more applications that we can preload to make sure that this is an easy process for your engineers? as well as security needs. Is there a VPN client? And if so, we can preload that and make sure that that’s not something engineers have to install. It’s basically making sure that your VCAD instance fits your needs. So, it’s it’s a lot of questions. we would also ask in terms of specifications, if you’re running simulations or if you’re mainly using it to browse PDM, those may require two different types of VCAD machines. So pretty straightforward questions there. on the data migration side, we would keep your servers as is. So there’s no data migration needed. That step is immediately eliminated. we would likely give you a VCAT instance for you to spin up and see make sure you can connect to your existing PDM system that you can open up Solid Works or you can open up Creo and get your feedback there, but no data migration. as far as user training, we would provide some documentation for users on how they can spin up their own VCAD machines, how to log in and how to connect to the VPN. but other than that, they the VCAD machine, the real beauty is it functions and looks exactly like your desktop does already. So the user training is it’s pretty limited to here’s how you first spin up that machine, here’s how you access, here’s how you stop it. it’s only the VCAD platform, PDM, Solid Works, Creo, they would all function the same way that they do on their desktops already. So that learning curve is is much shorter because they are just learning a little bit about the VCAD platform and how to use it and after that it’s it’s their they’re on their own. They’re in a familiar territory. process reconfiguration. We really don’t have to touch this either because we are using the existing system. So all of your workflows, your info cards, your you know your access credentials for Creo, all of that stays the same. You don’t have to worry about oh, how will this description field map over here and how does this field map over there and how does the approval button work? Now it it is all very much the same. as far as far as making sure adoption continues. you shouldn’t have as big of a hurdle. It’s more of here’s how you open up VCAD to access your machine. Everything else is the same. So it’s it’s definitely helpful for companies who either have wellestablished teams who are so used to their current workflow, smaller teams or even larger teams where a there’s a site over over there. How do we make sure they’re adopting the new cloud cloud platform or what about this new site that was just acquired? How do we make sure they are also on this new platform and who’s doing the training? It really cuts cuts on that overhead because accessing VCAD is pretty straightforward and once a user does it essentially works and looks just like their desktop. Awesome. So I feel like that’s a little bit of a intermediary from that whole whole platform move. So thanks for giving some some context to what VCAD could look like in this cloud CAD world. So if if you watching are exploring cloud CAD say that 10 times fast you’ve got some options obviously as Daniela talked about you know moving platforms but also maybe a quick win with SPKvcad which would be a intermediary you get the benefits of being in the cloud without a lot of the extra overhead with migration and and reh platforming reconfiguring. , if you’re looking for a nocost SPK VCAD overview, we can actually scope a pilot and show you what your time to first draw would look like for your teams. So, thanks for watching today. , be sure to like this video and subscribe to the SPK and Associates YouTube channel for more videos like this. Until next time, thank you Daniela and we’ll see you guys next time.