Well the subject seems evergreen so I searched and decided to continue the topic instead of starting the new thread. Yes I am in the process of selecting a plant design software for my company and have narrowed down to PDMS or SmartPlant 3D. I am in contact with both the parties and both say we cannot give you any demo version to try my hands on because you cannot get any good idea of software with out the training!!!!#$@%.
Now the idea of getting training of both the software and then making decision seems rather awkward. The other way is to buy the software blindly and be stuck with it for ever, good or bad. I have seen PDMS and it seems not so user friendly like most of the software which migrated to Windows environment rather late (no Undo most of the part and etc…). SmartPlant superlative description at Intergraph site seems very enticing and it seems to be user friendly and powerful. But I have not seen any one working on it so cannot be sure what it is like in reality.
Any feed back from the users of the two would be highly helpful.
If your good at getting around in 3D autoCAD and are a pretty good piping designer, than Cadworx is the way to go. Good program with great support. Easy to maintain specs and things like that. If your doing plant design with multiple piping specs it is very useful. Also get the Isogen package it works great to. Produces some good looking ISO's if you ask me.
Incase any Coade people are reading this.
I do have several complaints (some people would call it a wish list) about Cadworx. I have more than this but they are all minor.
Their equipment modeler is horrible. I just use their piping components to build up my equipment and standard Acad commands and it works pretty well.
If they added one component to their spec builder system, you could build any piping spec in 30 minutes instead of the 4 hours it was taking me. I suggested it to them 2 years ago haven't seen it added yet.
They now have a steel package which is pretty good.
Overall I give the package an A-
I miss it (changed jobs 6 months ago), in a different industry now and we are using Solidworks.