CAD Administration - time/budget

The company I currently work at has 1 CAD administrator. Which would be me, currently I spend all of my time doing adminstrative tasks. I spend my time investigating new programs and updates, training users, and creating training documentation, along with just learning the admin. side of each program. Of course we are in the process of updating all of our programing, so right now its justified for me to spend all of my time on it. We currently have 10 designers. Our budget was adjusted accordingly for this at the begining of the year.

My previous company was much differnt. They had about over a hundred engineers/designers and a CAD administrative team of 8 or 9. I was just a designer there so I can't comment on how adminstration was budgeted or how they used there time. I do know the CAD admins. where considered part of IT not Engineering.

Hope this helps

In response to James, we have around 80 seats of Creo Parametric, along with about 80 other products we support from big to small including ACAD, ECAD software and Adobe products. We also have 2 international sites and 4 domestic sites that we support as well.

We have a team of 6 with 1 CAD Admin (me) and Windchill Admin, Windchill Business Admin, and ECAD admin, and two others that fill in where needed on different projects.

We are starting a large PLM initiative and so our team with be splitting up a bit to focus on the WT Parts and integrations with ERP, CRM, and MDM in one group and the admin of PDMLink and CAD in the other.

As a CAD admin I spend about half of my time or better with user support, the rest is spread between training, testing and research. We do update Creo about 2-3 times a year with Datecode updates for bug fixes and PDMLink about twice a year. We are also early adopters of New versions. PDMLink is usually an M010 build we go live on and Creo in the M020-M030 range depending on bugs.

Hope this helps.

We have about 8 users, a couple of them very much part-time, and I support them as best I can while doing design duties. I do not have the admin powers I'd like, especially in Windburn, but I make do. I've loaded all the local installations, and help train the users and troubleshoot the issues they may have. I enjoy it, especially now that I'm training/converting some former SW users who used to talk smack about Pro/E.....and now suddenly like it better. Maybe it's the teacher......