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Projects move faster than they used to. Clients change specs more often. And every change restarts the same series of checks: drawings reviewed against your standards, BOMs cross-checked between SolidWorks, the PDM vault and the ERP, configurations updated one by one.

That work rarely shows up in a project plan, but it lands on the people you can least spare: the experienced engineers who know your templates and your tolerancing rules by heart.

Three places the hours go

When we talk to heads of engineering, the same three complaints come back.

• “We wait on the tool.” Large assemblies take a long time to open, and engineers watch progress bars instead of designing.
• “We check everything twice.” Every revision means re-checking drawings and BOMs by hand, often carried by one or two experts.
• “We find errors too late.” A BOM error caught by purchasing or on the shop floor can cost €10K to €100K in wrong parts, rework and delay.

None of this is engineering. It is screen work: open, compare, copy, update, check in. It is repetitive, it is error-prone when people are tired, and it scales with every new revision.

Why macros only go so far

Most design offices already automate what they can. Macros and DriveWorks handle the rule-based part well, and they should keep doing it.

The checks that stay manual are the ones that need someone to read a drawing, understand what it shows and compare it with what another system says. They cross SolidWorks, the PDM vault, Excel and the ERP, and no single script sees all of them.

Agents that work in SolidWorks the way your engineers do

H agents work through the same screens your engineers already use. They read drawings, models and BOMs, understand what they are looking at, then act. There is no API to build, no migration and no new stack, and a SolidWorks update or a moved button doesn't break them.

• Drawing compliance checks: every drawing checked against your templates and tolerancing rules before release, with issues flagged for your engineers.
• BOM verification: BOMs cross-checked between SolidWorks, PDM and your ERP before anything reaches purchasing.
• 3D configurations: variants created and updated from your specs, following your own modelling rules.
• Engineering changes: a change applied across every affected part, assembly and drawing, so nothing is left behind.

Your engineers keep the final check. The agent does the clicking and tells them what needs a decision.

From one task to six workflows

A European engineering firm was growing fast while its client kept shortening project timelines. Its engineers spent days checking drawings and rebuilding BOMs at every revision. It set the agents two goals: deliver projects faster, and raise delivery quality.

It started with one task: check a file out of PDM, open the assembly, act on it, check it back in. Months later, its programme covers six SolidWorks workflows, including drawing compliance against 12 in-house templates, part generation, 3D configurations and BOM generation. It needed no API integrations.

Nothing in its stack changed. Its data stays in its own cloud, and its engineers still sign off on everything the agents prepare.

Your data stays in your perimeter

Drawings and models are your intellectual property, so where the agents run matters as much as what they do.

• Agents run on your own private cloud instance (Azure, AWS and others), through an outbound-only connection, with zero data retention.
• Every action is traced and can be replayed. Nothing is released without your engineers' review.
• You are never tied to a single AI model provider.

Start with your own numbers

A rough order of magnitude: a team of 30 engineers spending 20% of their time on checks, BOMs and configuration updates adds up to nearly 10,000 hours a year. The estimator on our SolidWorks page runs the same calculation with your headcount and your hourly cost.

Then pick the workflow you would hand over first. In a 30-minute call, an engineer from our team walks through it with you, and within a week you get a free written assessment: which steps an agent can take over, what you would need to provide, and the hours it would give back to your team.