Mechanical Design

Back in September, Yoann Maingon over at Minerva, an Aras reseller, wrote a blog post that got my attention:Stop Starting PLM from Engineering!!! The gist of the post boils down to this excerpt. Start your implementation’s phase 1 out(side) of engineering and you’ll get live much faster. These people need integrated systems and their processes are more stable then in engineering. As you can see, it’s another traditional perspective on… wait… what?

Remember when Direct Modeling was rare. Seriously, more than five years ago, the modeling approach was pretty much relegated to being delivered to market by much smaller software providers. I’ll never forget a conversation I had with a head of product management at one of the largest CAD software providers. “That war was fought, and feature-based modeling won a long time ago”, he had said to me.

Back in June, I attended PLM Connections, the user event for Siemens PLM, in Las Vegas. Of course, there were a lot of product updates and announcements over the course of the conference. But there was one that caught my eye. The mainstream engineering folks at Siemens PLM (formerly Velocity Series) made some announcements about Insight XT, a PDM-like system that sits on top of SharePoint. They talked about numerous new enhancements to the product.

I had talked with Michelle Ringrose of NAFEMs on what they needed, and the answer was measuring the value of simulation. That fit in pretty well with some research I had been planning on conducting on the ‘Value of Simulation.’

Was anyone surprised that Autodesk acquired Inforbix? Well, actually, I was. Not that I didn’t think that Inforbix would be acquired. They seemed to be gaining traction in the market. And frankly, with Oleg as a loud and prominent evangelist, the concept and message behind Inforbix was getting out.

Ah, interoperability. A lot of changed over the course of the last few years. The CAD industry has become reinvigorated. 3D visualization seems to have become more focused on applications as opposed to just cool technology. PLM systems have started to become mainstream while more granular systems have simultaneously emerged. And despite all that change, at least one thing has been very consistent.

Sometimes, life throws little surprises at you that end up helping you think hard about things. One such opportunity came upon me just a while ago. An associate of mine in the industry suggested to the folks at NAFEMs that I present during their North American conference in Washington DC. If you’re not familiar with NAFEMs, …

Measuring the Value of Simulation Read More »

In the past three years, we’ve seen more dramatic change to the CAD industry that we’ve seen in the prior ten. Direct modeling has taken hold in many mainstream CAD applications. There has been an admission that 2D is a valid form of design and not just some laggard characteristic. There’s been a literal explosion of capabilities all related to design and engineering. All of these changes hint that there was a prior problem with how traditional CAD served users.

Over the past couple of years, the application of social technologies in the context of product development has been discussed quite a bit. I’ve written about many software provider’s efforts to include social technologies in their offerings, including Vuuch not just once but twice, PTC and Nuage. There are also offerings out there from Dassault Systemes, Autodesk, OneDesk and TeamPlatform. I am sure there are others.