Solid Solutions – Supporting Wavepower

Solid Solutions – supporting Wavepower’s journey to create the world’s first commercially viable wave energy convertor.

Wavepower, a privately invested start up based in state ofthe art offices in the heart of the Somerset countryside, are on a mission to create the world’s first commercially viable wave energy convertor.  It’s a big job – trying to do something that could change the world – but with a world class team of senior engineers on board already, custom built beautiful offices with onsite testing facilities and the backing of successful businessman Adam Norris and established entrepreneur David Rubie-Todd, they might just be the company to produce the solution to one of the biggest problems currently facing the world, and create a source of clean, sustainable energy.

But this big job isn’t one that can be faced without some external support.  When one of Wavepower’s Senior Engineers, Richard Blackburn, established that the company would need to implement a CAD software to support the company’s continuing development, Solid solutions offered the best packages and services to suit their needs.  Here, Richard Blackburn tells us about how they made this decision, and how Solid solutions are supporting the Wavepower mission and the long term growth of the team:

Why SOLIDWORKS?

We reviewed the main CAD software options on the market, from very low cost cloud options to fully optioned well established players.  Overall we felt SOLIDWORKS offered the best balance to meet our needs taking into account factors such as ease of use, availability of a trained talent pool to recruit from, flexibility regarding add-ins, past usage experience of various CAD systems, compatibility with systems our suppliers and customers use, and weighing these up with overall costs.

Why Solid Solutions?

We needed a solution provider who could offer more than just a software sale.  We need access to training, support for installation, management and administration for the PDM system, and the ability to continue this support as we grow as a company.  Solid Solutions have a great in-house pool of experienced users providing support, a huge number of online tutorials to use for training, the Wednesday Webinar to maximise efficiency and utilisation of the tools we purchased, and the ability to respond quickly to our needs.  These features together with many others seemed to set Solid Solutions apart over their competition so we have committed to a long term relationship for mutual benefit.  We find the “MySolidSolutions” features very valuable.  Solid Solutions are also well established with 18 years as a provider and almost 100 staff we were confident they could meet our needs for many years to come.

Where are Wavepower now and where are we going?

We have 3 staff who are dedicated SOLIDWORKS users and several other staff who use it as required on an ad-hoc basis using our floating licence setup. We are planning to recruit experienced SOLIDWORKS users at a steady rate through 2016/2017, plus upskill existing staff using the Solid Solutions training courses for general and tool-specific training. We are expecting to be adding more seats as our recruitment and requirements advance.