Interview with Tim Thomas, CEO of Cadenas at Solidworks World 2019

Sanjay Gangal interviewed Tim Thomas, CEO of Cadenas at the 2019 SOLIDWORKS World Conference in Dallas, Texas.

SG: How has the show been going for you?

SG: Show’s been really good. It’s our first time coming here. I started the business 19 years ago, and it’s been exciting, a lot of new blood and new energy.

SG: Tell us about CADENAS PARTsolutions. What do you guys do?

TT: We help manufacturers increase their sales and we help design engineers reduce their time to market.

SG: And how do you do that?

TT: We do that with a content engine, content library of components that designers would use in their assemblies. We have the commercial parts and industry standard parts that enable an engineer to get to them easily and quickly.

SG: How many parts do you have?

TT: It’s not a matter of quantity, it’s wanting the right part at the right time when you need it… We’ve got 800 suppliers of catalogs, and industry standards SAE AIA and ASME are involved with us as well.

SG: It is any types or parts, assembled things – from screws and nuts, to windows or big machinery parts?

TT: In an assembly, a user would have three components. They’re gonna have commercial parts, standard parts, and their parts, and then when they roll it up into the assembly, it would generally be their intellectual property. What we’re bringing to the desktop is the things you buy, you never model. That’s what we’re trying to do. And it covers the whole market from electromechanical, mechanical, we’re getting into the electrical components now, we’re in the BIM market. You mentioned doors and windows and things like that. So it’s across all industries.

SG: So you’ll have, let’s say part, now for not only SOLIDWORKS, but AutoCAD as well as BIM models, let’s say for Bentley or Graphisoft, ArchiCAD and stuff like that?

TT: Yes, the product works in a multi-CAD environment. We support all the major CAD formats in native form, so there’s no neutral file formatting that goes into those models. We’re believing in pure models, pure native, and so we do support the Revit types of products with our BIM offering, but mainly at this show, we’re addressing the SOLIDWORKS user, the CATIA user, but people that have come up to us use multi-CAD system. So for our tool, it’s more process-centric, so it enables an enterprise to standardize on a process.

SG: How about for electronic designers, let us say Mentor, Cadence, Synopsys, do your models for those people as well?

TT: We recently announced an integration to Zuken. We’re excited about working with the Siemens folks and the Mentor integration as well as Cadence.

SG: These are mainly mechanical and thermal type of models, or they support simulation as well?

TT: The parts generally are for physical-ness, but some of the ecosystems that we support go beyond CAD into mechatronics. Siemens has a mechatronics concept designer. We bring in those attributes from the suppliers that would drive those types of applications. The trick on the ECAD side is you have physical and logical, and bringing in that logical stuff is an education process with the suppliers at this point.

SG: That part is pretty tough. And I know a few other companies are doing more on the ECAD side, but you seem to have very extensive library on the physical side.

TT: We do. That is a fact, yep.

SG: And what makes your solution unique and differentiated?

TT: Our solution is unique in that we have two product offerings; we have that supply chain on automation if you will lead generation for the supplier, and then the component that does the design re-use strategy, and that’s what gives us a uniqueness in the industry, as well as our native outputs in all the CAD formats.

SG: What is the best way for people to find out more about your solutions on the internet?

TT: They need to go to www.partsolutions.com.

Tags: cadenas, component Library, PartSolutions, Tim Thomas

Category: Interview

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