We all know that quality control is an important part of the product development process, but has creating the documentation for that process become burdensome and a major bottleneck? SOLIDWORKS Inspection can alleviate these issues by streamlining the creation of your inspection reports, which keeps production moving, reduces errors, and can give back time to engineers that need to also focus on design. So what exactly does the software do and what features do you get when you go beyond Inspection Standard?
SOLIDWORKS Inspection Standard
With SOLIDWORKS Inspection Standard, you get both the add-in to SOLIDWORKS and the standalone application. These are distinct because the add in will allow you to quickly balloon and create inspection reports from your already created SOLIDWORKS drawings, while the standalone application can be used to extract characteristic information from 2D PDFs and TIFF files. This works by using optical character recognition to identify the nominal dimension, as well as the type, tolerance, and associated symbols, in a wide variety of formats. Inspection Standard can also automatically extract and balloon dimensions of both CAD files and pdfs. This can integrate seamlessly with SOLIDWORKS PDM, and there’s even a comparison tool to identify changes and update your quality project. All of this can be exported to PDF’s or 3D PDF’s for ballooned drawings or excel files with standard or custom templates for inspection reports.
SOLIDWORKS Inspection Professional
If you want to make Inspection an even more powerful tool, the Professional level adds even more functionality to reduce time and integrate seamlessly into your current workflow. If you currently use a digital caliper to record inspection dimensions, you can import those results directly from CMM to reduce errors. Inspection premium can then display these dimensions to highlight graphically to identify passing, failing, and marginal measurements. Inspection Professional can also support native SOLIDWORKS part and assembly files, including their PMI, as well as other 2D and 3D formats, which can be quite powerful if you’re using a product like SOLIDWORKS MBD to make your company drawing-less.
If you’re doing first article inspection using SOLIDWORKS, Inspection Standard or Professional are great options to accelerate your creation of inspection reports. If it seems like it could be a good fit for your workflow, reach out to your account manager to see which package may be best for you and when our next training sessions are.
