GoEngineer: Introduction to CAMWorks and SOLIDWORKS CAM Video Series

This is perhaps my most proud achievement so far in the SOLIDWORKS reseller industry. As my portfolio shows, I have a history in several CAM packages. CAMWorks is unique among them in how automation-forward it is. Ensuring that prospective customers have a grip on the fact that this software is examining your geometry and has an associative link to your design geometry is crucial. Furthermore, this video series is intended to be able to distributed in parts to non-technical decision makers so that the benefits can be made clear.

I was asked in late 2022 about making some content about CAMWorks because the software has a higher churn rate than folks are really happy with. User frustration is not uncommon with CAMWorks when coming over from something like GibbsCAM or MasterCAM, and often when I’m helping a customer navigate a workflow issue with CAMWorks or even during training, they’re not really using it the way it’s intended. None of the automation features are being leveraged, nor are simple features like saving tuned-in feeds and speeds.

There is an information gap between the people selling and delivering training for CAMWorks and the users, and it is a hard one to cover: how do you convey that CAMWorks has a completely different philosophical underpinning from most CAM software?

The CAMWorks sales team, the full-time CAM application engineering team, and myself all settled on the format of a video series for pre-sales (really, pre-demo) prospects. As short as possible, but demonstrating from top to bottom how this software is supposed to work. This way prospects don’t need to burn a ton of time on a single huge video, and different chunks can be shared to different users, and lastly the critical workflow of saving customizations can be bookmarked on its own.

This way, with these videos we can ensure that customers start asking more informed questions during pre-sales activities. Now expensive and time-limited training can be used to better effect because the basic workflow is already a known entity. Finally, we can begin covering deeper information during training because the basic workflow is already documented and understood; navigating the picks-and-clicks of the basics can be done well ahead of time.