I Challenge The Vendors.

This drawing dates back to AutoCAD Release 12.  It was drawn, by me, to drive a point home to a customer that was proving extremely difficult to convince of the values of upgrading a number of AutoCAD Release 11 licences, but the value was there and the sale had to be pursued to the end for that reason only.

The site and company I had dealt with and supplied since AutoCAD Version 2.5, all the draughtys were quite experienced and right from the very first discussions were keen to upgrade.  Our stumbling block was the new engineering manager; a person with no prior knowledge of my organisation or me, and with a singular belief that as a salesman absolutely everything I said should be treated ‘with a grain of salt’.

His insistence on testing everything I said about AutoCAD manifested itself in the form of lists of questions (no problem with this), resulting in a number of very lengthy onsite demonstrations, much paperwork and the complete erosion of any margin that could have been expected from the upgrades. After the last demonstration and without a single reason we were told, no sale!

Commonsense says walk away and cut your loses and that was exactly what my partner suggested we do, instead I drew this drawing. It is a portion of one of the customer’s drawings and represents less than ten percent of the detail to be found on drawings being produced in their office on a daily basis.

Completed, the drawing was given to the Leading Draughtsman and left sitting on a desk in the drawing office awaiting a bite!  And a bite we got; on a walk through the drawing office, ‘several days after casting’, the General Manager spotted the drawing, questioned the draughtys as to its validity and the accuracy of my effort and minutes later the order for upgrades was placed.  Nobody could ignore the fact that this step would be quickly justified and it was.

All the way through these documents I have stressed the fact that CAD must improve productivity and profitability else it is valueless and this applies to upgrades as well as new product.

I have made a point that Inventor has not meet this criteria; it’s simply another product, with a new interface in front of some old capabilities; it is far less capable or FLEXIBLE than Mechanical Desktop and therefore unprofitable for many to implement, and Buz Kross’s recent comments are no cause for celebration quite the reverse, this situation is set to continue.

I’ve stuck my neck out and in doing so have ‘thrown down the glove’ let’s see if the CAD vendors (all) are game enough to stick theirs out and prove me wrong in a manner similar to this not a sales spiel?

R. Paul Waddington
cadWest.