PDM Single Source of Truth, Powered by Kenesto
Since 2017, this ten-person mechanical engineering firm has run its entire CAD workflow on Kenesto — one authoritative cloud copy of every file, automatic locking, and full version history, so a fully distributed team always works from the same current version.
An amusement ride designed by Apollo Engineering (image courtesy Theme Park Archive)
Apollo needed a true single source of truth for its CAD data from day one — but OneDrive caused lost files, Sync.com was too slow, and Box/Dropbox created storage and sync headaches without solving the problem.
Since 2017, Apollo has run its whole team on Kenesto: one authoritative cloud copy of every CAD file, automatic locking, and full version history — with no on-premises PDM to build or maintain.
Apollo’s fully distributed team works confidently from one current file, weathered COVID-19 with no workflow disruption, and gets support response times measured in minutes.
Why Apollo Needed a Better Approach
Apollo Engineering Design Group is a mechanical engineering and design firm headquartered in Logan, Utah. Founder Josh Adams, a professional mechanical engineer, started the company in October 2015. Today Apollo employs ten people delivering design and FEA services, including structural, vibration and shock, and thermal analysis.
From the beginning, Adams wanted a genuine single source of truth for the firm’s CAD data — but the tools he tried first didn’t get him there:
- OneDrive — used when Adams launched Apollo, but it led to lost data.
- Sync.com — adopted after hiring his first employee, but it lacked speed and performance.
- Box and Dropbox — considered and rejected because of their storage and synchronization burdens.
- On-premises PDM (e.g. SolidWorks EPDM) — ruled out; Adams had no interest in building or maintaining on-prem infrastructure. His goal was always a true cloud-based solution.
How Kenesto Became the Single Source of Truth
Apollo has been a Kenesto customer since 2017, and every employee runs the Kenesto drive on their computer. The firm’s CAD files live in the cloud as one authoritative copy — not a master file synced down into a dozen local versions. When someone opens a file to work on it, Kenesto locks it automatically, and every save creates a new version, building a complete, ordered history of every change.
What Changed for Apollo
Apollo’s team is fully distributed — everyone is located near the Salt Lake City metropolitan area, and most work from home offices, except for two interns based at headquarters. Adams says the company has operated this way since its founding, coordinating through chat and video conferencing while Kenesto keeps everyone working from the same current files.
As a result, COVID-19 had little impact on daily workflows. The only disruption came on projects where Apollo staff needed to be onsite with clients, and the team has since resumed its weekly in-person meeting at headquarters.
On Kenesto’s support team:
“[Mike Bacin has a] response time in minutes” and is “very quick to instruct his users on how to solve an issue or to get on TeamViewer and resolve it directly.”
— Josh Adams, Apollo Engineering
Vacuum chamber project (image courtesy Apollo Engineering)
From the beginning, we have always sought a PDM single source of truth for managing our data.
Josh Adams — Founder, Apollo Engineering Design Group
Go Deeper on PDM, Cloud Storage, and Apollo
Kenesto works differently from a typical shared drive or sync folder. Files live in the cloud as the single authoritative copy — not as a master file that gets synced down into a dozen local copies. When an engineer opens a file to work on it, Kenesto automatically locks that file, so no one else on the team can open and edit the same file at the same time. Every time the file is saved, Kenesto automatically creates a new version, building a complete, ordered history of every change.
The result is that the whole team — no matter where they’re located — is always working from the same current version, with a clear record of who changed what and when. There’s no manual check-in/check-out process to remember and no risk of two people silently overwriting each other’s work.
It’s a fair question: doesn’t Dropbox or OneDrive already do this? Not really — and the difference matters most for CAD.
Consumer cloud storage tools are built to synchronize files: they keep a copy on your computer and quietly sync changes to the cloud and back down to everyone else’s computer. That model works reasonably well for a single Word document. It breaks down for CAD data, where files are large, interdependent, and frequently edited by more than one person on a team.
Because there’s no file locking, two engineers can open and edit the same CAD file at once without any warning — and consumer tools have no way to merge two versions of a model or drawing, so one person’s changes get silently overwritten or the sync tool creates a “conflicted copy” that someone has to manually reconcile. Because every user’s computer holds its own local copy, teams end up with multiple versions of the truth instead of one — and if a local copy is deleted, corrupted, or simply falls out of sync, the data can be lost entirely.
Kenesto is built specifically around this problem. There’s one authoritative copy in the cloud, not a set of copies syncing between machines. Files lock automatically while they’re being edited. Every save is versioned. It’s the difference between a tool designed to sync general files and a system designed to be a PDM single source of truth for engineering data.
Founder Josh Adams, a professional mechanical engineer, built Apollo on experience designing amusement rides, autonomous robots, heavy construction equipment, and aircraft landing gear.
The company’s toolset includes SolidWorks, Ansys, and MathCAD, and Apollo expects to add solutions from Altair in the near future. The team also has experience with TeamCenter, Windchill, and ProEngineer.
Looking ahead, Adams hopes to see Kenesto expand its capabilities further. He’d like features commonly found in enterprise PDM systems, such as the ability to lock and control major product versions made up of multiple files.
Create Your Cloud PDM
Apollo Engineering did it in 2017. Give your engineering team one authoritative source for every CAD file — with automatic locking and full version history.