Challenge
Engineering ran three SolidWorks seats; everyone else ran on PDFs exported to a network share. Old revisions circulated for years, the shop floor built from stale prints, and dealer requests for legacy drawings took days of archaeology.
Solution
The OEM migrated its active library - parts, weldments, and drawings - through the solidSF migration client, subsystem by subsystem, prioritizing current production models and the legacy machines that still generate service traffic.
Vault became the single source: revisions, locks, where-used, and audit history, with the shop floor and the service desk reading released drawings in the browser.
“The drawing the welder sees and the drawing the dealer gets are the same revision now. That sentence was not true for twenty years.”
Engineering manager
Results
Stale-print rework on the fabrication floor fell measurably in the first quarter; dealer drawing requests are answered the same day from where-used searches instead of folder digs.
The three desktop seats remain for surface-heavy work, but day-to-day engineering, ECOs, and release now happen in the vault.