Interview with Paul Schommer, Tooling Engineer from SOLIDReporter at 3D Experience World 2020

We recently had the opportunity to interview Paul Schommer, Tooling Engineer for SOLIDReporter at 3D Experience World 2020.

SOLIDReporter products are developed and offered by LOGOPRESS SAS, a company that has been developing and offering solutions dedicated to the tool & die industry for 30 years and with 20 years experience in the Solidworks ecosystem. The goal of SOLIDReporter is to meet a recurring demand from CAD/CAM users who want to free themselves as much as possible from administrative constraints and make recording and managing their time, comments and follow-up notes more reliable. Toward this goal, SOLIDReporter is an add-in for Solidworks for the recording, management and analysis of time, events, and comments.

Jeff Rowe: Since SOLIDReporter is so new, can you provide our viewers a little background on it?

Paul Schommer: The idea is that we are tracking time in SOLIDWORKS based on the files that you have opened using the file name or the folder structure to automatically assign the time that you have spent in those files to the project that those files go with. So rather than trying to stop and start stuff manually, this is all just handling it automatically.

JR: Can you give some details about how it works and what it’s about?

PS: It’s very seamless with SolidWorks and runs in the background. You’re going to set it up once, define some rules for it to figure out your projects using your folder structure to match that up. And then it’s just gonna automatically record in the background. It is designed to be forgotten.

JR: It’s used primarily exclusively with SOLIDWORKS right now.

PS: Correct. It’s an add-in for SOLIDWORKS. It’s going to automatically handle all the time that you spend in SOLIDWORKS and then it has a function called inactivity which will recognize when you put focus outside of SOLIDWORKS or just leave the computer, that it will then ask you where you spent that time and then you can capture that side of it as well.

JR: Since SOLIDWORKS is undergoing kind of an evolution right now, I’m sure you’re going to evolve along with it as things change…

PS: Correct.

JR: With apps in the platform’s situation?

PS: We’re going to have to see where things go. We’re looking at the desktop product and we are just leveraging the local files to make that happen.

JR: Since you’re so new, I would assume you don’t really have any competition with this particular sort of thing.

PS: No, it’s a new product. We’re the only ones that are actually doing this timing stuff actually in Solidworks. There are other products that you can kind of tell how long Solidworks has been open, ut that doesn’t provide you any information about which jobs you are working or if you’re actually working in Solidworks.

JR: So it sounds like you can generate quite a bit of detail.

PS: Yes, absolutely. All this data we capture, we can then generate reports based on the specific projects, the specific user, a time frame, and we can spit that data out as PDF, CSV or HTML files.

JR: We were speaking earlier about what type of trends you seek in reporting but you said it’s more of a need-based thing than a trend.

PS: Yes, just about everyone could benefit from using, but not everyone realizes it yet. What we’re seeing so far is that people are manually using spreadsheets or word documents to try to track their time, and at the end of the day, it’s really just a guess. And so this is going to give you actual hard data that you can go to your boss, you can go to your customer. This is actually what I did. We’ve got an official looking report here. This is real.

JR: So where can our viewers go for more information about SOLIDReporter?

PS: Go to solidreporter.com.

Tags: SOLIDReporter

Category: Interview

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2020 at 00:10. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.