SolidWorks CEO Manish Kumar released a blog discussing enhancements in both 3DExperience SolidWorks and SolidWorks with Cloud Services.
What are you most excited about in SolidWorks 2025?
Manish Kumar (MK): I am excited about the platform collaboration and performance enhancements in SolidWorks 2025.
We believe in empowering companies to deliver not only the best possible product but also an unforgettable customer experience. That’s why we enhanced platform collaboration, enabling you to easily share your models with industry peers, inside and outside your organization, by accessing communities directly from SolidWorks.
No matter if you use 3DExperience SolidWorks or SolidWorks with Cloud Services, you will benefit from the seamless integration with the 3DExperience platform.
Take, for example, multi-approval timestamps which help you enforce company rules on drawings. So, anyone who is part of the approval workflow, can easily log in from a web browser, review the drawing and approve it – anywhere and at any time.
The approval timestamp appears automatically on the drawing, alleviating the need for manual work.
We also took the tight integration with the platform to the next level with real-time notifications of status updates. If you are working on a model and someone has modified it, you will get a notification when you open the model.
When you get the notification, you will have the option to reload the data from the server or see the outdated components to understand what has changed. These notifications help ensure that you are always working with the latest version of your files.
So, these are the kinds of enhancements we are on a mission to deliver to help you make your workflows simpler and your efforts more productive. We know that working in silos has a high cost and real-time, seamless collaboration is a must. Breaking silos can only happen when we integrate tightly with the platform.
As for performance, don’t take my word for it – try out SolidWorks 2025 to see the dramatic performance improvements in both parts and assemblies.
Looking to accelerate part and assembly design? Look no further. Boost efficiency by leveraging selection accelerators for the Chamfer command to rapidly select edges. Copy assembly components along with their associated advanced and mechanical mates. Create a highly simplified part and make it associative to the parent part by using the Silhouette defeature method. Add a SpeedPak configuration at the top level of the assembly without needing to modify subassemblies.
Accelerate the calculation of mass properties for assemblies with previously calculated values for parts and bodies.
What user-requested enhancements are coming in SolidWorks 2025?
MK: We’ve made hundreds of user-driven enhancements in 2024 that are delivered throughout the year.
You have been asking for and we delivered a new History tab in the MySession panel, allowing you to see and track all actions performed on a model.
You also asked for faster plastic and sheet metal design and sketching. For example, for plastic parts, you can smoothly integrate the radius parameters for a seamless blend with the new “Continuous edge blend” option for variable radius fillets.
For sheet metal parts, you can automatically create customizable bend notches on the flat pattern bend line. In sketching, you can fix broken relations and dimensions due to missing references by reattaching broken sketch relations and dimensions.
Another much-requested enhancement is the ability to pattern reference geometry, such as planes and axes, which enables you to speed up skeleton model creation and build more flexible designs.
You can check the manufacturability of your designs faster with interference detection in large design review mode (LDR). Validate your design before going to manufacturing with the ability to check interference between surface bodies or surface and solid bodies.
Speed up the creation of assemblies with the ability to copy assembly components and their associated advanced and mechanical mates.
Edit assemblies in Large Design Review mode faster with a breadcrumbs selection that makes the selection hierarchy clearer.
Will there be changes to the product portfolio?
MK: Yes. I am excited about our latest offering, SolidWorks Ultimate, and the addition of NC Shop Floor Programmer to all SolidWorks packages and offers.
SolidWorks Ultimate is an end-to-end offering that builds on the tools and capabilities included with SolidWorks Premium. SolidWorks Ultimate adds cloud-based design, simulation, product lifecycle management, marketing, documentation and manufacturing tools, enabling and accelerating seamless collaboration for any product development workflow.
It offers all of these capabilities at an affordable price. By unifying design, engineering, simulation, manufacturing and go-to-market activities, SolidWorks Ultimate helps you eliminate siloed processes, allowing rapid iteration and exceptional product delivery.
True to our commitment to continue adding value to SolidWorks, we are including NC Shop Floor Programmer in all SolidWorks packages and offers with the SolidWorks 2025 release.
The advanced machining solution helps you validate your manufacturing designs and run what-if scenarios with nesting. You can empower CNC programmers with access to 2D fabrication programming, 3-axis, 3+2-axis, EDM and machine simulation to optimize tool paths before running the parts in the real world.
Will SolidWorks continue to be enhanced through multiple releases during the year?
MK: Yes, you no longer have to wait for an annual release to take advantage of the latest enhancements. For a couple of years now, we have been releasing new functionality throughout the year in our Service Packs (SPs) for SolidWorks with Cloud Services and Functional Deliveries (FDs) for 3DExperience SolidWorks. To access the latest enhancements, you need to update SolidWorks – whether 3DExperience SolidWorks or SolidWorks with Cloud Services. So, why wait?
And remember, with our fully browser-based solutions, available in the SolidWorks Cloud Offer, everyone is on the latest release all the time.
Dassault Systèmes
How is the SolidWorks product strategy evolving to better respond to new market needs and technologies?
MK: In my current role, I get to talk to a lot of our customers. I get to listen to frustrations and pain points.
For example, I am hearing about the need to predict manufacturing costs and reduce manufacturing errors. About delays caused by planning failures. People are struggling with tools that are not working well with each other. About communication silos where data has to be translated for other systems to use it.
While these issues appear unrelated, if you look deeper, they are all symptoms of a common underlying problem, a technology problem – lack of unified access to data.
So, we are on a mission to enable unified access to data – regardless if you use 3DExperience SolidWorks, SolidWorks with Cloud Services or the browser-based SolidWorks roles.
The 3DExperience platform delivers unified data access by ensuring all your tools and data are in one secure place. This enables you to leverage the latest technologies such as AI and data mining in conjunction with your company data and key software applications such as SolidWorks – all available in the cloud.
This makes it possible to generate history and rules-based insights that predict what a design should look like and automate repetitive, tedious tasks.
For example, have SolidWorks automatically select the edges that need to be chamfered or automatically finish your sketch. And why not automatically predict the number, size and material of bolts required to hold the cap of a pressure vessel, then create the holes and assemble them?