One Surprising Thing to Demand to See in CAD Software Demonstrations

[@JV_CNC]

As a teacher I always give live demonstrations to my students. Then the students experience that making 3D models is hard work and a lot of thinking, rethinking, editing, struggling ..... It is never as spectacular as in the prerecorded videos, even not after 20 years. I'm happy that people as you recognize that. (We use Creo parametric) Your demonstrations are great!

[@CADPLMGuy]

I took a class on cabling for another CAD package, and the teacher only used videos of prerecorded demos. My confidence in the software decreased immensely. It made it difficult to answer my questions. I don't see how someone can teach in a class setting without live demos.

[@hamzanawaz7945]

✅

[@Barbarpapa1]

I guess that I’m lucky to be a member of a small nation (Slovenia), because I didn’t deal with big CAD companies directly but always with their VAR-s (Value Added Reseller) in our country. VAR representative normally prepare live session at their place (this was still the time of UNIX workstations), first they presented the actual software live on their computer and in the second part it was “modelling according to dictate”. We told the presenter what to model and after that what changes of the part he should implement. My first contact with Pro/Engineer was in such manner and the guy (it was “one man band” back then) even lent me a working station with complete Pro/Engineer installation with bunch of manuals to test the software for myself. Today the big difference is only the fact that such presentation is easily made online. Thank you for the good work and please keep on… Jože

[@phillipharris8277]

This is a great subject. One thing I noticed when computers became available to the public was that people changed. Customers used to be very demanding and very skeptical when shopping for even the simplest products. When computers came along, they began to buy into promises and learned to take exaggeration and disillusionment in stride. They still have to benefit from their purchases, but the math is a lot fuzzier.

[@TheGrisu486]

You're so right, you get to the heart of the matter! Your story about the table is really incredible - but I can well imagine that it happened exactly like that. For me - a table in Creo: I'd love one - here you go! And on top of that, here a nice form to be able to enter and change the dimensions, materials and parameters quickly and effectively ... ... Sometimes I think I should have written down my incredible experiences in the field of tool and product design right from the start - and later as an AE. That would make a medium sized funny book ...

[@CADPLMGuy]

Funny, I was just texting with my former boss and coworkers yesterday. Had I not been there myself, I would have a hard time believing that AEs for a major CAD platform would have trouble with such a simple request. We still joke about that.

[@sfa6742]

I had a very similar experience with some NX demos. All of them were pre-recorded, and the "CAD guy" on the sales team had little to no knowledge of ProE so he was constantly saying things along the lines of "only NX can do this in the CAD space"

[@CADPLMGuy]

I had a call with a Siemens guy about Teamcenter a few weeks ago. He didn't know I was a PLM guy or that I had previously implemented Teamcenter before. It was similar to your experience. "Siemens is the top CAD and PLM vendor in the world." "Teamcenter is the best PLM in the world." "No one else can do what Teamcenter does." The aggressive hard sell was repulsive and completely destroyed any potential trust.

[@remy2824]

Being the devil’s advocate here. While this request happened a few times, I don’t get the kind of relationship that you to build by asking it without warning. Those last minute on the fly questions only make the asker shine. Not adding any value to the transaction. Back then PTC had the moto “show the product” and AE’s would learn crumbread menu scenarii by heart. It was hegemonic. Today software has become very complicated and a demo needs time and preparation. A good AE now will offer to explore scenarii with parts of the customer in advance. with multiple iterations and validation.

[@CADPLMGuy]

As I state in the video, the point of that entire day was for them to show us stuff live in the software. They agreed to that. And I strongly disagree that my boss threw them some kind of curveball. The request was "make a table." You're making 2 parts with 1 feature each and then putting them into an assembly. To this day, that software program is the only parametric modeler where that is some kind of complex challenge. The point was, "show us something super easy so we can wrap our heads around the workflow." We weren't trying to stump them. Quite the opposite. Also, as an experienced demo veteran, I know when to tell a prospect that what they've asked to see is too complicated, and if I'd need time to prepare. They accepted the request. We even tried breaking it down into simple steps. "Show us how to create a new part." "Show me how to sketch a rectangle." "Show me how to extrude that shape." A day in the life kind of stuff. I don't see how any of this should be beyond any application engineer.