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• Can PLM help manufacturing cope with rising energy prices?
• Live Rules Introduction
• Greening the executive suite
• PLM, Pacific-style
• Why The Ribbon Bar is Right
• Still discovering the power (and excitement) of Synchronous Technology
• Getting broader exposure
• Addressing feature tree failure and recomputes
• Dan Staples knows Sychronous Technolgy best
• Canadian manufacturing face challenge

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Can PLM help manufacturing cope with rising energy prices?

Posted Jun 30, 2008 - 07:10 PM by Chris Kelley

Got a chance this morning to read today's Wall Street Journal cover to cover (3 hour plane flight with accidentally dead PC battery) and ran across an article discussing how skyrocketing energy costs are starting to impact manufacturers.  The gist of the article is as higher energy costs translate in higher transport costs rise, some of basic assumptions used to build manufacturing strategies over the past couple of decades are starting to unravel.  The availability of cheap transport is fundamental to two of the biggest trends in manufacturing: just in time and offshore.  It seems that when it starts to cost twice as much to ship parts and products across the world that some manufacturers are starting to rethink how and where things get made.

As I was reading, I started to think about ways that PLM might be able to help with this problem.  A few of the ideas that I came up with:

• Make lighter weight components.  This saves both transport and operating costs if the product is mobile.
• Copy factory setups from one location to another.  One of the big arguments to getting one big factory setup is that you learn faster and can share hose learnings with all lines.  The digital factory aspects of PLM can make this effect work across a distributed set of smaller factories that are optimized for getting the heavier items closer to the end user.
• Make fixed cost lower component of overall factory cost.  This makes higher labor cost countries more competitive.
• Componentize design to allow for manufacturing of 'expensive to transport' components closest to destination.  Sort of the same as the second point, but this is more focused on product rather than process design.

Interested to hear what other ideas are out there about how PLM can help deal with >140 bbl oil.  Drop me any ideas in comments.

 

Live Rules Introduction

Posted Jun 19, 2008 - 05:44 AM by Mark Burhop

Live Rules in Solid Edge ST provide a new way of working with CAD geoemetry. After talking about other new ideas like the Solid Edge Steering and the new Ribbon based UI, lets continue on with some more talk about some other innovation going on in in the CAD industry and Solid Edge ST.

Doug Stainbrook was good enough to share some information on Live Rules which I’ll borrow a bit here. Live Rules is the proprietary relationship recognition functionality that is an important component of Synchronous modeling. To keep things simple I’m going to talk about using live rules on a “dumb” part such as might have been imported from another CAD system (no existing parametrics, dimension, etc.) We'll hit the more advanced concepts later.

As faces and/or features are selected in the model, Solid Edge immediately locates any other elements in the model that match the Live Rules settings. The user has total control over what types of relationships are searched using the Live Rules UI (shown above) or can turn it off completely.

As related “Live Rule” geometry is located, Solid Edge ST will tell you which rules found a match and what the matching geometry is. Even before you start to move or rotate, you have feedback about what is going to happen. There are also ways to control (i.e.lock down) geometry which I'll talk about in a future blog.

So what are the live rules? Lets walk though a few from the dialog above:

Concentric (C)
• Will locate cylindrical faces in which the Axis of the elements are collinear
• 2D circles included




Coplanar (P)
• Will locate faces of the part that lie on the same plane
• Sketch Planes and Reference Planes included if checked




Tangent edges (T)
• Will locate tangencies related to the selected elements
• Will maintain tangencies during Synchronous Move or Rotate



Parallel (L)
• Used Mainly for rotating faces to keep associated elements parallel
• Will locate all faces Parallel to any face in the select set
• Sketch Planes and Reference Planes included if checked






Symmetric about base (S)
• Will locate all elements in the model that are symmetric about the base reference origin to any face in the select set







Same radius if possible (A)
• Controls modifications such that radius
• values are maintained when the model is modified






When “off” radius values will change as needed to complete the operation




I hope this partial list gives you some ideas on the basics of Live Rules and how they work. If you noticed on the dialog above there is an avanced section which I will blog about in the future. If there is anything in particular with Live Rules you are interested in, post a comment and I'll try to cover that as well.

 

Greening the executive suite

Posted Jun 17, 2008 - 02:54 PM by Chris Kelley

Umair has a good post on the Harvard Business blog on the management DNA changes necessary for companies to really go green. What caught my attention was this excerpt:

They’re going to discover that the same principles of management are necessary to make companies green as those that we’ve been discussing at the edge: democratization, openness, transparency, love, and a fierce embrace of what’s good – to name just a few.

That's a pretty fundamental change and it's pretty clear that so far there are some companies that get it, some that are trying and some that need a little help.

The interesting thing is that these same requirements (democratization, openness, transparency) have been in place for companies looking to get an innovation advantage through product lifecycle management. Democratization because the best ideas can come from anywhere in the company, openness because best in class companies are able to operate in what Henry Chesbrough calls "Open Innovation" and transparency because using a PLM system in a silo consistently sub-optimizes results. So in the race to become green it will be interesting to watch and see if companies that have become innovation leaders through PLM are able to get to green sooner than the competition. If Umair is right in outlining the requirements, they seem to have all the skills mastered.

 

PLM, Pacific-style

Posted Jun 17, 2008 - 12:41 PM by SusanCinadr

This morning I got a note from a colleague in Korea, sharing their experience with 2008 Siemens PLM Day that happened one week ago. If you speak Korean, you can view most of the presentations from that day!

Much like the PLM World event that Chris, Mark, John and I covered, Korea had 800+ people who enjoyed presentations covering Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology, NX6, Digital Manufacturing, Simulation including Femap and much more! Enjoy this short 3 minute video highlighting the event.

 

Why The Ribbon Bar is Right

Posted Jun 15, 2008 - 06:39 AM by Mark Burhop

The advancements in the upcoming Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology release are causing a lot of discussion. Synchronous Technology is getting a good part of the interest but this is only part of the transformation users will see.

Putting Synchronous Technology aside, customers that continue to work with the traditional history based Solid Edge technology will still see the new Microsoft Office Ribbon based user interface. Changing the UI can have a big impact on software users so it can be a hot topic.

Long before the changes happening now with many CAD user interfaces, Microsoft spent a lot of time iterating on a design that would justify their own changes with sufficient improvement in ease-of-use and productivity. If you want to know more about this, a good blog on the story of the ribbon as well as this Slide share presentation below:

Now interface design is hard because you have so many different types of software users. So it is not surprising there is still a lot of debate on how successful Microsoft is with this new Ribbon Bar design. I’ve been using it for a while and do find it more productive but anytime you change UI, there is a learning curve.

Microsoft’s hope is for Ribbon Bar implementers to embrace the following principles (From Microsoft’s Office 2007 UI for developers)

Focus. The user’s attention should be on the content, not on the UI. The results-oriented approach allows the user to perform sophisticated formatting and advanced tasks without diverting their attention from the document or content on which they are working.

Context. The contextualization of as many commands and properties as possible is crucial. Increase the user’s sense of mastery by reducing the number of choices presented at any given time. Reduce the command space by eliminating redundant or seldom used features.

Efficiency. Focus on efficiency rather than scope. Users must be able to find the most powerful features for the task quickly and easily. A small gain in the scope of features used is not worth a significant loss in the efficient use of the features.

Consistency. A results-oriented user experience is best accomplished by clearly providing intuitive ways to solve different problems. When applying tools to tasks, flexible consistency is desirable; homogeneity is not.

Permanence. Clearly defined access to tools ensures better usability. Ambiguity is reduced by establishing permanent homes for groups of features. A consistent-location UI is favored over a "smart" UI.

Predictability. The Microsoft Office applications offer a long and rich legacy of acceptance, upon which you can build successful UI innovation. Straightforward design ensures continued user comfort and maximized results. Favor the predictable over the novel.

Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology and many of the other CAD programs either following Microsoft’s style guide for Ribbon UI (Solid Edge ST) or implementing their own ribbon like interfaces we are seeing much of this ribbon discussion moving to the various CAD articles, blogs and forums. We CAD users have a lot of opinions on the subject. Even within Siemens, you will notice we have taken different directions for NX and Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology.

Catalyst had an interesting interview on the new AutoCAD Ribbon Bar and other CAD products are using it too. You can find a few blogs on the subject. Here is one on “Why the Ribbon is Wrong” which triggered a lively discussion. Its an interesting debate… do a custom UI for your CAD system or follow what is becoming a Windows standard?

Why the Ribbon is Right for Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology

Like many readers out there, I’ve used a lot of CAD systems over the years. I’m also spending significant time in Office 2007 or digging through the Microsoft Style guide or looking how to best optimize our own Solid Edge UI (we have UI experts that do this too), Like everyone else, I’ve got opinions on the subject.

The fact is, CAD functionality is ever increasing so having a better ways of organizing access to this functionality is something we are all looking for. The Ribbon Bar provides a way to make the most common functionality both easy to access and quickly visible to new users. Key functionality is a big icon and hard to miss. Less common functionality can still be found with a single click and smaller icons. Functionality unrelated to the task at hand can be moved out of the way (to a different group or tab) avoiding the visual clutter. Compare this to thinks like pull down menus where the best you might be able to do is put the more important things on the top of the list or worse, start creating sub menus.

Now I’m not saying everything is perfect with the Microsoft standard. I’d love for it to allow for more customization (although that has risks too). Depending on how you work, you may have different ideas on how it could be better. I do think the Ribbon is the right direction but when it comes to UI, there is no perfect solution.

So first, we have a standard, and one which has been fairly well researched to be as easy-to-use and productive as possible. The key, of course, is making sure the commands are exposed in the best possible way in the Ribbon Bar. It’s my opinion that many issues people have had with other Ribbon Bars is not so much with the Ribbon Bar concept but with how their software’s functionality gets implemented in this context. I know we spent most of our time working on getting our layout organized in the best possible way with the best possible controls. We got some great feedback from beta customers too and continue to discuss further UI optimizations going forward. I’m looking forward to the product release to see how our customers grade us.

The second point with the Ribbon bar, especially those that follow the Microsoft Ribbon Bar standard is the facility at which you can move between it and other products. Now I know there are still some CAD users than spend ALL day in their CAD product and would love everything to be optimized for just that work. However, most of us are moving between Word or Excel or PowerPoint or tools like Solid Edge. If you use Microsoft Office 2007, learning the Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology UI is just not that hard. If you are a new user, you are focused on learning CAD, not CAD AND the CAD UI. If you know CAD and are familiar with the Ribbon Bar, the transition is even faster. Even moving between ribbon based CAD products can become easier.

The last point is important. Synchronous Technology makes multi-CAD environments much easier. So while I think the new Ribbon Bar will increase existing user productivity, I also think it’s the best possible UI for the occasional Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology user – these people that don’t have the time to learn each and every custom CAD UI.

 

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