IS EPDM WORTH THE MONEY?

Extra cost over what? Workgroup PDM? If so, usually yes. You can only be the judge as your specific business requirements may or may not justify the extra cost. As for the actual cost, you'll need to talk to your VAR.

I don't know what Sage is, but if it's an ERP system of sorts, yes and no. EPDM has the ability to export data via XML, but it currently does not have the ability to import.

The return of investment for EPDM for our company hasn't be broken down into dollars and cents, but it's not just engineering that use the system. Manufacturing, service, purchasing, engineering, inventory control, documentation, and vendors use the system. It's probably paid for itself in the time it has saved engineering by not having to send vendors drawings. Not to mention the cost savings on printing and paper internally.

As for what you can expect to get out of it: you're only limited by your imagination. One can attach as much meta data as one wishes to each document/item, so you can use it to track things other than parts and drawings. It's like anything though; you get from it what you put into it.

For us, we use it to obviously handle our models and drawings, but we also use it to track engineering changes. That evolved over time; first I built a standalone application that interfaced with EPDM, we ditched that and used Excel files within the vault, and we then moved away from that and are using a web based application. As our processes evolved we still use EPDM as the primary source of information. While I cursed and swore about SolidWorks advertising that EPDM would handle ECN's out the box, I'm grateful that it is flexible enough that I can roll my own solution.

I'd also like to mention that the EPDM group from SolidWorks is very active with their customers who use the product. They listen and are genuinely interested in how they can improve the product. It's nice to see.

So is it worth it? If you're a one man shop, probably not. If you're a manufacturing shop, maybe not too. However if you need to track changes to parts and have been asked for a drawing more than once last week, yes.

John,

We have been using PDME for 4 months now. We are going to put all of our Solidworks, Excel, Word, Emails, etc.... in here. It seems to keep crashing to a minimum and does not take forever to load large assemblies because it is connected to your C: drive. It has been a great benefit for all in our company. From Engineering to Purchasing (EC Documents), From Project Managers (Microsoft Project) to Shop Managers.

You can put any kind of document that you want in there and it works like Explorer! Its so easy to use. Its not as easy to set up so you will want to purchase a pre-set up thru your local Solidworks Dealer. And get a few hours on onsite set up time included in your purchase. Its not real difficult to do things in there after you get all of the bugs figured out. Im not sure the price, but it is worth it. I think I remember us buying about $4,000 worth in licences.

It tracks all of your revisions and keeps them safe. It also can notify the next person in charge of the next step in the process of Approval for any kind of document. It keeps everything clean and tells you who did what to which item in the vault. You can make it so that each user can see or not see what you want them to. Keeps everything connected even if you move files around in explorer. I am not sure how it links to Sage, sorry. We use Solidworks, great 3D solidmodeling program. Hope this helps!

Tonya