The Return of Plastic Part Filling Simulation to Solidworks?

Last week in Barcelona, Solidworks CEO Jeff Ray alluded to the return of of plastic part filling analysis to the Solidworks platform in response to a journalists question.  The question was asked what the relationship between Solidworks and Moldflow was since the acquisition of Moldflow by Autodesk some months ago.  The built-in Moldflow Express product disappeared rather abruptly once Solidworks 2008 was introduced.  At the time the explanation was that Moldflow was dropping the support of the Express product.  The general consensus was that Moldflow had an indication of future events, and was preparing for them.  In response to the question Jeff Ray said that a plastic part filling analysis solution was in the works, but didn't elaborate any further.

Having been a Moldflow user, we suspended renewal of our annual upgrades about a year and a half ago.  The interface was not very user friendly, and the support was worse, but thats a whole different story.  With the admission by Jeff Ray, this certainly opens up the possibilities to once again have a good solution for this area of the software. 

Of course for now its all speculation as to whats being developed.  Could they be working on an integration or creation of a new product from the Dassualt Simulia folks which happens to be headquartered in the North East U.S. in Rhode Island not far from the Solidworks Headquarters?

Whatever the outcome, lets hope its something that truly works inside Solidworks, and not some convoluted, hard to use interface that stand alone MoldFlow is.  Lets also hope there is an announcement soon!

Comments

[Brian Sather]

Hi Mike,

I wanted to take the opportunity to respond to a few of the items in your post.

First, as you surely noticed, SolidWorks 2008 was a significant change from the 2007 product that included MoldflowXpress. At the time Moldflow was a smaller company (compared to SW) and a large amount of effort would have been required to support the 2008 version. We felt at that time our development resources were best applied to enhance our core products. I can assure you there was no "indication" of the events that took place.

Second, I would love for you to shoot me an e-mail with specific comments on the UI and support. We strive to provide the best technical support of any analysis company and our survey results show that a huge majority of our users find it exceptional. As for the UI, I would encourage you to take a look at the newest release of Advisers (v8.1). We did a major overhaul of the interface to improve the usability of the software as well as to provide a more guided analysis path.

And most importantly - Moldflow products will continue to support all CAD systems (and yes, that includes SolidWorks). A significant portion of our customers and prospective customers use something besides Inventor, so even if we just look at it from a business standpoint this is the only option that makes sense. Autodesk did not purchase Moldflow simply for the technology - prior to the acquisition Moldflow did nearly $60 million in yearly revenue which they would like to see increase.

Having said all that, we are very committed to supporting our customer's existing workflows so we will continue to find ways to enhance the interfaces between all the various CAD softwares and Moldflow products.

Brian Sather
Technical Marketing - Moldflow