Hello Everyone,

My name is Blake Reeves and I am a newer member of the SolidWorks Product Definition team. I wanted to simply introduce myself to you all, especially those of you interested in Costing since this is my primary focus at the moment. A little background information: as a recent Mechanical Engineering Design graduate from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA, I have had a lot of exposure to machining and machine design along with some extracurricular work in biofuels and plant design. I have several years of experience with SolidWorks as a user, and I have background working with P&G/Gillette on advanced machine design projects as well as with Qteros, a biofuels exploration company, on their past processing plant endeavors.

Since joining SolidWorks, I have seen the potential of Costing and spoken to a lot of customers who see great things for the tool. I plan on working with you all in helping the Costing tool grow to your expectations and I look forward to you all being vocal about what you like, dislike, and would like to see from it in the future. I heard the call to create this space for Costing so I'm glad it is now available to us, but I acknowledge even within Costing there are many topics to discuss, so I would like to ask that we organize our discussions to their specific topics to avoid too much bleed-over. Some topics I've seen already mentioned and others that come to mind at the moment include:

Costing Templates

     Ease-of-Use

     Ethics of Sharing between Shops

     Level of detail

Costing Accuracy

     How to obtain Labor Costs

     Strategies to optimize pricing inputs

     Opinions on how things are calculated / how they should be calculated

General usability

     User Interface

     Discoverability of new features

     Interest in a more customizable approach

     Interest in a faster / easier approach

Future Enhancements you'd like to see...

Again this is simply a small list that just came to mind at the moment, you are not limited to any of these, I want to hear your experiences with Costing and any ideas on how to really bring out the great potential this tool has to offer. Feel free to send me an email if you would like to discuss anything as well, I'm reachable through Private Message or blake.reeves (at) 3ds.com . I will be sure to be as active on here as I can and I look forward to hearing all of your feedback and ideas.

Best Regards,

Blake Reeves