Auto CAD to Inventor Transition

[secretagdan]

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.

[osnapendp407315]

I have been slowly trying to move to Inventor when the job demands it but a lot of my work makes no sense in IV. I have taken two 3 day classes through Imaginit that were pretty good, but to start working on involved projects just takes too long right now. The problem is that besides knowing the commands in IV to make objects one must learn (strictly from experience) how to approach developing the part, assembly, etc.

What I have been doing is only using IV on smaller parts where only one or two pieces are needed for the job. It is fairly easy to make one part and then the drawing. Where I still stumble is how to make one part and then develop other parts that work with that one, and so on.

As always the other strategy is to find one person in the orgainization that is highly motivated to use the program. Once they have gotten through a few designs or maybe a few dozen they can start assisting others and pass on their experience so the learning curve is greatly reduced for the others.

It is true what they say, the longer you have worked on AutoCAD the harder it is to move to IV. The work process is so different from one to the other it makes it harder because you try to use what you know to learn the other and it doesn't work too well outside of the obvious lines and circles.

[jaberwok]

As always the other strategy is to find one person in the orgainization that is highly motivated to use the program. Once they have gotten through a few designs or maybe a few dozen they can start assisting others and pass on their experience so the learning curve is greatly reduced for the others.

It was exactly the same introducing CAD in the 80s.

[BeKirra]

I have the same situation, too.
The big issue is that you have to build up a part library for your company.
There is no much resources or free downloads over the internet for you.
This could spend you years of time to building up your company library.
The other thing is the Inventor has less ability to customisation when compairing to AutoCAD. When this point comes to the drafters, they would love to stay in the world of AutoCAD.
for example, they may think they can do 3D works with AutoCAD.
And there is a lot more 3D resources anywhere.
Why should I have to move?
Stay where I am unless I loose the job!
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