Can Pro-E wildfire Foundation II package be used alone?

[lejeanmi]

We have some Pro-E (2000i) and SolidWorks (2001) seats we used for isolated 3D projects. We are finely going to move from 2D to 3D for every part we make. And you guess it I am wondering whether to go with SolidWorks 2003 office or Pro-E wildfire. They both go for about $5000 with $1,300 maintenance.
They are so many (costly) adds-on available for Pro-E that I am afraid of getting wildfire only to find out I need one of their pricey extension.
We make AWD components for big tucks (class 8 and up). The cast parts we make are not too intricate and our assemblies only go up to 500 parts at most. Let’s put it that way, we’ve been able to model all our parts/assemblies with SolidWorks 2001 (without any add-on) and Pro-E 2000i (with all the adds-on, ie: the $20,000 pro-E)

So here come my questions:
-Does anyone uses the Pro-E wildfire Foundation II package alone, and is happy with it?
-How many parts in an assembly require the purchase of the Advanced Assembly Extension, 1000? 10,000? 100,000? (This is an additional $6000!!! to the Foundation II package, plus $800 for maintenance. Is it really worth $6000?)

Any info will be appreciated, thanks in advance.

 

[mloew]

lejeanmi,

I realize that this will only tangentially answer your question, but one thing to consider is that many of the truck manufacturers and their suppliers use Pro/E as their standard packages. Adopting Pro/E may save some costs and aggravation in the long run when considering communication and translation. Just a thought.
Best regards,

Matthew Ian Loew

Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips Fora.

 

[lejeanmi]

Thanks for your reply MLoew.
Most of our customers are indeed using Pro-E, and it is going to play a role in my decision of which CAD package to adopt. But on the other hand, even when we send them Pro-E models, we save them as “dumb-solid” to remove the features history from the file (we send them STEP for SolidWorks files). This is to ensure we are not giving our design away.
File format may become important when we send models to our supplier, because they need the features history to make the part. We use Gibbs as our CAM software which opens Pro-E and SolidWorks files directly, no conversion needed. I’ll have to find out which CAM package they use.

I am sure medium size companies ran into that problem before. Is the Foundation II package good enough alone?
If anyone has some answers I’ll really appreciate your feedback.

 

[wvassello]

lejeanmi,
The new Wildfire packages have moved a good bit of the functions that you probably needed in the $20K bundles into the lower end bundles. For instance, the foundation II that you mentioned, if you pay the maintenance money you move to a package called "foundation advantage". (or just buy it for $5k) This new bundle has all the functions that you are used to having plus surfacing, large assembly functions, animation making, data importing wizard, and a few other things. The important stuff for you is probably in the large assembly functions. That is about the only area that the foundation II package was needing out of it bigger brother bundles for your type of work. Considering that the costs are so similar between ProE and SWorks, I'd say your better off paying the maintenance on your ProE seats and going on from there.

Reguarding the AAX. You will probably find that most functions that you are used to using in SWorks for working with larger assemblies (there is no limit to the number of parts that an assembly can handle, reguardless of the packages that you own) and a few more are in the wildfire foundation package. The AAX has more tools for defining areas of work within an assembly to reduce clutter and improve performance. It also has some cool functions for sharing geometry between parts and into assembles that as far as I know SW does not have. But if you have never had that function, then you don't know if you will ever need that function. (sort of a catch-22)

An easy way to test all of these things is to get your local ProE reseller to give you a 30 day eval of the Wildfire package, and try it.

Good luck
-Wayne

 

[scubadude]

I've been using Pro/E for about 9 years. We originally started with the $25k seat of Pro/E (release 17) with all the bell and whistles. As we added seats, we scaled back what we really needed. I've been using only Pro/Foundation for the past 4-5 years without any issues. I design 1000+ piece machines without a problem. I don't need surfaces either, you may with your castings & such. There are some tricks you may need to use with layers and model representations that make it easier on your computer to handle the number of parts. Having a fast machine helps as well.

My opinion is that Foundation does most of the stuff AAX does, except for some higher order parts handling.

It has also been my opinion that this sort of thing is what will be the downfall of Pro/E. Solidworks continues to add features at no additional cost. If PTC doesn't follow suit, they will probably not be around 10 years from now.