Here is an Idea...

Do your customers use your products within their own designs? Do they use SolidWorks? Would they be more inclined to use your products if they could design them?

Using DriveWorksXpress to automate your designs internally has great time saving benefits. But if your customers could specify your products themselves, and instantly get a good representation to use within their design; would that increase your sales?

Obviously you would not want your IP, the design intent, the rules to get into your competitors hands. So now you have a project that does create all of your engineering data, why not create a dumbed down version that your customers can use?

Take a steel door for example, in house we need the developed (flat pattern) steel sheet that form the door blade to have all the punched cut outs for hinges, door furniture, apertures for windows, louvers, etc. The assembly needs to depict infill materials used, reinforcement positions, fixing lugs, etc.

Your customer does not need that much detail he may just need overall frame size, clear opening through the door, how far the door swings and relative positioning of furniture.

So instead of a fully engineered assembly consisting of many parts – you could probably get away with a 3 or 4 component assembly and the rules to drive this would just consist of simple maths and not disclose the real engineering rules used to design the product.

You could even drive a custom property value that creates a code you can use to enter into the full automation project once the order is accepted.