Profitability of SolidWorks Simulation Professional

Purchase Sw Premium (it includes static simulation and motion (of parts AND assemblies)) and will be sufficient for 99% of your work.

Aaron - Your questions are interesting to me as well as we are considering the SW Simulation package for thermal simulations of LED designs. One consideration that I can offer since there seems to be a lot a similarities between our businesses (engineering consulting) is that some potential clients will suffer "sticker shock" once your price increase comes online. We do not offer different prices for different levels of CAD work since the work occupies the same station and software. A client needs to understand that we can be working on a project that requires all or most of the Add-Ins we have purchased for another client if we were not working on their project. This tends to make potential clients, that need basic CAD work, take their projects elsewhere. We actually recommend it now and then. So my point is this: if you are going to upgrade your services without expanding your manpower, it will be difficult to balance your workload and to justify to a client the different rates for different projects. Overhead is overhead no matter if it the station is being used to run complex simulations or to design basic parts. Those clients that need your expanded capabilities over the other available CAD service providers will gladly pay for it (the Add-Ins are expensive as are the skilled operators).

You might need to choose if you are a simulation specialist or a CAD house unless you can have seperate cost centers / engineers for both. If you choose to become a simulation specialist and your prices reflect that, expect to have to dig deeper to find clients that need those services. My opinion anyway.

Harold

We are currently using Altair HyperWorks for 99% of simulation needs, pretty much our default unless the customer specifically requests SW simulation. The reasoning for this is first of all the advanced capabilities of the software and the quality control you have over the mesh. If you're doing 90% basic linear static analysis, the SW package with premium will handle most of your needs.  If you have a critical part with low margins, though, you need to be really careful about the mesh quality with SW as it can be difficult to create a good quality mesh and you will always be limited to Tets and Trias.

Though the overhead is there no matter what, we charge different rates for different services. This is because we don't want to scare off the CAD only customers, but still want to get the higher rate for the analysis customers. If you can be busy all the time charging various rates for various services, you end up coming out better than being busy part time and charging a higher rate across the board.  I have a "standard rates" list that details the various rates for various services, for example mechanical design, analysis setup, analysis runtime, CAD and drawings, prototyping, and administrative.  With this the customer gets an understanding of the rates in addition to seeing that you offer these other services.  If you stagger the work correctly, you can be running an analysis while you're doing CAD or something else (another reason for using a separate package for analysis) and essentially be working double time.