Eight in the morning. Double-click on the main assembly of a packaging line, well over two thousand parts, and the progress bar begins its familiar crawl. Time for coffee. By a quarter past eight the model is up, but the engineer spends the rest of the morning opening the associated drawings one by one: each time at exactly the moment he needs them, which means he sits there waiting for every single one.
That is why learning to open a large assembly faster in Inventor is only half the story: the real win is in the complete working session. In this article we look at how to open everything you need in one action in the morning, how to save and close in a controlled way at the end of the day, and which habits push the waiting back even further. The session tools in Thundercad play a leading role here, but the habits work without them too.
One boundary up front: this is about the workflow around opening, not about why a model itself loads slowly. If an assembly stays sluggish even on a strong workstation, first read Slow Inventor model? How to find the real culprits.
Where the waiting time really sits
The one long load of the morning stands out, but the scattered waiting that follows costs more. Take as an assumption an assembly that loads in four minutes and drawings that take one to two minutes each, at six to eight open actions per day. That engineer waits a good quarter of an hour per day, spread across moments that each land right in the middle of the work.
It is precisely that spread that makes it expensive. During two minutes of loading you pick up your mail, and ten minutes later you no longer remember why you opened that file in the first place. The waiting itself is then the smallest loss; the context switch around it costs a multiple. If you want to tackle the waiting, you should not just shorten it but above all bundle it: into one moment you choose yourself, instead of eight moments the work chooses for you.
Open your whole session in one action
The first step is bundling the open actions. With Batch Open in Thundercad you pick an assembly and Inventor opens the files that belong to it in one go, including the associated drawings. The engineer from the intro queues up the packaging line plus the three drawings he will be working on that day, starts the action and never has to look at it again.
The point is not that the minutes disappear; the point is that they coincide with time that was never screen time to begin with. Work planners who go through the schedule first thing, engineers who begin with a stand-up: almost everyone has a natural gap at the start of the day in which a session can load undisturbed.
Park your session and pick it up exactly as it was
The second step is to stop starting from scratch every morning. With Quick save you park your complete working session; with Quick load you bring it back exactly as it was, with the same files open. The little list of "what did I have open on Friday again" disappears, and it is exactly that list that eats most of Monday morning.
The same mechanism absorbs the rush job. Sales calls: a change has to happen right now for a customer who is waiting. Instead of clicking away forty documents or leaving everything open in a jumble, you park your session, do the rush job in a clean environment and afterwards load your own work back as if nothing happened. Switching between projects becomes a matter of seconds instead of a reorganisation.
Run the numbers on your own morning: every assembly and drawing opened separately is waiting time at the wrong moment. With Batch Open and Quick load you bundle it into one moment you choose yourself.
Try 30 days freeClose just as deliberately as you open
A session workflow has a back end too. Leaving forty documents open overnight carries real risk: after a freeze or an unexpected restart, unsaved work is gone, and an Inventor session that runs for days on end gradually gets stickier. With Batch Close you close the files of an assembly in one go, saving as you do, so shutting down becomes a deliberate action instead of a row of little crosses clicked on good luck.
Turn that closing into a fixed delivery moment: save, park the session with Quick save, close. The next day you begin with a clean start and a session that comes back in one action. How to roll out such a daily rhythm across the department, with a shared day start and a fixed delivery moment, is covered in Fixed routines for the engineering department: day start and delivery moment.
Habits that push the waiting back further
Beyond the tools themselves, a handful of habits shave away the remaining waiting time:
- Open only what you actually need for that part of the day, not the whole project "just in case": every unnecessary document costs load time and memory.
- Keep model and drawing together as a pair in your session: whoever changes a part will need the drawing within five minutes anyway.
- Switch projects by parking and reloading, not by leaving two projects open side by side.
- If Inventor grows sticky after a long session: park with Quick save, restart Inventor and load the session back in one action.
- Schedule the heaviest open action on a natural break: day start, work meeting or lunch.
The maths in minutes
Back to the engineer from the intro, with the assumptions from above: a good quarter of an hour of waiting per day, spread across six to eight moments. With a bundled session start, most of that coincides with the day start, and parking absorbs the project switches. The waiting time does not vanish completely, but it stops interrupting, and that was the actual problem.
Add the gains nobody clocks: fewer context switches, no puzzling over what should be open, a clean start every morning. On a department with three design engineers you are quickly talking about hours per week; above all, fill in your own numbers and tally it for a week. You will get used to measuring far sooner than to waiting.
Frequently asked questions
Does this approach help when the model itself is slow?
No, and that is an important distinction. The session approach limits how often you wait and at which moment, not how long a single file takes to load. If an assembly stays slow even when bundled, look for the cause in the model itself; we wrote a separate article on finding the real culprits.
What happens if I shut down without parking my session?
Then there is nothing to load back the next morning and you open the classic way, file by file. Quick load brings back what you parked with Quick save, so make parking a fixed part of your delivery moment, just as natural as saving.
Does this work with drawings included, or only with models?
Batch Open also opens the drawings that belong to the assembly, and a parked session contains everything that was open, model and drawing alike. It is most convincing on your own data: you can try Thundercad free for 30 days on your largest assembly.