More and more manufacturing companies these days ar e increasing their efforts in green and sustainable engineering by producing cleaner and more energy efficient products. Considering the big carbon footprint metal products produce, it is no longer enough to inform about how much energy was used to produce these products. Metalworking manufacturers need to specify the quantity of carbon-dioxide emissions associated with the manufacture of these metal products including transportation and recycling of the products. International Metalworking News- Middle East was fortunate to speak to Dassault Systémes SolidWorks Corp. Director for Marketing Innovations Rick Chin regarding trends happening in the metalworking industry and how SolidWorks Sustainability can change the overall environmental impact of any metalworking product created. IMNE: What business trends do you see happening in the metalworking industry in terms of sustainability as a whole? Chin: SolidWorks Sustainability is one product we are selling that is something the metalworking industry must put a lot of attention. With sustainability, the idea is to give users insights on what is the environmental impact of the product that they are designing. The environmental impact will include things like the carbon footprint and total amount of energy consumed by this product. The lifecycle assessment gives users the information they need to make the most environmentally friendly decisions throughout product design. As a user, companies can adjust the material choices that they make. For instance, what particular type of aluminium will I use? Is it going to be a type of steel? Is this going to be manufactured as a sheet metal? Am I going to die cast it? Those decisions have different environmental impacts. And so engineers can evaluate those things. For the metal fabricators, they could start providing their customers' detailed analysis that gives the right information needed to make the most environmentally friendly decisions throughout product design. The analysis looks at a product's entire life, which encompasses selection of steel that comes from this particular refinery, material production, manufacturing, product use, end-of-life disposal, and all of the transportation that occurs between these stages. IMNE: Do you get input from your customers in enhancing your products? Chin: There are a number of different ways on how we get inputs from our customers. They can actually go on to the SolidWorks website as customers and they can submit their answers and requests. Something new that we've done is that we made it more community-oriented. You cannot only submit requests, you can also see others' requests or what other users have put in. You can cast your votes and put comments to it. We look at what people have collectively said and select on those different enhancers. Customers can proactively give us their input on what the enhancement should be. At the same time, SolidWorks is very proactive as far as going out and seeing customers. It has always been a part of our culture to spend a lot of time going out to visit customers. The product marketing team perform hundreds of customer visits in a year, all over the world. We have a particular group, called product definition. Their job is to design how exactly user-interface would look and how it should be. The big part of their responsibility is to go out and visit the customers.
IMNE: What excites you most about the future of SolidWorks? Chin: As a person that works for SolidWorks, I guess the opportunities that have been given to me excite me. I like the fact that I can explore new product offerings. We have been doing CAD since 1995 and we are not just providing CAD, we are offering other things that are important to our target customers. We have designers and
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