A couple weeks ago, I found myself in an interesting conversation. I was talking with a software executive who was considering starting up a new software company in the simulation space. His most basic question was “where is the greatest need in simulation today?” I’ll be frank; I struggled to answer. Not because all of …
Technology Insights
The Diverging State of PDM
A little more than a year ago, I wrote post titled The PDM Revolution is Upon Us, Brought to You by CAD in the Cloud, which postulated what would happen as some PLM providers moved their CAD offerings to the cloud. Fast forward to today, and things haven’t quite played out as I suggested.
Direct Modeling is Better at Capturing Design Intent
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past five years, it’s that debate gives you new perspectives. Such was the case coming out of a webinar I presented in that was titled The Pros and Cons of 3D Modeling Paradigms: Direct Modeling and History-based Modeling. Brian Thompson of PTC and Dan Staples of Siemens PLM discussed which modeling approaches best fit the concept design and detailed design phases. The whole webinar is good, but the Q&A session at the end is where the real discussion began. That got me thinking about this topic.
PDM Capabilities: The Right Fit for Small Organizations
Technology can be a powerful thing. But is it always a good fit for every organization? The proposed advantages and benefits may sound appealing, but sometimes new tech can actually introduce more bureaucracy and disruption than it solves. In today’s post, I’ll look at what aspects of PLM and PDM systems make sense for smaller …
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Putting a Finer Point on Multi-CAD
Multi-CAD. Multi-CAD. Multi-CAD. It is all the rage today. You hear about it on webinars. You see it flashed at user conferences. It’s in many an eBook. But the more discussions I see on multi-CAD, the more I wonder if folks are really talking about the same thing. You see, there are many different facets to multi-CAD.
Simulations Conducted Within CAD Systems Are Faster, Research Finds
I have always wondered if any advantage that CAD provides to the simulation process could be quantified. Naturally, one would assume that CAD does, in fact, offer some value to simulation efforts. But to my knowledge, that has never been verified. In an effort to solve this mystery, I included several questions on this topic …
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The Trend Towards CAD Consolidation, Not CAD Standardization
For years, CAD standardization and consolidation have meant the same thing. But with advances in CAD tools, the meaning of those phrases are diverging.
Leveraging 3D CAD Data
Have you ever read Evan Yares’ stuff? If not, you’re missing out. He’s a really smart dude covering this space. Evan and I got to catch up at the 3D Collaboration and Interoperability Congress, where I presented findings from the 3D Collaboration and Interoperability Study. A couple weeks ago, Evan wrote up his own analysis of the findings in a post titled Leveraging 3D CAD Data. And he didn’t just regurgitate statistics. He provided some pretty deep analysis. And it’s good.
Transition from 2D to 3D Design Hasn’t Been a Clean Break for Most, Study Finds
In todays product-development environments, 3D models play an important role in design as well as the overall development process — there’s little doubt about that. But how far have we really come in the adoption and use of 3D data for product development?