Do you know of any engineering project that is overstaffed? Yes. That was a serious question. But I’ll take that as a no nonetheless. In that context, I’ve seen increasingly that engineering managers, even though they have taken on more responsibility in terms of managing a team, are still asked to work as an individual …
Do ‘In-the-Trenches’ Engineering Managers Get More Respect? Read More »
It’s no easy task being an engineer today. While designing a product you have to take into account a huge variety of information like costs, inventory, preferred suppliers and much more in addition to form, fit and function. We talked at length about it during the Enabling Engineering Decisions panel discussion at the Collaboration and …
Actify Centro and Microsoft Sharepoint: The 3D Mashup Read More »
This series of four posts looks at the management of items, data and bills of material for mechatronic products. It is split into mechanical aspects, electrical aspect, software aspects and integrated aspects. When you think about it, managing the software aspects of a mechatronic product is, at least in relative terms, one of the most …
Mechatronics Management (Part 3): Software Aspects Read More »
When it comes to sourcing in terms of engineering, it’s interesting to watch the pendulum swing. Over the past decade, a lot of engineering work moved offshore. Either it was outsourced to companies that operated overseas or manufacturers moved their technical and R&D centers offshore. The trend lagged a little behind the movement to offshore …
A Glimpse into Reshoring Engineering in the U.S.? Read More »
This post reviews Z Corporation’s 3D printers and their applicability for use within the engineering office and design prototyping.
For me, today started like just about any other day. To get up to speed, I check my stream of tweets, LinkedIn updates and Facebook updates from people I’m following as well as the RSS feed from the blogs I follow. That’s when I saw a blog post that caught my eye, titled summarizing PTC’s …
Does it ever feel to you like there’s a disconnect between the reality in engineering and what’s most capturing the most buzz in the industry? Based on what you hear, you might think that engineering has gone to a completely digital process where nothing is prototyped until the last second in the design phase. But …
Direct Modeling. Seems like every other day there’s another announcement about it from a software provider. Some time ago, Autodesk joined the fray when they developed something called Fusion in the Autodesk labs. Curious about what exactly it would offer, I hopped on the phone with Rob Cohee, Evangelist for Autodesk Manufacturing (twitter @robcohee) and Garin Gardner, Product Manager for Inventor, to get a little bit better acquainted with it. Here’s what I found and my perspective on it.
Back in June 2010, Dassault Systèmes launched the beta version of DraftSight, which is actually developed by a german software provider called Gräbert. Then in February 2011, the beta ended and the general release of DraftSight was made available (press release). Of note is that this software is a free download. Also, Dassault Systèmes launched a social networking website based on their SwYm architecture to build up a community around DraftSight. And finally, Gräbert, the developers of DraftSight, announced in January 2011 the launch of a DraftSight app store (press release).