Vistagy has been a long-term third-party partner not just to Siemens PLM, but also to Dassault Systemes. Though DS has its own composite design solution, many of its most important customers use Fibersim. To say Vistagy has been an important partner for DS would be an understatement.

My interest in Vistagy is as a microcosm of the relationship between Siemens PLM and Dassault Systemes. Let’s face it: These two companies are serious competitors. Has Siemens acquisition of Vistagy upset a tenuous détente (if it can even be called that) between these two giants of PLM?

This week at Siemens PLM Connection, I got a chance to speak with Steve Luby, the current Sr. VP of Siemens’ Specialized Engineering Software business segment, and former CEO of Vistagy. He told me that he’d always been careful in maintaining Vistagy’s relationship with DS. Since Vistagy had been a long-term partner to both DS and Siemens PLM, he got used to treading carefully. Since the Siemens acquisition, Luby explained, DS has not done anything precipitous (such as tossing Vistagy/Siemens out of their partner program.)

But that’s not surprising. Doing that would be the equivalent of mutually assured destruction. It’d be tough to explain to the biggest aerospace firms in the world that, oops, they can’t use Vistagy’s products anymore.

My guess, though, is that DS is focusing big energy on improving their composite solution (which I understand is mighty competent already), with the eye to displacing as many seats of Fibersim as they can. Yet, even in the best of all worlds, that’s going to be hard to do. I can’t imagine Boeing, for example, dropping Fibersim from the toolset used on the 787 Dreamliner—a plane that’s 50% composites by weight.

I don’t anticipate that DS is going to open their doors, and let Siemens/Vistagy have completely unfettered access to their APIs (and customers!) The current Vistagy products, including applications for composites, airframe fasteners, and automotive/aerospace seating, are probably grandfathered in. But future Specialized Engineering (i.e., Vistagy) products?

It’s a big wild-card. The new Codex of PLM Openness that both DS and Siemens recently signed would suggest that the companies are going to play nicer together than they have in the past. Yet, my reading of the Codex is that it gives an awful lot of wiggle room.

The Siemens Vistagy acquisition presents a nice public context for DS to show that they’re committed to openness. To playing (competing) nice. If my reading between the lines is right, the situation is “so far, so good.” If you’re a Vistagy customer, and you hear anything different (good or bad), I’d sure like to hear about it.

3D CAD Tips

From my perspective, persistent bugs and software stability would be a good primary focus. But, let’s limit it to geometric modeling problems. Not just the run of the mill “fix this bug” stuff, but rather the real serious problems.

George Allen, Chief Technologist & Technical Fellow at Siemens PLM Software, wrote an interesting paper for an academic conference, where he talked about what he saw as the big geometric modeling problems in industrial CAD/CAM/CAE software. You can download a copy of the paper at this link.

In short, Allen sees three particularly tough problem areas: filleting, history-based models, and performance.

Consider filleting: According to Allen, “the filleting problem is important because it consumes a great deal of modeling time – typically as much as 40% in parts like castings, forgings, and sheet metal stampings.” He points out “the filleting functions in CAD systems are often unpredictable, counter-intuitive, and prone to failure. So, producing the desired results often requires considerable user skill, which means that the task can not be done effectively by low-priced inexperienced workers.”

The problem with history-based models starts when the replay (or rebuild) process fail—which often happens if parameters (or inputs) are changed substantially from previous ones. “When this happens, the user must ‘debug’ the model. He has to understand the sequence of steps that was used to build it, and find out which of these steps are failing, and why. The process is very similar to the debugging of programs — in fact, in a sense, a history-based model is a program. But, unfortunately, the debugging tools are very primitive compared to those available for debugging programs. As a result, people often just give up and rebuild the model from scratch.”

Allen sees two distinct problems in performance. First is with large models: “Our users are dealing with enormous models. A motor vehicle, for example, will typically have around 30,000 parts, and overall data size is likely to be around 15 or 20 gigabytes. The largest parts are complex castings like the engine block and complex sheet metal parts like the floor pan.” The second problem is less obvious; “that some operations take a few seconds, but users really need the computations to be done in real time (in other words, in around 1/30th of a second). Lack of real-time response makes some exploratory functions unusable, and this impairs user creativity.”

How much performance improvement would be enough? Allen says that “in either case, we need performance that is roughly 100x better than we have today, so clearly small incremental refinements of our current approaches will not be sufficient.”

In the paper, Allen suggests some possible solutions to these problems, but he really leaves things pretty open. The paper was targeted at academic researchers, to point them in the direction of research that would be of real value to developers of commercial CAD/CAM/CAE software—and ultimately, their customers.

Take a few minutes to download and read the paper. You’ll come away with a greater understanding of how challenging it can be to create good CAD software.

3D CAD Tips

ProSTEP started the initiative for a CPO in 2011 and developed version 1.0 together with BMW, Daimler, Dassault Systèmes, IBM, Oracle, PTC, SAP, Siemens PLM, T-Systems and Volkswagen.

The aim was to develop a common basic understanding on the subject of openness of IT-systems in the context of PLM. The partners definied measurable criteria in the process.

The CPO is a voluntary self-commitment for companies that is intended to generate seamless PLM data processes.

You can download a copy of the CPO from the prostep.org website.

The first question that might be reasonable to ask is why is the CPO even needed? The answer to that should be self evident: The big PLM vendors have not been open, and have been obstructing competition in the PLM market for years.

Yet, what do the big PLM vendors have to say?

Quite a lot, actually. Let me start with Dasault Systemes, which issued a press release on the CPO this week. (I’ll talk about some of the other vendors in follow-up posts.) Here’s a quote from that release:

“For 30 years Dassault Systèmes’ executive team has driven PLM relentlessly towards an open, unified collaborative experience for our customers,” said Dominique Florack, Senior Executive Vice President, Products, Research and Development, Dassault Systèmes. “Openness is critical to collaboration and, thus, innovation. Dassault Systèmes is very much in favor of the CPO and actively supports this effort.”

I was drinking a Coke when I read that, and almost spit it out all over my keyboard.

Let’s see if I have this right: BMW and Volkswagen, two of Dassault Systemes biggest customers, go to a lot of trouble to initiate the Codex of PLM Openness, and DS says “we’ve been open all along”?

Here’s what they’re not saying: These customers made it clear that they weren’t going to do any new business with any PLM company that wouldn’t agree to the CPO. DS had no real choice but to sign.

If you read the CPO with a jaundiced eye, you can see how the weasel word “should” is sprinkled throughout it. It’s written in a way that anyone, even the world’s biggest software monopolists, could sign it. (And, indeed, a couple of the world’s biggest software monopolists have signed it!)

I do want to give DS, and all the other big vendor signatories, the benefit of the doubt, that they’ll somehow change their ways, and become less obstructionist to competition. Yet it’s hard for me to do, and keep a straight face at the same time. (OK: I have asked DS for some information to back up their position on openness. If they come through with it, I’ll be completely thrilled to post about it here.)

While I keep open the possibility that the CPO will somehow change things, I can’t see it happening. If openness isn’t in a company’s DNA, it doesn’t matter what kind of voluntary agreement they sign. They’re not going to change.

3D CAD Tips

You can be forgiven if you don’t know what a “social innovation application” is. The best description I can cobble together is that it is a web framework, similar to a content management system (think WordPress, Drupal, Joomla), designed to manage communities of interest, and support business needs, such as ideation or knowledge sharing. Social networking with a PLM twist.

The name “3DSwYm” is a CamelCase acronym for “3D See what You mean.” It’s a play off of “3DS,” which is Dassault Systèmes’ trademark, combining “3D” and “DS.” Sometimes, DS uses the term “SwYm” to refer to sites built using 3DSwYm technology, and “SwYmers” (pronounced “swimmers”) to refer to the people who use those sites.

According to the DS press release, the new version of 3DSwYm (which I understand to be the V6R2013 version) incorporates semantic search, business processes and information intelligence experiences, and unleashes the power of communities for innovation. More precisely, DS has incorporated Exalead semantic search, and Netvibes widgets, and provides integrations to Enovia, and other enterprise systems. 3DSwYm is offered as software as a service (SaaS), and is hosted on a cloud infrastructure, by Outscale (a company in which DS has an investment.)

Probably the biggest user of 3DSwYm is Dassault Systèmes itself, along with its partners and customers. DS runs a number of 3DSwYm communities, for internal use, for partners, and for customers, under the www.3dswym.com (or swym.3ds.com) URL.

Here, for example, are some screen shots of screens that a DS employee might see when in 3DSwYm:

3DSwYm has a lot of capabilities, including custom dashboards, newsfeeds, wikis, questions, media, and quite a bit more. It’s a powerful system, and I suspect that it’ll be even more powerful when the V6R2013 version is deployed (apparently, in May.)

I’ve had a personal account on www.3dswym.com for some time now, since it’s the place where DS supports DraftSight, their free AutoCAD clone application. All totalled, I’m a member of 8 communities: SwYmer’s Hall, DraftSight, n!fuze, eCar Design Challenge, Open Source eCar, Realistic Human Simulation, Simulia Learning, and DaVinci 3D Experiences. I can only see 15 communities total on 3DSwYm, and the ones I’m not a member of are locked, and require permission to join. There are many more communities that I can’t see, as my login credentials (“DS Passport”) don’t authorize me to see them. (I imagine that were I a paying customer, I’d get access to much more.)

One of the irritations of 3DSwYm is that it is completely locked down: You can’t see or do anything without logging in first, and it doesn’t have the option of remembering you by saving a cookie. If you navigate to swym.3ds.com, you’ll be faced with a plain login screen. If you log in, and leave the site open for awhile (I just did overnight), it logs you out.

The last time I logged in, the website took about 18 seconds to initialize, and bring up the main page. That was on my 8GB quad-core Linux box, with a 20Mb/s internet connection. I thought that was a bit much, so I tried it on a big honkin’ HP Z1 workstation that I’d received to review. It took only 10 seconds. I say “only” with some irony: If Facebook took only 10 seconds to load its home page, the company would be in deep trouble. Remember Friendster? Performance problems ultimately contributed to its death.

3DSwYm has similar performance issues throughout the site. When navigating, it builds pages as you visit them. You can see the pages visually build up, element by element. When I went to the DraftSight page, for example, it took about 15 seconds for it to fully load up – despite the fact that its last update had been 7 hours earlier. Refreshing the page actually took sightly longer than loading it the first time. There appears to be no server caching.

One thing I’ve been curious about is whether 3DSwYm will have mobile clients. In the past, it hasn’t, and, even today, it won’t load on my Android phone’s browser. Since the site has a mechanism for asking questions (or, as they are called, “iQuestions”), I posted one. I got an answer back in about a day. 3DSwYm V6R2013 will be supported on the iPad, but with some restrictions.

I also asked Derek Lane,, DS PR manager for North America, about mobile clients. Here was his response:

There are mobile apps on iOS and Android. First, the two iOS apps are internal only. The first is an iOS version of our SwYm phonebook capabilities. Browse by photo (as you do albums in iTune or on iPhone/iPad), as well as all the other search capabilities and contact information our employees have come to expect. The second is a beta version of our internal SwYm solution ported to iOS. In case you didn’t realize, we use SwYm for our own social enterprise solution. Media, blogs, phonebook, discussion forums, detailed personal data, etc. Images attached to give you a sense of how we use it.

The third app is an award-winning Android app dedicated to “social shopping” developed by a third party partner using 3DSwYm. Link to a story about it here: http://www.thinkandgo-nfc.com/index.php/news/item/64-thinkgo-nfc-unveils-nfc-retail-solution-as-the-last-meter-influencer-at-wima-2011.html

Not all questions get answered quickly on 3DSwYm. Last November, when I was previously on 3DSwYm, I asked a couple of simple questions and never did get answers.

At the time, I thought I’d follow the iQuestions activitiy via RSS, since there’s a link to do that.

It didn’t work. I just tried it again, and got the same results: Google Reader can’t get to the RSS feed, because DS has the site locked down behind a password wall. I don’t know why 3DSwYm would offer an RSS feed if it doesn’t work.

Being obstinate, and slightly irritated, I decided to work around the password wall, using Yahoo pipes. The following URL lets any RSS reader login to 3DSwYm, to get an RSS feed:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=71a1422a9a0b48aabad6078e2985f579
&_render=rss&feedaddress=swym.3ds.com%2Frss%2Ffilter%2Ffeed%2Fcommunity_id%2F1
&login=[USERID]&password=[PASSWORD]

Is this the best DS can do?

There is no doubt that 3DSwYm has powerful underpinnings. But, as a social networking tool, it seems to be a failure.

Consider the DraftSight SwYm community. Despite there being on the order of 2 million downloads of DraftSight, and despite the DraftSight SwYm community being promoted by DS as the place for no-cost DraftSight community support, it appears to have a total of only 76 members, most of which are DS employees. It may be that there are many more members, and that I just can’t see them—but why create a community with no community?

Once people visit 3DsWym, they don’t seem to come back very often. Perusing the member lists, it seems that the only people who visit regularly are those who are paid to. Even many of the DS employees who are members of various communities seldom seem to visit.

I want to like 3DSwYm, but I can’t muster a lot of enthusiasm for it. There have been plenty of social networking websites that have promised much, and then flamed out. Remember Friendster? How about MySpace? Both of these showed how a few rough edges were enough to drive users away. And 3DSwYm has some serious rough edges.

The management at Dassault Systèmes likes to point out that they use 3DSwYm internally, with great success. That certainly makes sense: it’s an internally developed tool, and they can dictate its use by employees.

While individuals, such as myself, might find some use for 3DSwYm (such as in getting support for DraftSight), it’s really more of an enterprise tool. DS licenses its use to their customers, on a named-user basis.

I have no idea exactly how much DS charges their customers per-user to use 3DSwYm (In typical DS form, pricing is not published), it’s not likely to be cheap. The mere fact of named-user licensing makes 3DSwYm unsuitable for social product development use, where a company might want to engage with the public.

Monica Menghini, EVP Industry and Marketing for DS, says this about 3DSwYm:

“At Dassault Systèmes we care for delivering the right experiences to all industries, but we especially care for the ‘human’ behind the business process. Unleashing the power of each individual and connecting people in a more ‘social’ way within an organization is one of the key transformations facing industry this century. We are offering customers a value creation platform. Many disciplines within a company create value. All industries, from banking and insurance to retail, fashion, construction, energy, life sciences, transportation or aerospace, need to break down barriers and ensure value is created by all. 3DSwYm lies at the heart of our Social Industry Experience strategy.”

This sort of empty marketing-speak seems to be more and more common at DS these days. Rather than actually addressing the functional capabilities of their products, they talk about things such as “unleashing the power of each individual.”

If 3DSWyM is the heart of DS’s social industry experience strategy, they may be in trouble. It’s kind of a dull tool.

http://www.3ds.com/products/3dswym

3D CAD Tips

Autodesk has just released ForceEffect Motion. It too is free. It appears to be a phenomenal tool for doing conceptual design of kinematic systems. And probably a great excuse to ask your boss to buy you an iPad.

Autodesk ForceEffect Motion

3D CAD Tips

Creo 2.0

This release includes fresh and updated releases of the 9 existing Creo apps, and adds a 10^th new app called Options Modeler, which supports design-to-order and assemble-to-order. Picture, if you will, the kind of capabilities that major PTC customers such as Caterpillar and Deere might need, and you’ll get an idea of what Options Modeler is about. It integrates with Windchill, and can handle arbitrarily large and complex assemblies. It’s available today an extension to Creo Parametric and will be available as a stand-alone app in June.

With the new release, PTC is offering the free Creo Sketch app for Apple devices, and Creo Layout for doing 2D layouts as a front-end to 3D design.

Overall, PTC has added more than 490 enhancements througought the Creo like. PTC says that the quality, performance and usability of version 2.0 of the entire Creo family is dramatically improved from version 1.0.

Windchill 10.1

PTC has integrated Integrity with Windchill, and are leveraging it for comprehensive requirements management. Integrity is the tool PTC customers will use to capture and, ultimately, trace customer requirements across the product development lifecycle to ensure the product delivered most perfectly matches the product desired. Of particular note: PTC is using Integrity to manage requirements in its own development processes.

PTC has enhanced Windchill in several key areas, adding capabilities to help users ensure compliance with government relations and with industry quality standards. One important enhancement is the ability to monitor for the use of “conflict minerals” in a given product. They’ve also improved how reliability analysis is communicated, to ensure faster resolution of issues stemming from customer complaints.

With the introduction of Windchill Mobile, PTC is now supporting the iPad and iPhone. The software includes the “shake and break” feature demonstrated at last year’s PlanetPTC Live, in which users can “explode” the diagram of a product assembly by simply shaking their mobile device to see the internal parts in greater detail. I suggested an Etch-a-Sketch function, where turning it upside down and shaking it would erase your project files—but the PTC people told me that Microsoft already had a patent on that function, back from the days of Windows ME.

The official press releases follow:

PTC Advances MCAD Strategy with Release of Creo 2.0

Latest Release Introduces New App for Modular Product Design, Enhances Apps for Concept Design, and Improves User Productivity Across Creo Family

NEEDHAM, MA. – April 9, 2012 – PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC) today announced Creo® 2.0, the latest release of its revolutionary new generation of product design software.  Last June, PTC challenged the industry paradigm with the introduction of the first nine “apps” in its Creo family – conceived, in part, to enable a much wider range of roles to contribute to the design process with a set of integrated, purpose-built tools.  With Creo 2.0, PTC introduces a new role-specific app supporting modular product design that extends how organizations can approach concept design, and delivers significant productivity enhancements to its existing Creo apps.

“The release of Creo 2.0 demonstrates PTC’s unwavering commitment to deliver against our Creo strategy and solve the chronic challenges customers face with traditional CAD tools,” said Michael Campbell, divisional general manager MCAD segment, PTC.  “Built on PTC’s heritage of innovation, Creo rethinks the very nature of product design, increasing collaboration and protecting data fidelity across any user role, any design mode, or any data source.  Today, PTC is also delivering the first technology component in its vision for managing modular product designs driven by the bill of materials.”

Modular Product Design

With Creo 2.0, PTC introduces a 10^th app to the Creo family – Creo Options Modeler™ – a new role-specific app built for designers who need to create or validate modular product designs in 3D early in a design cycle.  The new app, available this summer, delivers a dedicated, easy-to-use, powerful set of capabilities to build accurate, up-to-date, precise 3D-based product assemblies, irrespective of size or complexity. When used with Creo Parametric™, Creo Options Modeler enables teams to validate precise mass, center of gravity, and even check and resolve critical issues like interference for modular designs.

Creo Options Modeler contributes to PTC’s AnyBOM™ Assembly technology vision, which promises to give teams the power and scalability needed to create, validate and reuse information for modular product architectures.  By combining Creo Options Modeler with PTC’s Windchill® product lifecycle management software, manufacturers can generate and validate precise 3D representations of product configurations defined by an individual bill of materials.

By enabling easier reuse of existing 3D models and through innovative interface tagging, the new app can reduce process errors and engineering rework.  As a member of the Creo product family, Creo Options Modeler also seamlessly leverages and shares data between other Creo apps, and with other people involved in the design process and beyond, further increasing detailed design and downstream process productivity.  

Rethinking Concept Design

Many companies prefer to start concept designs in 2D to quickly explore multiple options before moving to build more complex 3D models.  With Creo 2.0, PTC delivers on its vision for enabling companies to make the most of this early stage of their product development process.  The new releases of Creo Parametric, Creo Direct™, the free Creo Sketch™ (now available on Mac OS X with this release), and Creo Layout™ combine to greatly enhance collaboration, innovation and design exploration during concept design.  Since all Creo apps share a common data model, 2D geometry and design data can be easily shared by all users and apps and can be re-used later in the design process to accelerate the transition to the detailed design phase.

In Creo Layout 2.0, PTC is helping to solve the specific problem of transitioning from 2D to 3D, allowing users to easily create a layout of complex assemblies, quickly explore design alternatives, import a variety of 2D CAD file types, sketch and modify 2D geometry, organize information with groups, tags and structure as well as dimensions, notes and tables.  Once created, a 2D design in Creo Layout can serve as the basis for 3D models, allowing users to create assemblies in 2D or reference 2D geometry to create part features, and any changes made in 2D are reflected in 3D upon regeneration.

Productivity Enhancements

In the new release, PTC delivers more than 490 enhancements to the Creo app family, all designed to optimize the user experience and increase design productivity. 

Creo Parametric enables increased productivity and streamlining of the overall product design process with:

·        Freeform Surfaces – With the enhanced freestyle capabilities, designers can quickly and easily create more refined surfaces with higher levels of detail while still maintaining top level control over the general freeform shape. This significantly reduces the time to move concepts to precise, highly-detailed aesthetic product designs.

·        Cross-sections – Designers working in 3D cross-sections gain complete product insight with new, intuitive, and fast ways to create and dynamically re-position the sections, including instant access directly from the model tree.  Real-time interference detection within a section together with 2D visualization helps designers fully visualize the design, design changes, and detect and address potential issues early.  The new tools significantly enhance productivity when working in cross-sections and provide a rich design environment that accelerates the overall design process.

·       Measure – The new streamlined measure tool offers significant performance and usability improvements.  Designers can quickly gain detailed insight into key dimensions and measurements of any selected surface.  By controlling how and where measured results are displayed on-screen, and allowing for simple re-use of the displayed values into other applications, such as a Word document, designers can improve the efficiency and accuracy of leveraging precise measurements during the design process.

·        Track Changes – The new track changes capability in Creo Parametric allows designers to view, accept or reject model changes made by others using Creo Direct.  Designers can now work with a broader range of roles across the company while still maintaining full control of how changes are reflected in the parametric model.  This ensures design intent is fully maintained. Irrespective of modeling approach or Creo app, teams can now truly work together.

Overall, Creo Parametric delivers state-of-the-art user experience, new capabilities, automates common tasks, improves performance with streamlined workflows and enables dramatically improved overall design productivity.

Beyond Creo Parametric, PTC delivers significant enhancements to other Creo apps.  New capabilities in Creo Direct help accelerate bid-proposals and early concept design.  Casual users can now quickly and easily create new compelling 3D designs.  They also can easily modify models by reference to existing geometry of available parts and assemblies or quickly, but precisely place multiple parts and assemblies into position with the new intelligent snapping capabilities.

And as Creo Direct seamlessly works with Creo Parametric and other Creo apps, any 3D design can be shared by users across the enterprise design process.

In addition, this latest release greatly simplifies the installation process for Creo, only downloading and installing the Creo apps specific to a customer’s environment and license entitlement. This speeds download and significantly simplifies installation and configuration enabling teams to get up and running with Creo more quickly than ever before.

More information will be shared at PTC’s upcoming annual user event, PlanetPTC Live.

Additional Resources:

·        Creo Product Page  (website)

·        Creo Options Modeler  (website)

·        Creo Parametric  (datasheet)

·        Creo Layout  (datasheet)

·        Creo 2.0 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

·        Creo 2.0 Top Ten Reasons to Upgrade (datasheet)

·        Introduction to Creo Layout  (video)

·        Images & Captions

·         Creo Ready Software and Hardware Partners

Availability

Creo Options Modeler is available for purchase today as an extension of Creo Parametric.  It is expected to be available as a stand-alone app in June 2012.  All other Creo 2.0 apps are available now.

About PTC

PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC) enables manufacturers to achieve maximum value from their product strategies with software and services designed to optimize key business processes throughout the entire product lifecycle – from conception and design to sourcing and service. PTC’s integral solution portfolio enables customers to unleash product innovation, improve collaboration and ensure product data integrity within engineering and across the enterprise, supply chain and service partner networks. Founded in 1985, PTC employs over 6,000 professionals serving more than 27,000 customers worldwide. More information can be found at www.ptc.com.

PTC Extends Windchill Capabilities, Integrates with Integrity

Company Leverages Integrity for Comprehensive Requirements Management

NEEDHAM, MA. – April 9, 2012 – PTC^® (Nasdaq: PMTC) today announced the latest version of its Windchil^l® product lifecycle management (PLM) software, which is now also integrated with PTC’s recently acquired Integrity™ software system lifecycle management technology.  Windchill 10.1 introduces sweeping enhancements to the product’s capabilities in a wide range of areas, while integrating Windchill with Integrity raises the bar for how manufacturers gather and manage requirements and trace related changes.  In addition, Windchill Mobile™ is now available from the Apple iTunes store for the iPad and iPhone.

“At PTC, our goal is to help manufacturers find new ways to compete in their markets, and to make their success repeatable over time,” said Brian Shepherd, executive vice president, PLM Segment, PTC.  “With this new version of Windchill, we’ve not only enhanced a number of critical functional areas, but we’ve also made major improvements to the user experience and serviceability of the product across-the-board.  We believe that PTC is continuing to set the pace for the value companies can generate when they deploy enterprise-class PLM technology.”

Do More: Comprehensive Requirements Management from Integrity

Less than a year after being acquired by PTC Integrity is dramatically expanding PTC’s footprint of capabilities.  Specifically, PTC has integrated Windchill and Integrity to combine the rich, collaborative requirements authoring and management capabilities of Integrity with the powerful “flow-down” traceability offered in Windchill.  This combination delivers powerful, comprehensive requirements management capabilities and enables manufacturers to improve product quality, reduce rework and improve time to market.

In addition, Windchill now integrates with the software change and configuration management capabilities of Integrity – and other leading tools – to manage defects and issues, as well as enable software releases to be synchronized with product configurations.

Requirements gathering and management is one of the most critical aspects of a product’s lifecycle.  According to industry analyst firm CIMdata, “Requirements management is all about balance—preventing one class of requirements from overriding another is critical. Effective requirements management ensures that the voice of the customer is captured and managed throughout the lifecycle of the product. This enables a company to design, build, and deliver products and services that meet or exceed their customers’ needs and expectations.”[1]

In addition, Windchill’s core configuration management capabilities have been further enhanced to provide advanced support for configurable products.  Together with new digital mock-up capabilities in Creo® 2.0, these enhancements in Windchill contribute to PTC’s AnyBOM™ Assembly technology vision; promising to give teams the power and scalability needed to create, validate and reuse information for modular product architectures. 

PTC is also extending the breadth of product-related content that can be managed in Windchill for retail and consumer product companies.  With a new version of its FlexPLM technology, companies can now reference CAD models managed in a Windchill environment – giving retail product designers much greater visibility and understanding of how to work with products that have both hard and soft goods (e.g. a chair’s frame and fabric).

Know More: Track Compliance, Quality, Cost

In the critical area of compliance, PTC has extended Windchill’s capabilities for tracking and monitoring regulated materials use.  For example, the recent Conflict Minerals legislation passed by the US Government drove the introduction of new management and reporting capabilities to help manufacturers identify and assess the compliance status of products containing the regulated minerals of tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold and their many derivatives. This allows companies to effectively protect their corporate brands, mitigate risk of non-compliance with government regulations and customer requirements, and avoid possible fines and penalties.

To further assist manufacturers with their quality initiatives, PTC has enhanced how Windchill analyzes the latest product structure information to provide early and accurate insight into product reliability.  For example, critical-to-quality characteristics identified in Creo are automatically communicated to Windchill Quality™ offerings for risk and reliability analysis, associating these characteristics with the test plans and manufacturing controls designed to ensure their quality.  A new Windchill Customer Experience Management™ module provides a highly-structured and automated process flow to trace and respond to customer complaints about product quality.  This enables a company to consistently resolve quality issues in a manner compliant with government regulations or quality management standards.

PTC has also enhanced how companies can accurately track product cost estimates and maintain related historical information by managing and displaying product cost information in multiple currencies.

Get More: Windchill Goes Mobile

With the new release, PTC is introducing a new Windchill Mobile app, giving users instant “anytime, anywhere” access to current product and process information.  Windchill Mobile includes an innovative “shake and break” capability that allows users to explode a product assembly by simply shaking their mobile device to see the internal parts in greater detail.  This helps companies improve worker productivity, regardless of whether they’re on the road, the manufacturing floor, or visiting a customer.  Windchill Mobile is available today to download from the Apple iTunes store for both the iPad and iPhone.  Windchill also now supports Apple users even if they aren’t on a mobile device with support for Mac OS X.

PTC has also simplified the Windchill system administration tools to improve reliability and lower overhead associated with running a Windchill installation.  For example, the new PTC System Monitor continuously checks the Windchill production environment to give administrators greater visibility into system performance, allowing proactive detection of potential bottlenecks before they impact end users, and reducing time to repair.

Finally, Windchill continues to build on the dramatic improvements PTC introduced in its user experience, making great use of graphical information and further simplifying workflows to accelerate tasks.  For example, the new Relationship Explorer allows users to visually navigate between related parts, documents, CAD designs, requirements, and change objects.  This allows users to quickly navigate across product structures to find the information they need.

More information will be shared at PTC’s upcoming annual user event, PlanetPTC Live.

Additional Resources:

·        What’s New in Windchill  (web site)

·        Windchill Interactive Experience(web site)

·        Windchill product page  (web site)

·        PTC’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Resource Center (web site)

·        PTC’s Quality Lifecycle Management Resource Center (web site)

·        PTC’s Product Analytics Resource Center (web site)

·        Windchill 10.1 Frequently Asked Questions ( FAQ)

·        Images & Captions

·        What’s new in Windchill 10.1 (video) 

·        Requirements Management (video)

·        Windchill Mobile (video)

Availability

The Windchill capabilities described above are available now, with the exception of integration with Integrity (available in early May 2012), FlexPLM (available in May 2012) and Windchill Quality offerings (available in July 2012).  The timing of any of these remaining product releases, and any features or functionality thereof, are subject to change at PTC’s discretion.

About PTC

PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC) enables manufacturers to achieve maximum value from their product strategies with software and services designed to optimize key business processes throughout the entire product lifecycle – from conception and design to sourcing and service.  PTC’s integral solution portfolio enables customers to unleash product innovation, improve collaboration and ensure product data integrity within engineering and across the enterprise, supply chain and service partner networks.  Founded in 1985, PTC employs over 6,000 professionals serving more than 27,000 customers worldwide.  More information can be found at www.ptc.com.

PTC, Windchill, Windchill Quality, Windchill Mobile, Windchill Customer Experience Management, Creo, Creo Options Modeler, FlexPLM, and Integrity are trademarks or registered trademarks of Parametric Technology Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

3D CAD Tips

For Siemens PLM Software to win GM’s Supplier of the Year award for the fourth time is really something.  The award is given based on ratings for quality, service, technology, and price.  It’s not something that a supplier can get by playing golf with the chairman.

The people at Siemens PLM should be justifiably proud of this honor.  Then, they should take a big breath, and get back to work, because millions of engineers are counting on them for the tools to help them get their jobs done better.

The official Siemens press release follows:

Siemens PLM Software Receives General Motors Supplier of the Year Award for the Fourth Time

GM Supplier of the Year Award for IT Builds on Siemens PLM Software’s Strong Momentum in the Global Auto Industry

“We Look Forward to Continuing to Contribute to the Remarkable Resurgence and Excitement of the new GM,” says CEO, Chuck Grindstaff

DETROIT, April 10, 2012 - Siemens PLM Software today announced it has received the prestigious 2011 General Motors Supplier of the Year Award at a ceremony held March 13th at the Detroit Institute of Arts. GM cited the important role that Siemens PLM Software has played in the automaker’s efforts to design, build and sell the world’s best vehicles. This is the fourth time the global supplier of product lifecycle management (PLM) software has won this award, which rates suppliers in a variety of categories including quality, service, technology, and price.

“Siemens PLM Software’s partnership, and dedication to consistently perform above expectations, contributed to both our companies’ success,” said GM executive, Timothy Cox. “The entire GM team appreciates the efforts of the Siemens PLM Software team and wants to recognize the entire organization for its performance.”

“After working so closely with the incredible team at GM to thoroughly understand their requirements and deliver the solutions they need to build some of the world’s best cars and trucks, it is particularly gratifying to be named a 2011 General Motors Supplier of the Year,” said Chuck Grindstaff, CEO and president, Siemens PLM Software. “We know that understanding our customers and the industries they serve has helped us formulate a unique and practical vision for PLM that has contributed to the unmatched growth and momentum we are experiencing in the global automotive industry. So we want to thank General Motors for this award and for their partnership. We are truly honored to have been selected from such a prestigious list of IT suppliers, and we look forward to continuing to contribute to the remarkable resurgence and excitement of the new GM.”

Siemens PLM Software supplies General Motors with a comprehensive set of integrated software, services and expertise to help automate their entire product lifecycle process. The offerings in use at GM include, but are not limited to, NX™ software for computer-aided design, manufacturing and engineering analysis, Teamcenter® software for digital lifecycle management, andTecnomatix® software for digital manufacturing automation and simulation.

Broad automotive leadership, unmatched momentum
Siemens PLM Software has experienced unmatched momentum and established a broad leadership position in the global automotive industry by adding several prominent automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and suppliers to its customer base over the past several years. Its technology is now used throughout product development and manufacturing by more than 90 percent of the world’s top 15 automotive OEMs and nearly 90 percent of the top 25 Tier One auto suppliers. In fact, Siemens PLM Software technology is used in the development of more than 80 percent of all the vehicles produced worldwide by all 47 of the world’s top OEMs ranked by the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers (OICA).

About Siemens PLM Software
Siemens PLM Software, a business unit of the Siemens Industry Automation Division, is a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services with 7 million licensed seats and more than 71,000 customers worldwide. Headquartered in Plano, Texas, Siemens PLM Software works collaboratively with companies, delivering open solutions to help them make smarter decisions that result in better products. For more information on Siemens PLM Software products and services, visit www.siemens.com/plm.

About the Siemens Industry Automation Division
The Siemens Industry Automation Division (Nuremberg, Germany) supports the entire value chain of its industrial customers – from product design to production and services – with an unmatched combination of automation technology, industrial control technology, and industrial software. With its software solutions, the Division can shorten the time-to-market of new products by up to 50 percent. Industry Automation comprises five Business Units: Industrial Automation Systems, Control Components and Systems Engineering, Sensors and Communications, Siemens PLM Software, and Water Technologies. For more information, visit www.siemens.com/industryautomation

Note: Siemens and the Siemens logo are registered trademarks of Siemens AG. NX, Tecnomatix and Teamcenter are trademarks or registered trademarks of Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and in other countries. All other trademarks, registered trademarks or service marks belong to their respective holders.

3D CAD Tips

There are three general groups of people who are going to be interested in Active Workspace: those who use Teamcenter, those who’ve thought about adopting Teamcenter, but haven’t made the jump yet, and those who are using competing PLM solutions, who will likely be telling their suppliers “we want something like this.”

Siemens PLM describes Active Workspace as “a personalized environment for accessing the entire PLM ecosystem, which provides all PLM users with the right information at the right time to make the right decisions. Active Workspace delivers high-performance search and visualization capabilities, simple yet powerful collaboration tools, and a groundbreaking user interface. Active Workspace delivers the multi-disciplinary decision support platform that PLM workers need to make smarter decisions and better products.”

So, Active Workspace connects users to the resources (people and information) they need to get their jobs done better.

Siemens PLM Software CEO Chuck Grindstaff puts it this way: “All companies and individuals face the challenge of dealing with information overload due to the increasing speed and volume of data coming from multiple sources. Active Workspace helps companies manage this challenge and significantly enhances decision making by reducing complexity and intelligently presenting PLM information that is accessible for all users… Active Workspace creates an intuitive and personalized 3D graphic interface that significantly enhances the ability of our PLM suite of offerings to deliver knowledge instantly to the right people, at the right place and in the right context to support rapid and intelligent decision making.”

Like I said, it connects users to the resources they need to get their jobs done better.

Joe Barkai, the Practice Director for Product Lifesyle Strategies at IDC, explains it a bit differently: “The constant increase in product complexity creates a need for a strong multi-disciplinary decision support platform that makes information exchange and collaboration simple, intuitive and effective. A dynamic decision support system, like Active Workspace, creates rich technical and business context to enable intelligent, high-fidelity decision making.”

Like I said, it connects users to the resources they need to get their jobs done better.

You might call Active Workspace a “dashboard.” It’s the place where a user will come to at the beginning of their work day. Here are Active Workspace’s major features:

Visualize and Navigate Product Data

• Allow users to easily locate, browse and visualize products in greater detail using intuitive graphical controls.
• New high-performance visualization capabilities allow users to view products in a fraction of the time previously required.
• Intuitively see and understand how data relates to the network of information that supports and defines it, helping users make timely, high-quality decisions.

Compare and Report Product Information

• Easily investigate rich PLM information directly on the 3D product model with color-coded, easy-to-understand, visual reports.
• Create visual reports without the need for training or support from IT.

Configure and Share Contexts

• Save the recipe for decision contexts by utilizing our innovative new shelf.
• Share information with another user or a whole group of users − whether it is a filtered list of search results, a color-coded visual report, or anything else – by dropping it on the shelf.
• Once something is on the shelf, anybody else with access can reference the data, confident that the information is accurate and current.

Collaborate Effectively

• Active Workspace will proactively suggest appropriate people for users to collaborate with based upon the context of the information they are reviewing, helping make sure they engage the right people to assist in making the right decision.
• Collaboration tools are seamlessly integrated into Active Workspace, keeping users in a single tool and allowing them to get the answers they need faster.
• Active Workspace integrates with e-mail and instant messaging, as well as Teamcenter Application Sharing, providing numerous ways to share information.

Find What You Need Faster

• Return search results faster than ever before, bringing information to the user almost instantly.
• Enable users to find and access information from anywhere in their PLM ecosystem, not just information managed by Siemens PLM Software products.
• Intuitive filtering allows users to quickly narrow search results down to just the information they require without having to know a lot about that data beforehand.
• Embedded shape search capabilities allows users to find components that are geometrically similar.

Here are some images that show screen shots from Active Workspace.  Click on the images to see high-resolution versions of the images.

Active Workspace suggests key stake holders for a user to collaborate with on this product.

An Active Workspace user views the product in intuitive 3D and sees the relationships to other information at the same time.

A user views high performance, realistic graphics in Active Workspace.

Systems Engineering relationships are clearly displayed in Active Workspace.

A user views a color coded graphical report directly on the 3D product model in Active Workspace.

Search results from multiple sources are clearly displayed to the user in Active Workspace.

Why is Active Workspace a big deal?

What Active Workspace isn’t is a shiny front-end pasted on a PLM system, just to make it look sexier.  It is a serious tool to help engineers to get their work done faster and better when dealing with information overload and organizational complexity.  It’s just what a good tool should be: a force multiplier.

Siemens PLM Software 

3D CAD Tips

Benjamin: “Yes, sir.”

Mr. McGuire: “Are you listening?”

Benjamin: “Yes, I am.”

Mr. McGuire: “Plastics.”

- The Graduate, 1967

Dassault Systemes SolidWorks Corp this week announced a new product: SolidWork Plastics.

Actually, it’s not strictly new, and it’s not just one product. SolidWorks Plastics was developed and originally sold by Simpoe, a provider of plastics injection molding simulation software. Dassault entered into an agreement whereby SolidWorks will now sell the software under their banner.

There are two versions of SolidWorks Plastics. The Professional version (US$4,995.00) is for people who design plastic injection molded parts. The Premium version (US$14,995.00) is for mold designers.

If you’ve been using SolidWorks for a few years, you might remember that the 2007 version came with MoldflowXpress, a limited function molding simulation tool that included a generic materials database, part-only analysis, single gate location, and a go/no go result, showing whether a part would fill. MoldflowXpress was what you might call a “good enough to be useful, not good enough to take sales from our more expensive products” tool. Still, it was pretty useful, and nicely integrated into SolidWorks. It became unavailable about the same time SolidWorks’ arch-competitor Autodesk purchased Moldflow. (Imagine that!)

After MoldflowXpress went away, Simpoe was one of the companies that stepped up to the plate, to offer a “gold” partner product for plastics simulation running embedded in SolidWorks.

I’m guessing that users were happy enough with the Simpoe products that Dassault decided to bring them into the fold.

SolidWorks Plastics Professional is quite a bit more capable than MoldflowXpress ever was. It allows parts designers to verify uniform wall thickness (a fundamental best practice of plastics part design), optimize the thickness of features such as reinforcing ribs to avoid sink marks, and predict (and either minimize or eliminate) weld lines. It includes a material database with around 5,000 grades of commercial plastic. It has a very useful set of capabilities for people who design plastic injection molded parts. (And SolidWorks is probably the leading CAD tool for this purpose.) The important thing about SolidWorks Plastics Professional is that it lets parts designers verify manufacturability early in the design process, long before cutting any tool steel. It’s not trivially inexpensive, but compared to the cost of a few trashed molds it’s a bargain.

SolidWorks Plastics Premium is for mold designers. It’s a big-time full-function mold analysis tool, supporting analysis of single-cavity, multi-cavity and family mold layouts, runner balance analysis, and providing a wide range of report plot types for identifying and rectifying problems. It comes with automated report generation capabilities, for sharing results with others. A significant benefit of SolidWorks Plastics Premium, when compared to standalone analysis solutions, is that runs embedded inside of SolidWorks, and uses familiar workflows. Its learning curve should be comparatively easy for experienced SolidWorks users. It should go without saying (but probably doesn’t) that learning curve and usability are exceedingly important, even for people who are domain experts.

While SolidWorks Plastics isn’t technically an entirely new product, now that it’s part of the SolidWorks family, it’ll probably get more attention from resellers, and more awareness among users.  All told, a good thing.

DS SolidWorks Corp. www.solidworks.com/sw/products/plastics-injection-molding.htm

3D CAD Tips

The interview is about 12 minutes long. About 2 minutes in, Bass makes possibly the most interesting comment in the interview:

“I’d say two to three years from now, every one of our products will be used online. The only way to use them will be online.”

If that happens, it will be a truly transformative and disruptive event.

But how can it possibly happen?

Autodesk has, over the years, built or bought a large stable of high-end graphics applications, including 3DS Max, Maya, AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, and many others. The company continues to invest massive resources in all the tedious details of updating, fixing, and connecting these products. Customer wish lists still include items from years ago. Performance and bugs are still issues. Within this context, how can Autodesk transform the architecture of these major applications, used by on the order of 12 million people, so that they will run efficiently online?

Possibly the answer will reveal itself. Two or three years from now. If they manage to pull it off, it’ll be impressive.

3D CAD Tips