Corvus's One-Week Transition from 3DEXPERIENCE to Bild

About Corvus

Corvus Technology Solutions builds defense technology from its base in Melbourne, Australia, with a second site in Seoul, as part of the ANCA Group. The company designs, builds and integrates motion control and mechatronic systems, including the Corvus Launcher EL4 and EL10 and its In-Arm Suspension Units. It holds AS9100D certification, so how it tracks and controls engineering data matters.

Corvus was building its CAD capability from scratch, which meant it needed a data management system that a fast-moving team could set up and run without help. To lead that work, the company brought in Avon Perera, Corvus's Mechanical Engineering Tech Lead, nine months ago with a clear brief: build the CAD side of the business from the ground up.

The Challenge

In practice, that made Avon the person responsible for the entire CAD setup. There was no admin to look after a platform for him, and no IT project team standing by.

He knew what a good system looked like, having run SolidWorks PDM at an earlier job, so he gave 3DEXPERIENCE a fair trial of about three months. It is a capable enterprise platform, and plenty of large organizations run it well. Those organizations also tend to have people whose job is to run it. Corvus did not.

That difference showed up quickly. Configuring and maintaining the platform started taking more of Avon's week than the engineering did. "I was spending a lot more time trying to maintain it and make it do my bidding" than actually using it, Avon said. "It was way more complex than it needed to be." For a team without a dedicated administrator, that alone was enough. "I don't have someone here to be able to maintain this every day, or even set it up properly."

The friction showed up in the everyday tasks. Checking files in and out. Finding a file. Setting up a release workflow. "There were so many complexities around just doing simple tasks," Avon said, "that I kind of got fed up and I started looking around."

When we asked how much time the platform was saving him, his answer was direct. "3DX was in the negative. It was actually costing me more time than it was saving." His estimate of what the setup had cost him: "weeks' worth."

Finding A Solution

Avon kept his list of must-haves intentionally short. He needed a system that worked out of the box and did the main jobs well, meaning check-in and check-out, version history, revisions, metadata control, and automatic universal file generation. Anything past that was a bonus.

He skipped the big enterprise platforms without trying them, figuring they carried the same overhead for a team his size. "Going to some of the big players would still probably end up with similar complexities, as well as potentially cost."

That left Bild, which won on exactly what he had asked for. "Bild sort of stood out as having the minimum viable product for me to get things up and going," he said, "simple, approachable, robust enough, had enough of the features that I need." Getting the go-ahead inside Corvus took very little effort. "It was fairly easy for me to push over the line after I demonstrated how much time I wasted on 3DEXPERIENCE."

Switching to Bild

Here is the part we find most telling. Before his first check-in call with Bild, Avon had already built a custom approver role, split his users into groups, set a part numbering schema and built BOM templates. No one had walked him through any of it.

When asked how he worked it out, his answer was short: "most of those were relatively self-explanatory." The only thing that tripped him up was the meaning behind some of the field descriptions, which he took to his account manager.

The migration was just as quiet. The one piece of real work was extraction. "My biggest issue was really just getting data out of 3DEXPERIENCE," Avon said. Getting it into Bild was the easy half, because "with Bild, it basically just retains the same structure and hierarchy, and you can find the files."

He moved his main assembly to Bild, running it through the bulk editor to add part numbers rather than typing them in one by one, and the whole thing came to "probably the equivalent of about a day in total." Start to finish, the switch took "about a week," which was the same estimate he had given at the start of the trial.

No consultant. No implementation project. No rollout phase. The person who had to use the system every day is the person who set it up.

Solution/Benefits

The barrier was low enough to cross alone

Getting in was one thing. Staying in has been the quieter benefit. Bild has mostly disappeared into the background of Avon's week, and the friction he still meets is mostly legacy data, files that came across as families and configurations.

"Quite frankly, these are minor things that we can work around pretty easily."

It was simple enough that adoption took care of itself

Corvus has never run a formal training day, and that is a deliberate choice, rather than an oversight. Avon's reasoning is that training people before they need it does not stick, because by the time they use it everything has been forgotten and you end up doing it twice. So he waits until someone has a real job in front of them. For example if someone needs to release a file, he shows them how to run an ECO.

He walked us through one from that morning, a basic ECO covering what it is, how to add and remove files, how to record the reasons and how to run the workflow. His verdict on the session doubles as a verdict on the product. "Straightforward, and that's kind of the main point of Bild. It doesn't make things more complex than they need to be."

The real proof is who ended up using it. Four to five people at Corvus now work in Bild at very different depths, some viewing, some downloading files, some reading BOMs and some only approving, and the built-in 3D viewer is the part they keep remarking on. "Lots of people have commented how quick and easy it is to just open a part up in Bild and actually see what it is."

Nobody planned that. It has started to close a gap Avon cares about a great deal.

"The production guys, rather than just going to PDFs, now come in and ask me how to access things in Bild, because it's actually easy for them to understand how things go together, actually see parts, and see whether it's the latest version." As he puts it, "that gap between engineering and production is one of the things I'm pretty passionate about minimizing. Bild certainly helps, by democratizing the CAD and making it available to people with low barriers."

The value started in week one

Because there was no implementation phase to wait out, the return began almost immediately.

A normal day now runs start to finish in one place. Avon revises an assembly, updates the drawing and the metadata, builds the BOM, raises an ECO, releases the parts and then the top-level assembly, and pushes the universal files into the shared folder for purchasing. He compared that with doing the same work in the system he left behind. "Whereas if I tried to do that through 3DX, that would be like eight hours plus."

The system is also strict without being unforgiving. It keeps the full version history even when a release has to be pulled back and redone, which matters more than it sounds. "If someone queries something, I can always go back and show them the reasons why."

Where Corvus is now

Nine months in, Avon has found a solution with Bild, and it runs the engineering. Corvus knows its data is versioned, traceable and open to everyone who needs it, not just the engineers who drew it.

Next, Avon wants to open up the supplier portal so Corvus can stop using workarounds to share files with vendors, and to bring Bild's feedback tool closer to the team's quality workflows.

It took about a week, and one engineer who worked most of it out on his own.

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