Pro/E Learning Curve

Hi Greg. Great topic. I'm looking forward to hearing some responses on this.

Hello

I started using pro/e 3 three years ago, with no previous CAD experience, it was a lot of work, things start falling into place the more you work with it

patience and perseverance are key......don't give up.

I love pro/e now that I halfway understand it.

Rick........my first post in the new forum : )

The problem is that resellers of other products talk about Pro/Engineer as difficult to learn even though they have never used it. Many have never seen it in action.

In my experience all the software out there can be quickly learned to a point. Very basic modelling and assembly creation is very simple to do in everything from Pro/E to SolidWorks. I've used most of the software currently available.

To properly utilize any tool to it's full potential requires: 1. experience 2. formal training. 3. more experience 4. more formal and online training.

Realistically to properly utilize any tool you need to delve into the depths of everything it can do and all it's functionality. You are not going to learn any software package properly without formal training. Documentation cannot teach technique and the miriad of recommended practices for a particular circumstance.

Many of the people that learn it in college learn very little about what Pro/E can really do. An application that truly has a vast array of functionality takes time to learn. There's no way around it. One can only learn so much on their own and the reality is there is a lot of trial an error involved. Agreed there is still a little trial and error involved after formal training but you at least have a basic foundation of what functionality exists.

I've dealt with many resellers of engineering software that don't even know their own product functionality. Pro/Engineer resellers are no exception to this. These people are sales people and their goal is to convince you their product is better.

I have taken a number of parts and given them to Solidworks, SolidEdge, Inventor resellers and get a response back stating, "Is this a go-nogo deal? We can't draw this."

The trick is to do your own home work and make them show you that it will in deed work for you. Many of the simple programs just don't have the functionality of Pro/Engineer. Maybe you don't need that functionality but if you don't know what your missing, it's a pretty big investment to change midstream and start learning all over again. Not to mention you may have an inventory of poorly drawn parts.

That's my 2 cents.

I would say the learning curve is very high, it follows everything else in engineering and science,

it's abstract and complex. That's part of the fun, finding all the crazy(and very serious) things it will do.

Rick

In my opinion the learning curve varies depending on what you are trying to do. If you are creating extrudes, cuts, revolves, rounds and what not it is very straight forward and easy.

If you start getting into ribs and drafts that is more complex because you start having to think about order of creation and how different surfaces meet and alignment.

Then, when you are getting into sweeps you add more complexity

Surface blends are where it really starts getting difficult. You have to figure out how to create all the sketches and supporting geometry in such a way that Pro/E can create the new surface with smooth transisitions. I have been using Pro/E for 6 years and have not spent enough time creating surface geometry to make reliable parts. I cannot seem to make the geometry without S shapes and V shapes where two surfaces meet.

PTC has made great steps forward in useability, and I am looking forward to more with WF6. But, they need to figure out how to make geometry work more reliably. No matter what order the history is you should be able to create using what is there. You should never have to go back and recreate a different way and see if the new feature will work now.

I think that is where most of the usability issues come from. Not from how many clicks it takes to do something, but how much time you have to spend to create the geometry the way Pro/E wants it. You should be able to create it the way you want it the first time and Pro/E should be powerful enough to handle it.

Here we have people using Pro/E, some using SolidWorks and others using CoCreate. They are all supposed to move to Pro/E. I get different excusses from the SW people then I do from the CC people. The SW people talk about clicks, infrequent use and remembering, being able to design the part instead of fighting the software, and other stuff like that. The CC people talk about not being able to quickly create ideas, having to fight with the history instead of just cutting off what you don't like, a different mindset in the design technique and so on.

So to wrap up.

I think that Pro/E is a great tool and is loaded with functionality. It is extremely easy to use to do basic modeling tasks, but as you get in deeper the learning curve goes up exponentially. This learning curve is not because the functions are harder to understand, but because it is harder to get Pro/E to preform the way you want it to.

I would argue that the "difficulty in learning the software" is directly proportionate to the available functionality of the software....of course the converse would be true as well.

We switched from a 2D tool to Pro/E and have found that very rarely do we use the old tool for anything. The only exception that we find is for very complex sketches. This is solely driven by the time factor, we can create very complex 2D profiles in our old product much faster than in Pro/E. With that being said all other work is done in Pro and we have found that since the Wildfire releases the learning curve to train our employees to be much shorter. Getting them comfortable and up to speed has dramatically dropped from the 2001 release. Getting people to understand what they need to do to create all the geometry that is required is easy, getting them to think about the order of creation that makes Pro happy is the hard part. This is what seems to add time to the learning curve, not finding what type of feature they need to create. But understanding what my downstream features and functions will be and what effect does the geometry creation play on that. The tool itself is easy to learn in terms of navigating the software, but the complexity seems to come from understanding what makes a robust model that can except the changes that always seem to come up.

Interesting post!

Our engineers are very good at creating designs quickly in Pro/E during the initial phases of the design. The ability to create assembly cuts allow ideas to be created and shared quickly. It is also easy and intuitive. Unfortunately, as the design progresses, the memory needed keeps increasing. Large assembly management and processing speed is a really big issue. The engineers know what they want to create and document. Why is the usability of the design so dependent on how it was created? Designs can become too large to activate even on 64 bit computers. When the assemblies or drawings get too large to activate, then drastic steps in fixing the design occasionally need to be followed. It would be helpful to know if the resources to open the design is getting close to the a preferred set limit BEFORE it is activated and BEFORE the user makes plans to add a lot more information into it. Why should engineers be concerned about monitoring system resources? Their main purpose is supposed to be to come up with the design.

Engineers have also had to recreate designs from scratch when the user who created the design did not follow good design practices. For Pro/E to really reduce the learning curve, it has to allow engineers to be more concerned about processing their ideas then being very proficient with the tool. Many engineers spend a good majority of their time in meetings and coordinating the information about design with everyone in the team. There is just not enough time for many of the engineers to stumble around looking for icons or take extra time trying to remember the correct procedure to create their design ideas. If a user does not use a module for a few months, it often takes them a while to get started in it again. I do agree that Pro/E is becoming easier and improving in many ways with each release.

Don't get me wrong, I really do like the Pro/E tool. It is very capable at creating any kind of design you can imagine. These are just me thoughts (from my observations and discussions with users) on how to make Pro/E more user friendly and reduce the learning curve. We have been using Pro/E as our main design tool for over 15 years.