The General Session today was full of partners and customers of SolidWorks. There was a parade of well known companies demonstrating how they use SolidWorks in their daily product development.
Fielder Hiss introduced us to Tom Salomone, the World Wide Manager for Mechanical Design and Automation at HP. He stressed that great companies innovate during the tough times in order to prepare for when the times improve. This echoed yesterday’s theme set by Sir Richard Branson’s interview.
Jeremy Luchini, the Certification Program Manager at SolidWorks Corp stated that SolidWorks World is a unique chance to celebrate its users and those who have become CSWP’s. To stress the importance of certification, he introduced us to Yanick Tremblay of Mega Brands Inc. Mega uses SolidWorks from the early stages of design to create buildable transforming robot toys. Tremblay wanted to create a strong training SolidWorks program for his designers. This is when he discovered the CSWP program. However, Luchini noted that companies such as Mega may not be able to take engineers out of designing for four hours straight (the current length of the CSWP test).  To address this problem, he announced a new program in development that will allow users to take 1 hour of the CSWP test at a time, and allow their employers to track the progress of CSWP training.
It was great to see SolidWorks partners enthusiastically embracing not only the SolidWorks software, but also everything that goes long with it, including SolidWorks World and the CSWP program. They seem to understand the importance of these events and programs. They “get it.â€
Part 2 of this article to cover real world uses of SolidWorks by several companies during their design process.
