At last, I can post this update. I just migrated my old blog to WordPress and I can finally finish the story of our V6 implementation.
After all the hard work and hours of effort, we decided to scrap using V6 from Softtech. It was a very tough decision but sometimes you just have to accept that you’ve made a mistake. Despite all the work and effort to try to get all of the tools in place, it was not getting us where we needed to be. Speed issues plagued us. It was cumbersome to set up and tough to train. Updates to the database were slow. The shop drawing and VRML outputs were hacks.
My team worked very hard and did their best but in the end, it was just too difficult and we had lots of work that just had to get out the door. We decided to return to the software we had used originally (a mixture of Autocad and a database back-end). This got us back on track with the projects, cleaned up the outputs for the shop, and gave us a good starting place to move forward.
The V6 software is probably a better fit for a company that uses standard systems. We needed something that could work for all the custom projects that we do and also be able to generate the outputs (tickets, cutting lists, machine programming) that we need.
If you don’t have a few failures, you just aren’t trying hard enough. This was one of my biggest failures. I learned a ton from the experience and our company is better and stronger because of it. Our internal development has taken off and the software we are using today is remarkable. It took a lot of hard work and effort to get here, but I’m very happy with where we are today.
