Dan Staples’ favorite user story of the Solid Edge ST4 Event

During a coffee break today, I was chatting with Dan Staples and asked him out of all the users at the Solid Edge ST4 Event, what’s the best story he heard. He mentioned tractor and attachment manufacturer Ventrac. (Disclaimer – I am sure that Dan Staples loves all the user’s stories we’ve heard over the last couple days, this happened to be the one he told me 🙂 )

I know these guys well after I met them last year at our Productivity Summit in Cleveland (my home town) so Dan caught my interest right away. That and I had been working with them on getting the tractor as one of the images in the Solid Edge ST4 splash screen.

Ventrac uses sheetmetal in their mowers and up till a couple months ago, everything they did was using the traditional approach and not taking advantage of synchronous technology. When Solid Edge ST3 came out with synchronous technology in our Sheetmetal environment, we gave Ventrac their Christmas present early.

I was able to catch up with Dan Swartz and ask him about their use of Solid Edge since implementing ST3 and what he’s seen in ST4 in the last couple days. The way he tells the story, giving them synchronous in sheetmetal was like flipping a switch for their productivity.

The second part of Ventrac’s story that Dan Staples liked was their use of PMI for design reviews. Dan Swartz told me that everyone from their service manager to their sales manager can see what’s in the product without creating a drawing. As Dan Staples puts it, they are using PMI in the way we intended when we put it in Solid Edge way back in V19.