Auto CAD to Inventor Transition

[Secretagdan]

I am glad the forums are up and running again.

To start, I am a CAD manager with a bit of experience with Auto CAD & managing a small manufacturing CAD department.

I started at a new company recently & upon my hiring I found out that they have the full Inventor suite. At the time of the purchase, the company was going to move to Inventor full board. The drafters all went to school, but for some reason Inventor was never fully implemented & everyone is still using the Vanilla Auto CAD.

Now I believe that part of the reason it never took hold was the Inventor Suite includes Auto CAD. This made it very easy to go back and use Auto CAD where it was convenient and with convenience nullified the use of Inventor in general.

We went to our Autodesk reseller & it appears that it is actually cheaper to stay with the Inventor licenses rather than down grading to the vanilla Auto CAD. So based on that decision my department will again make the switch to Inventor, to make use of the product.

With the time lines that we get for the majority of projects we need to produce construction documents in a very short order. Unfortunately because of the nature of this business I think that it would be very easy to fall in to the trap of doing what is convenient.

I have looked at Inventor in the past at my previous employer & I do see the benefits in using the new product. Once everyone is as proficient at Inventor as they are currently with Auto CAD, I think that my department as a whole will be more productive.

I have looked at educational recourses that will help us make the transition & I will soon make that decision. All of the people in my department are all on board for making the transition as well.

What are some things that I can do that will make the transition into the new software successful with out falling into doing what is more convenient? With utilizing the educational benefits, how long does it take for someone to go from being proficient with one software to another? I need to make a time-line for management, so that they can see what the investment will be.

Sorry for the long post & thanks in advance for any feed back.

[Patrick Hughes]

I've not had to do the transition so I'm speaking merely my opinion.

 

First, I would take baby steps. That is, I would not attempt to transition everyone at the same time. In fact even before I attempted to transition anyone I would go through the process myself at least for a period of several weeks.

 

During that time I would approach each of the staff and get a feel for who has the most interest in making the transition and evaluate the most suitable candidate and go from there.

 

Do you or your staff currently do any work in AutoCAD in 3d solids?

[Secretagdan]

Yes 85% of our current work is using Auto CAD's 3D solid modeling, so I believe that the basic concepts of using inventor should be fairly simple to wrap our brains around.

I have a total of 3 people under me, but 1 person is in a satellite office 1500 mi away, which is its own issue.

With the small group of people, i was thinking we could all make the transition at one time. Currently we are ramping up for our busy time of the year (lots of OT), so we will need to make the transition after the project is completed. Once that is out of the way, there will be a little 'down time' to make the transition. I am thinking it may be enough of a window to get everyone on board. The window will likely be about 3 mos., so I am hoping it will be enough time, so that productivity is not completely lost.