Revision History

Rev #	Date	Description
1.0	August 2021	Document created.
1.1	April 2024	Updated to correct CAD Admin dashboard details and include project management processes

Note

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Preface

The successful adoption of any new tool or solution requires an organization to develop a plan that includes, change management, stakeholder identification, communication methods, key milestones and responsible parties for each of these areas to ensure that the new system is accepted and that the users and organization are successful. This is as true when adopting SOLIDWORKS CAD as it is with any other system. Defining criteria to assist the client organization in successfully using SOLIDWORKS CAD as an essential solution and providing measurable goals keeps the adoption process on track. These criteria should not begin and end with the installation of the software. This SolidPractices document provides guidance on criteria you may consider when adopting SOLIDWORKS CAD to ensure successful transition and sustained support through the cycle of adoption. You may use all guidance in this SolidPractices topic to develop a project plan or phased adoption plan that is specific to the product you adopt, or to the client organization adopting the product. Though this document is written for SOLIDWORKS CAD, the guidance within is useful for other products such as SOLIDWORKS PDM or 3DEXPERIENCEWorks. This document refers to the partner organization and the client organization. The partner organization may be a Value Added Reseller (VAR) or IT department. The client organization may be an external customer or an internal department that adopts the new solution and associated tools. As you become familiar with these concepts, the recommendation is to customize solutions for the client organization. Different industries have specific needs to include in the adoption plan and your partner organization has a specific style of delivering customer success. Including these customizations in your adoption plan along with the recommendations in this guide will help support your success. In addition, it is a recommendation that you review the entire LAER (Land, Adopt, Expand, Renew) framework as defined by the Technology and Services Industry Association (TSIA) to understand how adoption fits into the customer life cycle. The practices in this document support the TSIA Adoption Framework. There are three groups of practices, which drive adoption: Enablement, Monitoring, and Intervention¹. For more information, refer to official TSIA publications.

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Enablement

The following guidelines are helpful to assist the client organization in the use of SOLIDWORKS.

Audit the Legacy System

For the new system to succeed, you must understand the shortcomings of the legacy tools. What were the pain points the client organization felt that resulted in the search for a new solution? It helps to have a conversation with the presales team and a discussion about user frustrations and limitations. It is also important to research unresolved or long-term support tickets to understand specific points of failure. Use this information to plan activities that are specific to your client and be sure to consider their needs in all activities. For example:

• Scenario 1: Users have expressed pain in the past with usability.

  • Solution: Plan targeted training that eliminates those pain points and improves the overall user acceptance.

• Scenario 2: Past limitations have prevented output from meeting deadlines.

  • Solution: Build in custom programming (for example, specific workflow recommendations or custom libraries) that improves output ability and accuracy.

Define Outcomes

Understanding what did not work in the past is only part of planning for success. Use your understanding of a client’s vision about what they must accomplish as a foundation to build specific criteria for success. While measurable goals may not be completely clear in this stage, understanding the desired outcomes allows you to prioritize what matters to the client, which guides all adoption activities to contribute to those outcomes. To ensure adoption, always refer to the client’s outcomes objectives. For example:

• Outcome: Release designs faster and utilize them in multiple aspects of the business.

  • Supporting activity: Build this into the pilot project goals. During training, emphasize labor saving functionality such as design reuse or shortcut keys.

  • Success criteria: Models are usable by the marketing department and final assembly approval occurs three days earlier than past development cycles.

Though specific release timelines have not been defined and not all aspects of the business are a part of the current adoption project, using the outcome to inform the activities helps the client define specific criteria for success and better ensure adoption.

Secure Management Buy-In

Communication about the new solution must be planned in advance and come from and receive the support of the client organization’s management team to enforce new system utilization by all users. This communication should include why the organization is making the change. This point is key to gaining support from the stakeholders who will be using the new system. Change can be painful and scary for some people, so knowing the reasoning can help with understanding, if not total acceptance. Additionally, a timeline of when users can expect retirement of legacy systems must be clearly identified. Ideally, the communication also includes the actions each user is responsible for taking, and when users require special approval to receive a license of the legacy tool.

When monitoring the success of the adoption and onboarding activities, it is best to share a report about any activities that need follow-up from the client’s management team. For example, if additional expenses are incurred because of delays or the need to use the legacy tool, the client’s management team needs to determine the cost center responsible. At no point should the management team be unsure of the progress or current standing of the adoption project. It is a strong recommendation to use a live system to share information about the progress of the adoption project and the progress reports with the client’s management team.

1. Facilitate Proper Onboarding

2. Training

Developing a training path for users to understand the new tools available to them is essential for adoption. There are many things to consider:

• Is there a budget for training?

• Does management support providing dedicated learning time for the users?

• How far in advance of deployment will users receive training?

• How will you determine user readiness after training?

• Is custom training required to show users the differences in workflow and methodology between the new tools and the legacy tools?

• Are users already familiar with or certified in the use of the new tools?

• Do users prefer to learn together in an in-person setting? Do they prefer using a self-paced eLearning program?

• Does the client’s management team support a growth plan for users that incorporates certification in the new tool?

• Will the onboarding program for new hires include training for the new tool?

Answering these questions will help determine the best training plan to support the continued success of users. Solution adoption is most successful when users have a positive experience, when you consider their needs, and when you incorporate the needs of the business into standard practice. Providing a path to certification provides users with a sense of accomplishment for their personal and professional growth, which increases the quality of output for the company. You must customize the training to suit the needs of the user and the client organization. This keeps them interested and makes their experience using the solution relevant. When standard training is inappropriate for the user audience, it leads to discontent and users may become detractors in the adoption process. Therefore, it is a best practice to customize training to the experience level, the learning style, and the expected workflows to create better support within the user base and the likelihood of successful adoption. Developing training tutorials specific to the skills that users require ensures better output by the users and support for adoption from the client’s management organization.

Timing is equally important. The training should not occur so far in advance that users forget the skills they learned. However, the training should not occur so close to roll out that the users are under immense pressure to master new skills too quickly. Instead, schedule enough time before roll out that the users can learn design skills and practice them in a pilot project. This pilot project can be a past, current, or future development project where users are free to practice their skill on a realistic product that the company develops. This helps the client organization ensure that products are developed by using the newly adopted solutions. It also helps ensure that users have enough time to perfect their skills and be efficient when development timelines become strict.

1. Tailoring to the Client

When you perform an initial assessment to understand the extent to which the design process will integrate with the new solutions, you can incorporate those findings into the custom user training. It is best to use company-specific templates in training courses. Practical use of drawing, part and assembly templates helps support user adoption of company standards in addition to the users becoming comfortable with new modeling workflows. This can also include templates used for data cards in SOLIDWORKS PDM, bend or gauge tables specific to company design guidelines, approved toolbox components, or a custom material database with approved company materials. When you design the new workflow and training to support the use of approved and common design rules, as well as other tools you may incorporate in the workflow, there is more consistency in the output from users and less time required by administrators or support personnel to investigate issues. In addition, it is best to develop these templates in partnership with the client organization and the partner organization, to ensure knowledge sharing about how to create good templates from the start. Replacing faulty templates later is detrimental to the productivity of the organization.

1. Pilot Projects

2. Prove the System

Schedule a pilot project as a means to test the readiness of the users with the new tool. This helps the client organization and partner organization understand any gaps in knowledge or functionality that require attention before officially rolling out the new tool. You can also use the pilot project for contingency planning to decide what measures to take if the project plan changes after rolling out the new tool. The pilot project should be relevant to the business and not a generic training project. For example, you can use a current or past development project for the pilot project so that users are familiar with the criteria for success and able to use their new training with their historical experience. Alternatively, if users already have previous experience with the tool, the pilot project could be a future development project with more ambitious criteria for success. This allows the users to apply their knowledge of the tool in a more creative and challenging environment.

1. Identify Needs for Training, Best Practices, Etc.

For the users, it is best to use the pilot project as a readiness test. This is an important step for users to experience the new design process based on the new solution. The test helps the users to adopt the methodology of the new solution in a more practical setting. During this process, the users may require additional support from the partner organization as their skills progress from learned to applied. This is a great opportunity to identify training needs (such as new functionality training or review of core functionality) and introduce or create best practices based on what is or is not working during the pilot project.

1. Provide Easy Access to Help

2. Helpdesk

Users may need help at any given time. Establishing a process to get support easily is beneficial to all organizations. If the support process is not easy, users may hesitate to ask for help and may become detractors to the long-term success of the solution and the client organization. Ensure that the process to find help accommodates the variety of users you may encounter. It should be easy to access the helpdesk with information available on the home page of your website, on a partner organization’s business card that users receive at training, or even in your email signatures. When a user submits a helpdesk ticket, the partner organization must be abundantly clear regarding what you will need from the user in order to best support them. If a helpdesk phone hotline is active, the hotline must be accessible for the user and direct the user to the proper technical support subject matter expert quickly. If using email support, it is important to send a follow-up response that tells the user when to expect a reply and what to do if an issue becomes critical. Building the user’s confidence that they will receive a response and effective support is essential for the helpdesk to be successful and create professional relationships with a client organization. VARS can find more information about building effective support organizations in the 3DEXPERIENCE Partners Platform.

Plan helpdesk support in phases ahead of a client’s adoption project to accommodate new user needs. This assists in planning staffing needs at the partner organization to ensure you are ready to help the client promptly. At the beginning of the adoption project, it is common that users require assistance on a regular basis. Plan for those needs by using site visits where you can meet with each new user to ensure they have a chance to ask questions, request advice, or make comments. Afterward, move to a second phase where the users meet with the partner organization support team on a regular basis to review new questions and comments. When the users become more comfortable interacting with support, move to the final phase where they seek technical support on an as needed basis. This allows technical support representatives to engage directly with users, which develops great working relationships. This phase allows for the scaling of direct support activities so users become confident and self-reliant. Phased support may not work in this way for all clients with constrained budgets and is to be adjustable.

1. Online Help

Users can find self-help information in many places online. Notify the users of these resources so that they can find support at their own pace or during off hours when the helpdesk is not immediately available. The resources include the MySOLIDWORKS website, training eBooks, user forums, and others. MySOLIDWORKS is an excellent resource for official SOLIDWORKS tutorials, SolidPractices documentation, and various information to help users understand core functionality more thoroughly. The help documentation available within the SOLIDWORKS applications also provides clarity about the purpose and workflow of the software functionality. It is essential that users become familiar and comfortable with these resources so they can find answers quickly and on demand.

1. Local Subject Matter Experts and Power Users

Because SOLIDWORKS is a globally used CAD solution, there is a good possibility that experienced users already exist within the client organization. These users may have advanced certifications or an ability to achieve advanced certifications quickly. These subject matter experts, or experienced power users, are excellent resources to leverage when onboarding new users who may prefer to work with team members when they need additional assistance. Rewarding power users for helping to boost the skill and knowledge of their team members with opportunities for attendance at professional seminars such as 3DEXPERIENCE World is a great way to recognize their efforts.

Reward Early Adopters

Motivate early adopters of the new tool within established company policy or with rewards that relate to the new standards. For example, if an early adopter paves the way for new users by defining best practices, reward them with attendance at an industry conference such as 3DEXPERIENCE World. If company policy allows rewards for early adopters, ensure that users are aware and encourage this as a professional milestone.

Disable Access to Legacy System

When defining the appropriate timeline for the new tool to be operational, you must also consider the timeline to retire the legacy tool. While some users may be uncomfortable with the move to the new solution, leaving the legacy tool active for too long gives users an excuse to delay adopting the new company standard practices. This can result in failed adoption and missed deadlines. Often, an easy way to mark the transition is to establish a policy specifying that current and legacy projects remain in the legacy tools and that all users will create new projects using the new tool effective with a certain start date or contract number. Then, as discussed in the next section, specify a date after which the legacy system becomes inaccessible.

1. Communicate when License Access will Cease

It is important to send a clear message to users about the retirement of the legacy tools. In the message, include any actions that involve them leading up to the retirement date. Users must be aware of the adoption plan and about when they will no longer be able to access the legacy tools.

1. Provide Limited Support to the Legacy System

After determining the plan to retire the legacy tools, you must cease support for them. Continuing to support legacy tools results in a poor user adoption rate because they still have an incentive to continue using the old tools. To encourage and support user adoption of the new tools, remove support for the legacy tools as quickly as possible and deprioritize assistance that relates to these tools. Ensure that the client’s internal support organization gives priority to support for solutions offered in the new tool and consults the partner organization where solutions are not known.

Monitoring

The following guidelines provide information helpful to understanding how successfully the client organization is adopting SOLIDWORKS.

1. Build a User Community

2. User Groups and CAD Committees

Client organizations should create internal user groups and CAD committees. User groups are generally beneficial to the tool users to increase their knowledge and collaboration on design challenges. CAD committees are comprised of subject matter experts, decision makers, and internal advocates. CAD committees are beneficial to the adoption process because they continue to discuss the evolution of the tool at the client organization and evaluate best practices. The CAD committee oversees coordinating discussions with the larger user group and conveying information to business management to aid with informed decision-making. Both groups provide value to the client organization. These groups must be flexible enough to allow participation from multiple development teams or business units. In-person or virtual groups should strive to meet during business hours and to accommodate multiple time zones.

In addition to onsite user groups, attending SOLIDWORKS User Group Network (SWUGN) meetings locally or regionally is a fantastic way to build advocates for the new tool and collaborative networks. For organizations new to the tool, this supportive network of professionals is a great source of insight and inspiration for best practices.

1. User Community Support

Support the user community by continuing to collaborate with their user group:

• Set up lunch and learn webinars about essential features.

• Review major enhancements prior to an upgrade.

• Present technical deep dive webinars.

• Support informal meetings with a user group to offer insight on a design challenge.

  Informative opportunities like these ensure that users feel continuous support and you remain informed of any potential opportunities or other major developments.

1. Check-Ins with CAD Committees

If the organization chooses to create a CAD committee or a user group, schedule meetings at regular intervals. This interval can be monthly or quarterly depending on the organization size or discussion topics. For example, user groups may want to meet monthly to better collaborate on design challenges and increase exposure to essential functionality. CAD committees may meet less often, quarterly for example, if formal decisions and best practice evaluations occur less frequently.

1. Identify Areas of Improvement

As the CAD committee and the partner organization meet with the user groups, opportunities for growth may become clear and necessary. Providing opportunities for constant feedback, such as lunch and learn sessions or technical support tickets, makes it clear when there is a need for training, which should be conveyed to engineering management or the CAD committee for prioritization. There may also be a need for development or improvement of a client’s best practices.

1. Share Success

User group meetings are an excellent time for users to share the features and methodologies they find helpful or productive in their environments. In addition, the SOLIDWORKS User Group Network is a great place to share successes or learn from the success of others to improve or try new approaches within the organization. Sharing success stories can also lead to new or updated best practices within the client organization that benefit all users.

1. Measure Adoption

2. Define Criteria

You must define the criteria for determining successful adoption at the start of the adoption project and measure the criteria throughout the project. When determining the key performance indicators (KPIs), you can consider a variety of criteria such as:

• Success as a measure of who and how many users are utilizing the new tool.

• Success as a measure of the quality of data being complete, valid, accurate, and consistent.

• Success as a measure of the growth of a new PDM vault over time.

• Success as a measure of the number of sessions, and health of SOLIDWORKS sessions reported in the CAD Admin Dashboard.

• Success as a measure of efficiency improvements where less time or resources are required to complete tasks than before adoption of the new tool.

• Success as a measure of which functionalities users leverage to deliver value.

• Success as a measure of the readiness of users after training sessions.

• Success as a measure of the number of advanced certifications obtained by users over a specific period.

• Success as a measure of the quality and frequency of support tickets submitted.

• Success as a measure of the consistency of license usage.

• Success as a measure of critical metrics such as reduced cost, reduced risk, increased revenue, or decreased time to market.

You can establish and customize many more criteria based on what the client organization deems as successful. The emphasis is typically on quantitative measurements of KPIs although qualitative KPIs may be required. Regardless of the specific KPI, the emphasis must be on the client organization’s criteria for success rather than the partner organization’s criteria for success. The partner organization has the expertise to guide the client organization to their goals and recommend realistic expectations. However, the client organization always determines the criteria of success. The partner and client organizations must thoroughly understand and agree on a clear plan of engagement for these goals. Roadblocks to success must be addressed based on the level of risk to the client organization and the criteria of success.

1. Provide Reports

Several reporting tools are available to either the client organization or the partner organization. The recommendation is to use these reports when measuring KPIs. For example, certification reports used directly after training to determine knowledge retention are available from the following website:

https://3dexperience.virtualtester.com/#home

The partner organization (SOLIDWORKS VAR) can access the MySOLIDWORKS usage report to determine areas for knowledge review or growth. The CAD Admin Dashboard, available to the client organization, can be used to report user utilization with a variety of metrics. When generating these reports, monitor the client organization users in the headquarters office and the remote offices to build better collaboration between the offices and insight into local user groups.

1. More Processes or Departments Covered (Expansion)

Adoption may be considered as successful if an organization that already uses the new tool expands usage of the tool to new processes or departments. In this way, adoption is a cyclical process. As the client organization generates data using the new tool, they will likely find that the data is also useful to other departments after development by the original engineering group. Build adoption plans for future development to help the client realize the full potential of their investment in the new tool. When the client’s criteria for success is met, they may be ready to consider expansion.

Intervention

The following guidelines are helpful to address issues with adoption that become apparent while monitoring the adoption activities.

Identify Slow Moving Teams or Users

When adopting a new tool, the following two groups of users require special consideration and additional support planning:

• Users working on critical projects for delivery from the legacy tool.

• Users who are reluctant to adopt the new tool.

After identifying both groups, work with the leadership of each group to define a realistic timeline for the users to move to the new tool.

Contractual obligations may prevent the client organization from developing projects in the new tool, which may cause some users to delay adoption. In such a case, develop an alternate schedule to move these users to the new tool so they are not at a skill development disadvantage compared to other users. This may come in the form of a delayed roll out to the particular users or the concurrent development of a pilot project that does not delay the delivery of the critical project. Either way, the critical project team must be able to finish their project while having enough time to adopt the new tool in time for new projects.

Users may be reluctant to move to a new tool because they are comfortable with the legacy tool or have past experience with the new tool that did not leave a positive impression. If these users are strong advocates for the legacy tool, it does not mean they cannot become advocates for the new tool. Instead, it is important to understand their motivation so that their reluctance does not create delays to the adoption project. Understanding their positive experiences with the legacy tool, and how to adapt those experiences to positive experiences in the new tool, should be included in the adoption plan. These users and their associate designers all benefit from positive experience.

Develop Best Practices

Create best practices that are specific to the client organization, utilized by users and supported by management, to create guidelines around the new tool. This helps to ensure that the legacy tool remains in the past. You can use two paths to develop these best practices: what worked in the past that we want to support moving forward, and what did not work in the past that requires replacement.

1. Keep What Works

If there is a specific best practice that worked in the past, replicate and support the practice in the new tool workflows. Incorporate this best practice in training for reinforcement. Support for practices that are logical, productive, and already supported by users and management should be documented and shared with the client organization. The caveat to this is the new system may have improved or new methods to complete legacy practices. Every effort should be made to investigate these new and improved methods before replicating them. Replicating legacy practices may introduce complexity to the new system which makes support and upgrades more difficult and costly.

1. Improve What Did Not Work

It is a certainty that there are best practices that did not work in the past; otherwise, there would not be a need for a new tool. Determine the reason that the client organization is searching for a new tool and discuss what strategy they would like to see moving forward to prevent those issues from being repeated.

• Does the client organization need to increase productivity?

• Does the client organization need to ensure that users are all using the same design standards?

• Does the client organization use standard parts that cause issues with larger assemblies?

Does the client organization need to collaborate with multiple locations and/or global locations?

Understand why something did not work, what the motivation is to change the behavior, and what the goal is for the new behavior. This information is useful to educate users on new workflows that become effective with their new design tool to support better practices. Document this and share the information with the client organization. Include this information in onboarding with new hires to ensure that adoption of the new best practices is carried forward to all applicable departments of the organization. In addition, review the new best practices at regular intervals to understand if the practices achieve the goal that the client organization is working toward. Best practices are not stagnant, and the application of the tool must adapt to support new standards of practice as appropriate.

We hope that you find this document informational and useful and request that you leave a brief feedback about the topics that you want us to cover in the next revision of this document. Click here for a complete list of SolidPractices documents available from DS SOLIDWORKS Corp.

Endnotes

1. Lah, Thomas E. May 2021. “TSIA Adoption Framework” TSIA. https://www.tsia.com/resources/tsia-adoption-framework.↩︎