I usually don't post much, but something happened at mycompany last Friday that really kinda rubbed me the wrong way. Wehave seven seats of SolidWorks. 4 standalone and 3 network seats. Ihave full control of the 4 standalone seats. But the floating seatshave somehow managed to float to the machines of individuals whohave very little knowledge of how to run Solidworks. They rarelyuse it for anything other than viewing drawings. When they do tryand use it, they take hours to do work that should take a matter ofminutes because they simply don't know how to run the software.Somehow, the manager of this dept. has convinced upper managementthat it is a must for his guys to have access to Solidworks. Withthe demand that Solidworks 2008 puts on hardware, they have foundthat their computers just will not run on the machines that theycurrently have. Needless to say, they went to upper management witha request for new computers. This of coarse threw up a red flag. Ifupgrading Solidworks each year is going to cost us new machines,then why are we doing it? I was told, and I qoute, "We pay asubscription fee for our ERP system each year, but we dont upgradeto every new release. So why are we doing it with Solidworks?"Personally, I don't beleive you can compare an ERP software updateto a Solidworks update. But everyone is entitled to their opinion.Management has now asked me to justify the updates to each newmajor release. The thing that aggravates me the most is that thereare only 2 of us in the entire company that practically live on thesoftware each day and our productivity has increased with each newrelease of the software. Now that "the others" have seen the software and what it can do, theywant the ability to be able to run the software, even if it is onlyonce a week. So, how do I justify the yearly updates to someone whothinks of Solidworks as dollar signs and not an engineering asset?Any feedback is greatly appriciated.
SolidworksGeneral