PDS & FDS become one: Product Design Collection

People are wondering about their workflows now that Product Design Suite and Factory Design Suite have been combined into the new “Product Design Collection.” Many of my customer visits in the last three weeks have included the same question: “How is upgrading to Product Design Collection going to affect us?” All of my customer visits the last three weeks were also factory layout users. They have moved from AutoCAD to Factory Design Suite, or FDS. Having made the transition once already, they find themselves faced with the same task: move again.

The discontinuation of FDS and the new subscription model by Autodesk can be daunting for managers and IT departments – not to mention hardware requirements, OS support, developing new workflows, and retraining users. It’s no wonder that some of our customers feel the best course of action is to do nothing for right now.

In actuality, the best strategy at this point is to get informed. Establish three basic realities for your company.

• What operating system will my company be running in 2017, and on what hardware?
• What will be the data requirements for transferring files between customers and suppliers 24 months from now?
• What new technologies and standards will come into play, like 3D Laser Scanning, BIM requirements, cloud access, mobility, licensing models, industry requirements such as energy savings. The list can go on depending on your work environment.

Take back control: develop a three-year plan. It’s actually not as unnerving as many people think.

• Take a look at Autodesk’s Product Design Collection and what’s included here.
• Understand the difference between a perpetual license and a subscription
• Get help from the people who live it: an Autodesk reseller like Tata Technologies. We recently ran a webinar for our Autodesk customers explaining the transition from Suites to PDS, and have since made it available to the general public in the i GET IT Live archives. CLICK HERE TO WATCH OUR PRODUCT DESIGN COLLECTION WEBINAR.

Getting someone like us involved to help clear things up is not the only way to avoid feeling alone or overwhelmed; there are great websites to get information. One of them is the Autodesk Community. I use it a lot, especially lately because of all the changes.

GOOD LUCK, EVERYONE! Please do not hesitate to call us at 877-668-8282.