Challenge
The team's SolidWorks plus PDM stack assumed an office that no longer existed: license dongles, a vault server behind a VPN, and Windows workstations for a team that had gone fully distributed.
STEP-based migration paths were dead ends - dumb solids would have meant remodeling every bracket and weldment they intended to keep iterating on.
Solution
Using the solidSF migration client, the team extracted parts, assemblies, and drawings from SolidWorks and reconstructed editable geometry and feature trees in solidSF, batch by subsystem, validating mass properties against the originals as they went.
Vault replaced the PDM server: private projects, revisions, locks, where-used, and audit history, with firmware and ops given read access through a browser instead of a VPN account.
“We budgeted a quarter for remodeling our core assemblies by hand. The feature-tree migration meant we mostly reviewed instead of rebuilt.”
Principal mechanical engineer
Results
Three weeks after the first batch, SolidWorks went read-only. Engineers on both coasts edit the same assemblies in real time, and design reviews happen in a shared document instead of screen-shared sessions.
The PDM server, its VPN, and two Windows workstations bought solely for CAD were all retired.