How to transfer Autocad drawings for use in Solidworks softwareWritten by Adrian Dunevein
How to prepare Autocad drawing borders for use in Solidworks.If you have begun using Solidworks for your 3D modeling it’s quite likely you have amassed lots of Autocad drawings over years. More than likely, you would like to continue using same look and feel in drawing borders you make in Solidworks. You can import Autocad drawing borders into Solidworks but there is some preparation you should do before attempting it. This preparation will make sure that you can copy back to Autocad in future with minimal problems. Lets assume you have opened a sample Autocad drawing and you have entire drawing border visible on screen. Start by making sure your drawing border and title block, bill of material and revision blocks are only things visible. You can leave text in title blocks, you can always edit it later in Solidworks. Same applies to drawing numbers, revision numbers and any other textual information that might need to be placed on every drawing you create. Make sure your drawing border is actual size it is supposed to be. If this is a D size drawing for example, draw a rectangle 24” x 36” around drawing border and see if border fits inside. If not, scale border until it does. Locate lower left corner of rectangle you have drawn and move it and whole drawing border, rectangle and all to location 0,0,0 in model space or paper space.
| | Is Your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) System Doomed To Fail?Written by Perry Norgarb
“Right, People. Let’s blast out that mail campaign we’ve been planning for so long.”It’s time to put your trusty CRM software to work; to let it earn its keep. You run a search of people and companies you want to target. You soon realize something’s wrong when your list is far smaller than anticipated. A quick check reveals many profiles/categories have not been filled in, impacting your search results. Further inspection shows numerous records are incorrect; others are riddled with typos. And that’s just for starters. With a sinking feeling, you realize that last push isn’t going to happen in a hurry. Time for some Damage Control or Preventative Maintenance. Fortunately one of most common reasons cited for high failure rate of CRM systems - poor data quality - is also one of easiest to avoid. Your CRM software is only as good as information it contains. As old programmers motto goes ‘garbage in, garbage out’. So how can you avoid incomplete, incorrect, irrelevant or out-of-date and generally unfit-for-use data from permeating your CRM software? You need to gather your key CRM users together and thrash out a DATA CAPTURE PROCEDURE document, defining rules of use. Spell out: •Who has what rights to system; who can Create, Insert, Modify or Delete records, assuming your software supports all these functions? Forward this information to your system administrator to action. •Decide on a procedure to check for any duplicates before creating a record. Depending on what ‘de-duping’ or ‘data scrubbing’ features your system has, this might require some simple searches before starting a new record. •Do you allow abbreviations or acronyms? For example: IBM, or I.B.M, or International Business Machines Inc. or Incorporated and so on. A policy on ensuring consistency of input will help to avoid duplications in future. •Are records going to be created in Upper and Lower case and when are CAPS acceptable? •By when do you expect records, notes and so on to be created or updated? Same day, on return to office? •Check to see whether your Postal Services have specific requirements. Ensure your data meets these criteria. •Is primary address of clients to be created as a postal or a physical address? •Make sure everyone checks spellings if they are unsure and do not trust spellchecker! When in doubt, ask client – they’ll respect that. Is it Clark with an ‘e’; Shawn, Sean or Shaun? One certain way to get your mail binned is to spell someone’s name incorrectly. •Also confirm kind of corporation e.g. LLC, Inc, PTY Ltd. and so on. •Make rules for creating new profiles or User Definable Fields (UDF) (or whatever your specific CRM software calls them.) Place a lot of emphasis on this. Every time a new UDF is needed, it should first be approved. Otherwise duplicates will permeate your database e.g. Lead Source: Yellow Pages, YP, yelo pages. •Ensure that email addresses are put in correctly. Basic but common mistake! •Set up procedures, if not supported by your software, of how to create records from inbound emails. •If applicable, are you going to use Mandatory/Forced fields?
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