It has been a little while since I have done a post in my series titled “Orlando or Bust” about how to convince your management to send you to SolidWorks WORLD 2009 in sunny Orlando, Florida. Last year when I was attempting to convince the management at my company to send me to my first SolidWorks WORLD I learned a lot about what to expect from other users that had been there before. So last week I sent out a questionnaire to some of my fellow bloggers to see why they feel it is beneficial to attend this event from a user’s perspective. Below you can find the response’s that I received back from them (be sure to check out their blog’s as well, they are a wealth of knowledge for everything SolidWorks related). Here is the question and the responses:

Question: As a user who has been to a previous SolidWorks WORLD, why do you feel it is beneficial to attend this event?

Jeff Mirisola – Jeff’s Blog

1. I feel it’s beneficial for a few reasons. First, and foremost, the learning opportunities. As an attendee, you have the opportunity to attend classes taught by experts in a multitude of disciplines. There are “hands-on” sessions so you can actually follow along with the instructor. Then there’s the vendor fair where you can check out a huge selection of partner products. Lastly, there’s the networking. You’ll meet people there who can assist you when you get stumped, who can provide a different point of view on how to accomplish different tasks or help you overcome various challenges in your designs.
   

Josh Mings – SolidSmack

1. Without a doubt, if you have a goal to go there and find out about something that will benefit yourself or your company - a process, a program, or technique - you will learn more than you originally thought possible. You will come away with more ideas about how that process can be used and you will benefit from conversations with others about how they use SolidWorks. Set a goal. Make sure your company knows. Find out everything about it when you go.

Brian McElyea – CADFanatic

1. Attending the SolidWorks World conference has major benefits not only for the attending users, but also for their respective companies.  There is a tremendous return on investment; companies receive not only an increase in the users’ skills and knowledge of the software, but also can benefit from the networking aspects associated with this sort of event.

   Users can network not only with other users, but with SolidWorks employees, third-party developers, and potential vendors and customers.  The wealth of information that can be gleaned from just strolling through the Partner Pavilion is worth the cost of the conference by itself.  Couple that value with all of the sessions available, access to the entire conference session presentations after it is over, and the potential business opportunities, and it is easy to see the benefits far outweigh the costs of attending.

   I have personally never went to a SolidWorks World conference where I did not learn something new, be it functionality of SolidWorks I was unfamiliar with, new modeling techniques, or answers to some engineering problems that my company was facing.  And seeing other’s designs in the Partner Pavilion always helps inspire me to be more creative in my designs.

Matt Lorono – SolidWorks Legion

1. I found the diverse type of breakout sessions to be very valuable.  They do not just cover SolidWorks how-to or hints/tips/tricks.  Business appropriate topics are also covered.  On such as session last year covered project management in the context of a 3D CAD environment.  Another session I enjoyed discussed how to handle file management and SolidWorks within a regulated industry.  I learned lessons from these particular sessions that immediately benefited my company upon my return.

   Also, having employees attend can raise the profile of one’s company, generating interest on the part of others who may not otherwise discover your company via other means.  This can help attract both clients and potential highly qualified new hires.

As you can see, this event is a must attend for any level of SolidWorks user. Whether you are a beginner or an advanced user you will be sure to find an unbelievable amount of information that will help you do your job better and more effectively. So talk to your management, let them know what you can bring back for yourself, for your fellow engineers and for the rest of your company.

NETWORKING? This seems to be the big topic in this day and age. It seems like everyone is trying to build their own personal network with various types of acquaintances that they have. In the next part of the series of posts I am doing on how to convince your management to send you to SolidWorks WORLD 2009 in Orlando, Florida I will be touching on all of the various networking opportunities that you will have and that will present themselves for your company. Today there all kinds of social networking sites out there, sites like Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin, Twitter, etc. etc. etc. These are all great sites and I personally participate in a lot of them but in the end, no social networking site is as good as face to face networking in my opinion. A lot of times the social networking that you do on a daily basis lead to great face to face networking possibilities. One of the things I like the best about User Group meetings is the opportunity to network in person with other users in my area. SolidWorks WORLD offers all kinds of great face to face networking opportunities and they usually present themselves, all you have to do is be there. Below I have broken these opportunities down into the biggest 4 groups that I could think of. There are many more than what are just listed here but these I believe are the best ones, for me at least.

SolidWorks Users In Your Industry

SolidWorks does a great job of supplying you the opportunity to network at this conference. Every day they offer what they call “Birds of a Feather” lunches where they break up tables into different industries so that you can (if you want) sit at a table with other SolidWorks users in your industry. This is a great chance to talk to others about how they are designing their products. Are they designing everything in context, top down or bottom up assembly modeling. There are so many different ways to do things in SolidWorks that it is good to talk to others in your field and bounce your methods off of them, talk about their methods and find out why they do it that way. It may result in you coming back after the conference and start designing things a new way that will increase your proficiency and decrease your turn around times to get things out the door.

SolidWorks User In Your Region

Another part of the “Birds of a Feather” lunches are the opportunity to sit down with other users in your region. It is always a benefit to make contacts with other SolidWorks users that are close to your hometown. There always seems to be a closer relationship when you are in the same area as another user as opposed to communicating with someone from the other side of the country or a whole different country all together. Not saying that those contacts are not important also but the ability to have people closer around you that you can possibly meet up with after SolidWorks WORLD is very important. When I ran AutoCAD for the 1st five or six years in my line of work I had no other AutoCAD users that I could contact with issues or ideas. That is one of the biggest things that attracted me to SolidWorks was the community of users that seems so vibrant with this software.

As for the “Birds of a Feather” lunches I strongly suggest you participate in these. They are great opportunities to meet users and get your name out there.

SolidWorks Employees

The biggest thing that I noticed at my first SolidWorks WORLD last year was the availability of SolidWorks employees to everyone. It seemed as if everywhere I went there were SolidWorks employees talking to the casual users. This included Jeff Ray, Jon Hirschtick, Scott Harris and others who have MAJOR roles in the SolidWorks product and the future of SolidWorks. How many times have you sat at your computer and said WHY does the software act this way? Why can’t it do this or that? I have had this discussion inside my head many times and this is your chance to ask those questions to the people at the source of the answers. All you need to do is introduce yourself as you walk by and the door is open for discussion. How much better could you have it. Let them know what you think of the software and where you would like to see it go. The users are what drive this software so make your voice heard and let them know what you think. This is what they are there for.

SolidWorks Power Users

The SolidWorks community has some very well known faces in it that most people recognize. People like Phil Sluder, Ed Eaton, all of the SolidWorks Blog Squad, Gerald Davis, Wayne Tiffany and others that are walking around the conference just like you. There is nothing more that these users like (speaking for myself but I am pretty confident that the others feel the same way) than to talk to other users. In the end, every is a user of the software and everyone can learn something from others. The user that has been using the software since the 1st release can learn something from the user that has only used it for a month and vice versa. Be sure to introduce yourself to these people and talk to them, there is a wealth of knowledge out there that is just waiting to be explored.

In conclusion, SolidWorks WORLD is a great place to network face to face with all sorts of users. If you are there and see me wandering around aimlessly make sure you introduce yourself. I would love talking to you to see what I can learn from all of you.

How many of you knew that there is only 116 days until February 8, 2009? That is only around 2773 hours away. So what, right? What’s the big deal about February 8, 2009? At 5:30 PM on February 8 in Orlando, Florida SolidWorks WORLD 2009 will officially kick off with the welcome reception in the Partner Pavilion. The first “official” event of SolidWorks WORLD will be CSWP & CSWA which will be on Sunday the 8th from 12:00-3:00 & from 4:00-7:00. If you are the CAD Administrator at your company I highly suggest attending Greg Jankowski’s CAD Manager’s Boot Camp which will be from 1:00-5:00 on Sunday.

SolidWorks has posted a preliminary agenda on the SolidWorks WORLD 2009 website for you to check out, with a more detailed agenda with technical training sessions included coming before October 23, 2008.

The first early bird special has passed but you are still eligible for the second early bird which will be in effect until January 9, 2009. So REGISTER TODAY and experience this year’s event for yourself!

Keep checking out my blog if you are having a hard time convincing your boss to send you to SolidWorks WORLD. I will be continuing to post on how to convince your management in the upcoming weeks.

Hopefully, I will see you THERE!

Last week I posted about all of the great deals that were available to you if you signed up early for next year’s SolidWorks WORLD. Even though those are great deals you may still get some resistance from your management because of the price that is still there. This week I am going to show what I used last year to analyze the cost of the event compared to the productivity gains that you will come back with after SolidWorks WORLD.

Below is a screen shot with generic numbers that I put in for this post. This is a simple Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that I created that I gave to the owners of my company so that they could compute their return on investment for sending me to SolidWorks WORLD.

The 2 manual input boxes that you can fill in are the Hourly Wage cell and the SolidWorks WORLD Productivity Increase (Percentage) cell. The Hourly Wage cell is self explanatory, fill it in with your hourly wage. The SolidWorks WORLD Productivity Increase (Percentage) cell is the one that you can adjust to make the Amount In Saved Wages cell come out to would they would like to see.

Here are the calculations I used to generate all of my numbers that you see.

Total Hours Worked Per Week (Non Overtime) = 52 x 40 (weeks per year*hours per week)

Hourly Wage = Manual Input

Pre Tax Wages Paid Per Year = Total Hours Worked Per Week (Non OT) x Hourly Wage

SolidWorks WORLD Productivity Increase (Percentage) = Manual Input

Total Hours Worked After Productivity Increase = Total Hours Worked Per Week - (Total Hours Worked Per Week x Productivity Increase)

Pre Tax Wages Paid Per Year After Productivity Increase = Total Hours Worked After Productivity Increase x Hourly Wage

Amount In Saved Wages = Pre Tax Wages Paid Per Year - Pre Tax Wages Paid Per Year After Productivity Increase

I think all of this is pretty self explanatory. This tool is great for those that need to see specific numbers in front of them to show their return on investment. I definitely helped me last year in my attempts to convince management to send me to SolidWorks WORLD 2008 in San Diego, California.

Feel free to use my spreadsheet for your own use. You can find it here: SolidWorks WORLD Productivity Increase Cost Analysis. You will need Microsoft Excel 97 or newer to view it. To unlock the cells so that you can see my formulas the password is rocksolid.

If you have any additional questions feel free to email me. I am here to help you get to Orlando this coming February for SolidWorks WORLD 2009.

As most of you know by now SolidWorks WORLD 2009 will be held at the Swan & Dolphin Resort at Disney World in Orlando, Florida from February 8-11, 2009. Some of the bloggers broke the news last week that that annual off site event this year will be held at the Animal Kingdom on the Tuesday night of the event.

Well there is more news. If you are interested in extending your visit to Disney World, either before or after the conference, you are able to get discounted tickets into the following attractions: Walt Disney World, Universal Studios, Sea World and Dinner Shows. To get your tickets ahead of time you can go to this site and order your tickets. The tickets will be mailed directly to your home or office (sorry, no PO boxes). It also looks as if there will be a registration table at the parks as well if you are wanting to wait until you get there. The registration hours are:

• Saturday, February 7, 2009: 11:00am - 6:00pm
• Sunday, February 8, 2009: 7:00am - 7:00pm
• Monday, February 9, 2009: 7:00am - 7:00pm
• Tuesday, February 10, 2009: 7:00am - 6:30pm
• Wednesday, February 11, 2009: 7:00am - 12:00pm

These tickets will be cheaper than if you were to go to the gates and order them so it would be wise to do this ahead of time.

Sorry it has been a while since I have posted on SolidWorks WORLD 2009.  After a crazy, busy last week which included a trip to Barcelona, Spain for the SolidWorks 2009 Press Launch Event, I believe I am finally back on course to helping you out with convincing your management to send you to Orlando, Florida this coming February.

How many of you get a warm fuzzy feeling when you go to the store or car lot and come home with a deal that is almost too good to imagine?  I will admit that I do and even though your management may at times seem to be unfazed by exciting things like this, deep down they are like you and me and love to save some serious cash.  SolidWorks caters to this by offering (2) Early Bird specials for users who sign up early on in the registration process.  If you sign up before October 10, 2008 you will receive a $200 dollar discount, that equals 20% off.  If you can not pull the trigger on your proposal before October 10 you have until January 9, 2008 for the Early Bird #2 discount which give you a $100 dollar discount or 10% off the full price.  Here is what the fees look like for SolidWorks WORLD 2009.

Last week Tuesday I published the first post (Orlando or Bust…Why You Need To Be There!) in a series of posts that I will be doing on how to get your company to send you to SolidWorks WORLD 2009 in Orlando, Florida.  This week I am go to hopefully help you with the first step in building a proposal to give to the upper management at your place of employment.  This post is going to be more of an outline for upcoming posts where I will break down these steps in more detail.

Where do I start?  That is usually the first question that I ask myself when I begin compiling information for a proposal such as this.  There are so many reasons why you need to attend SolidWorks WORLD as I outlined in the first post in this series, but what are the key things that will make your management realize that sending you is not an option but a necessity.  Last year I put together a proposal without any idea of what all of the buzz was about, but this year I have a better understanding of what happens there.

Here is a list of items to begin thinking about when compiling your information:

1. What is the largest underlying cause for your company not wanting to send you?  Money?  Don’t see the value?  No time?
2. What route of asking them to help you do you want to base your proposal around?  Pay for everything (Conference Pass, Hotel, Travel, Time Away From Work) or any other combination of these 4 things?
3. What would be the biggest benefit of SolidWorks WORLD for your company?  Over 150 Training Sessions?  Networking?  Partner Pavilion?  Direct contact with SolidWorks employees?

Once you come up with some of the answers to the above 3 questions you can begin thinking about your “plan of attack”.  There are different things you can do for your proposal and I will list some of them here.

• Use the Early Bird Savings as a leveraging tool.
• Create a Productivity Gains vs. Savings spreadsheet that will display your hourly rate and what the yearly savings will amount to based on productivity gains.
• Break down the different networking opportunities that you will have like the birds of the feather luncheons, the off site events and all of the other free time that you will have to network with other users.
• Break down all of the types of technical sessions that will be available and that you would like to attend.  And then explain how those will benefit the company.
• Talk to other users (myself and others) about their feelings on why you should attend this event.  Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email for a 1on1 conversation.
• Use the SolidWorks supplied Boss’ Justification Letter’s.
• Use the personal testimonial written by Bob Jordan that I received last year (also the podcast that he did later on) during my series of posts.

As I said before I will break down all of these bullet points more in depth in my upcoming posts so stay tuned.  This is a big event and it will probably involve some of your personal time to put together a stunning presentation for your bosses.  I found last year that lunch time is a perfect time to do some work on this.  It is worth every second if they make the decision to send you as my company did last year.  That is why I feel it is so important to share some of my steps from last year with you and hopefully I will see YOU there this year!

Check out this highlight video from SolidWorks WORLD 2008.

Stay tuned for the next post in this series of how to convince you management to send you to SolidWorks World 2009 at the Swan & Dolphin Hotel in Orlando, Florida.

Important dates to remember:

• September 15, 2008 - All presentation proposals must be submitted for consideration (All presenters will receive free admission into the conference).
• October 10, 2008 - Early Bird Special #1 ends.
• January 9, 2009 - Early Bird Special #2 end.

As many of you know by now the SolidWorks WORLD 2009 website is up and running and registration is open.  Last year I did a series of posts on my attempts to get my employer to send me to San Diego for SolidWorks WORLD 2008.  This year I am going to be doing a similar series with hopefully more insight now that I have been to one of these events.

The first step in any proposal is convincing yourself that it is worth the efforts and/or costs.  There are many reasons to attend this annual event that SolidWorks hosts every year.  Last year, before I had attended a SolidWorks WORLD before, I had an idea of what to expect but was completely unprepared for what I experienced as soon as I arrived in sunny San Diego.  The buzz around the convention center and in the hotel that I stayed at was vibrant.  I immediately felt that sense of community that I had heard so much about.  Friendships that had been idle for a year being rekindled and friendships that were being made at that very moment.  And this was just at the hotel.  Being a part of a community such as this is a very, very big reason for you to attend SolidWorks WORLD 2009.    I am sure that there are hundreds of business deals that develop each year because of a relationship that was built at SolidWorks WORLD.  This event is a great way to give your company a face in a community/market that is growing at unbelievable rates.  This is just 1 of many reasons to attend.  Where else can you go where you can communicate with any and all of the blog squad, or Jeff Ray (CEO of SolidWorks), or Jon Hirschtick (1 of guys that started SolidWorks) or any of the SolidWorks employees.  One thing that I found out last year was that everyone is open to talk to.  There are not security guards escorting the CEO around, he is walking amongst everyone else.

What better a place to advance your SolidWorks skills than at a convention that offers over 150 technical sessions that you can jam pack into 3 days.  These sessions cover almost every nook a cranny of the software.  Is there a tool that your company uses every day?  Why not go to a session that deals with that tool and see how others use it, I bet you will pick up something new.  Is there a tool that you think you company can take advantage of but no one really know how to use it effectively?  Here’s your chance, you can come back after SolidWorks WORLD and be the “expert” at your company for that tool.  These sessions are given by some of the brightest SolidWorks users out there including SolidWorks employees themselves.  Last year I attended a session that not only taught me how to do something SolidWorks related but taught me something that I implemented company wide so that engineers and non engineers alike benefited from it.

Here is a list of some of the reasons to attend SolidWorks WORLD 2009

• Choose from over 150 technical sessions to attend that will increase you skill level with SolidWorks.
• Network with other users, whether they are in your industry or in your neighborhood, by attending the birds of a feather lunch time gatherings.
• See the latest and greatest SolidWorks add-on’s, partner products, and tools to assist in your everyday SolidWorks usage.
• Talk to SolidWorks employees to pick there brains about the things that you think about as you run the software on a daily basis.
• Get a sneak peak at what SolidWorks 2010 will include.
• Test your skills against other users in the Model Mania competition and win awesome prizes.
• Hear great motivational speeches from some of the best speakers that are out there in the engineering/computer line of work.
• Become a CSWP at SolidWorks WORLD and attend the private CSWP only event.
• Attend the unbelievable off site event that SolidWorks hosts every year.
• Make friendships that will continue outside of Orlando, Florida.
• Introduce yourself to the bloggers…LIKE ME!

There are so many opportunities that present themselves at SolidWorks WORLD that it doesn’t make sense not to go.  If you use the software for more than 10 hours a week, you or someone from your company must attend this event.  So sign up today and experience for yourself what SolidWorks WORLD is all about.

Check out this highlight video from SolidWorks WORLD 2008.

Stay tuned for the next post in this series of how to convince you management to send you to SolidWorks World 2009 at the Swan & Dolphin Hotel in Orlando, Florida.

Important dates to remember:

• September 15, 2008 - All presentation proposals must be submitted for consideration (All presenters will receive free admission into the conference).
• October 10, 2008 - Early Bird Special #1 ends.
• January 9, 2009 - Early Bird Special #2 end.

For any of you that pay attention to any of the SolidWorks Blogs that are out there you may already know that the SolidWorks World 2009 website went live last week Thursday.  This means that it is in fact right around the corner.  This years event will be held at the Swan & Dolphin Hotel in Orlando, Florida on February 8-11, 2009.  This is a must attend event!

Last year was my first year in attendance and it was unforgettable.  In August and September of 2007 I did a series of posts here on RockSolid Perspective that followed my efforts in trying to convince the management at the company that I work at to send me to San Diego, CA for SolidWorks World 2008.  Because of my efforts I was able to convince them to send me and it was well worth their efforts.  When I did these posts last year I was completely clueless of what to expect and based all of my reasons on why I should attend solely on what other users and bosses had told me.  This year I now know what it is all about and will have an even better idea of what to expect.

Seeing that I was able to attend last year for the first time I want everyone else to be able to attend also and experience the awesome look and feel of what SolidWorks World is all about.  I am planning on again doing a series of posts this year about convincing management to send you to this event.  Please feel free to contact me at any time to ask for additional advice about getting through to management about the benefits of attending this annual user conference.

Stay tuned for the beginning of my posts for reasons to attend and how to use those reasons to convince the management at your company to send you this year too.

Unfortunately all of those months of anticipation for SolidWorks World 2008 are behind us now with only the slightest of thoughts for next years event tucked away in the back of our minds. When I began to think about what I was going to try and do to convince the management at my company to send me to San Diego I had thoughts of this marvelous show where everyone acted like family, there was more information than you could shake a stick at and there was just a general passion amidst everyone there for SolidWorks. Needless to say, I was not let down concerning any of these thoughts. For me, working at a small company I do not get as much interaction with passionate SolidWorks users as I would like so I had a thirst to go somewhere where I could. There are many events that you can quench this at like a local user group meeting, a SWUGN Technical Summit, or just a new release roll out event through your local reseller. Well as all of you know that attended this years SolidWorks World or any other SolidWorks World this event is the grand daddy of all passionate 3D modeling user conferences. When I arrived the Saturday afternoon before the conference I could already feel the vibe in the hotel I was staying at. It was great. It had the feeling of a 5,000 person family reunion (Greg Jankowski and I discussed this exact thing later at the conference in my one on one interview with him). This feeling revealed itself big time at the first event I attended, the SolidWorks “Blog Squad” dinner on Saturday night. I had many interactions with the majority of these people through emails and discussion forums and other networking tools but never face to face. I had a feeling similar to going on a blind date, the feeling of knowing you get along when you are typing and talking on the phone but worried that it will not carry over to face to face communication. So I showed up at the Hard Rock Cafe with only my memory of the pictures of some of the blogger’s from their sites to try and pick out from the crowd who I was trying to meet, needless to say I was a touch on the worried side. Well as the ‘blog squad” started to roll in all of those anxious fears quickly subsided. All of the members were more than I could ever ask for in regards to accepting, friendly and just all around great to be with. Even though I had never met any of them it felt like I had known them since I was in grade school. This is just one of so many examples of the family reunion feeling that I had from Saturday night to Wednesday night. Sorry for being sappy, but its true. As for the information, this didn’t not exactly disappoint either. When you have over 100 breakout sessions lobbed into only 11 time slots, look out. I think the most stressful and unlikable part of going to SolidWorks World is trying to figure out what breakout sessions you want to attend. Not that it’s not fun by any means but with there being over 10 different sessions going on at once, it is extremely hard and frustrating to pick and choose which ones you want to attend, especially because each time there are probably 5 different ones that you would love to go to. As frustrating as it is initially it was worth it once I got there and starting attending some, because as a lot of people told me, it was INFORMATION OVERLOAD.

Now that I am a veteran (can you call it veteran if you have only been to 1) I see what everyone was talking about before I went. I now understand why Bob Jordan (letter and podcast) feels it absolutely necessary to send his employees so that they stay on the cutting edge. This event is well worth the price tag in my eyes. There are small, small things that I discovered at the conference that I have implemented already at my company that will more than make up for the cost that it took for them to send me. And these things are just the beginning, as time allows I want to implement other things that I think will blow some of the management at our company out of the water. So if you work with me and are reading this, STAY TUNED!

In closing, I already have the countdown started for next year in Orlando. I have things in my mind that I want to focus on for breakout sessions next year so hopefully I have the same opportunity to attend as I did this year.

Finally, I want to say thank you to everyone that made this event special, I will never forget my 1st of hopefully many SolidWorks Worlds.