Technology Insights

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.

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 …

PDM Capabilities: The Right Fit for Small Organizations Read More »

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.

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 …

Simulations Conducted Within CAD Systems Are Faster, Research Finds Read More »

For years, CAD standardization and consolidation have meant the same thing. But with advances in CAD tools, the meaning of those phrases are diverging.

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.

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?

Continuous systems validation brings a whole new level of complication to simulation. In my first post in this series, we looked at how designs progress in various engineering disciplines. In the second one, we looked at how cross-disciplinary simulations are actually assembled out of these different designs. But furthermore, as the design progresses at the …

Continuous Systems Validation: Implications for Software Solutions Read More »

For the past three years, the CAD industry has been a really wild and fun ride. The ball started rolling with broad acceptance of Direct Modeling. It’s grown into a full blown peer of feature-based / parametric / history-based modeling. I think that technology has more maturing to complete, but its interesting that just about every CAD application out there now has some form of this capability.
The ball continued right along with 2D tools. We’ve finally seen this industry accept that, in some …