Thursday October 3, 2019 at 2:59pm
Founded in 2002,
JM Adventure has come a long way since their one-man band and are now
providing unique outdoor course designs for a range of major companies such as
Center Parcs,
Scouts,
Royal Navy and many more. Every
project that JM Adventure works on is exclusive and bespoke for their specific
clients, so they have a lot of experience in composing outdoor courses for any
space.
JM Adventure recently switched their CAD software over to SOLIDWORKS,
this post is about this transition and how SOLIDWORKS has changed the way they
design and manufacture their projects.
We interviewed Adam Kiddell, Operations Manager at JM
Adventure, and Stefan Cole, their Technical Manager, to see how the changeover
went.
“JM Adventure have been using SOLIDWORKS for nearly a year,
we moved from Sketch Up which worked well but didn’t fit our needs anymore. We
needed something that gave us a conceptual system so we could provide customers
with a visual idea of what the end product would look like,” says Adam.
“When you get into the details and actually start using fabrication drawings and assembly drawings it’s clear that SOLIDWORKS is so far ahead on that, being able to
use drawings to communicate with the fabricators makes the whole experience so
much better”, adds Stefan.
“The immediate benefit for us was that everybody quickly got
used to the software, it fitted well within the business and within that time
the need for a second SOLIDWORKS licence naturally arose, it became very apparent
that this was the right software for us.
From a sales point of view, I was very keen to have the
renders in place so that I could show the client what the end product would
look like. The first thing a client sees is a drawing but that’s very hard to
put into context, once you put it into context with the beautiful finishes that SOLIDWORKS produces, the project really sells the vision.
Meeting face-to-face with Solid Solutions was an integral
part of the purchasing process, it worked for us in terms of us explaining our
needs, Solid Solutions coming back with a productive response, and what we
could benefit from, which
ultimately lead to the purchase”, claims Adam.
“We contacted Solid Solutions and they provided us with a free trial on SOLIDWORKS and we had a little play with that, however, without
any training, we were unable to get a full understanding of how you’d use the
software. Luckily Solid Solutions were able to come and visit us to give us a demo
of all the different features and how they would fit into our business which
was great and it left us feeling really positive,” says Stefan.
“The training
that Solid Solutions has to offer is completely valuable, it meant that the
guys didn’t muddle on and fond things out for themselves. This often leads to
mistakes or errors that can turn into bad habits.
We immediately went on the
training courses, the guys really understood it and recognised the benefits
immediately, it’s really improved our knowledge of the software.
If I can give a piece
of advice for people considering a new CAD software or looking for the right
vendor is do your research, make sure it’s the right software for you and get
in contact with the likes of Solid Solutions so they can understand your needs.
It’s an exciting time for us at JM Adventure as we have lots of different
products that are in development, all of which are through using SOLIDWORKS.
The market is changing and we need to stay on top of those changes, without the
use of SOLIDWORKS we wouldn’t be able to design our products in the initial
phases and then produce them after that.”
To find out more about JM Adventure, please visit: http://www.jmadventure.com