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by Chris Kelley | 28 Jun 2010

This post is a bit late, but we wanted to make sure we had all the kinks worked out before officially announcing our move from the address we have been hosting our blog at for the past few years (siemens.pmhclients.com) to a new location at blog.industrysoftware.siemens.com. This change is the culmination of a few different factors. When we started the blog more than three years ago, it was an experiment. We were later than some in getting into the corporate blogging game, but I still think we were part of the early majority. We weren't sure where it would go or how it would develop, but we knew we would learn more by doing something than by just talking about it.

So we did something and launched the blog without a definite plan, and in order to limit our investment we chose to host it with an outside company. Three years later and we have more than 600 posts and we have definitely exited the expirmental stage and its safe to say that the blog is here to stay. So moving it insdide the siemens.com domain makes sense. At the same time as we were making that move, we also wanted to look at other content management systems for the blog and ended up deciding to move to wordpress. There are just too many third party add-ons to expand functionality and the capabilities of wordpress 3.0 are very impressive (we hope to move to that soon).

So for our loyal readers here, please point your browsers to our new location. If you are an RSS subscriber, no change is necessary since we use feedburner and have pointed our feedburner feed at the new locations RSS feed. See you in the new digs.

 

 

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by dorasmith | 10 Jun 2010

My colleague Shaun Ennis works with industry analysts and is at a Siemens Manufacturing Excellence event in Genoa, Italy. He shared this report with me from the first day of the event.

Buon giorno! From the Process Manufacturing Excellence event in Genoa, Italy.

About 150 people from process companies across Europe gathered in the historically significant seaport town of Genoa, Italy, birthplace of famed journeyman Christopher Columbus. The event agenda features presentations by Carlsberg, Applied Tech Systems (ATS), SAB Miller, Cola Cola Hellenic, Nestlé, Ferrero, Kraft, Skretting-Nutreco, and British American Tobacco.

Each of these companies are on their own journey towards manufacturing excellence, enabled by the latest IT advances from Siemens.

Some of the analyst firms attending include IDC Manufacturing Insights, ARC Advisory Group and Aberdeen Group.

Aberdeen’s Matt Littlefield shares what he is looking forward to getting out of the event.

Siemens Industry Automation (IA) division CEO Anton Huber opened the event. Among its offerings, the IA division houses Siemens’ MES, PLM and plant lifecycle management software solutions. He emphasized Siemens’ enormous current and future commitment to this Industrial Software category of IT, which fills the IT gap between desktop productivity and ERP transactional solutions. It connects the worlds of engineering product development and manufacturing execution. Huber described how this connection challenge is greatest for companies in the process industries, where R&D labs need to share information with manufacturing in order to be optimally safe, compliant and excellent in their specific markets.

Siemens’ key partner, Microsoft, shared its vision of how its technology will allow greater collaborative relationships in manufacturing and support next generation solutions from Siemens.

Other topics on day one included not only the connection between process R&D and manufacturing, but also how manufacturing can best connect with ERP. The conference ended with a presentation of how SIMATIC IT MES allows a robust Asset & Utilities Management function.

ARC’s Valentijn de Leeuw shares his takeaways from the first day.

See www.mesexpertise.com for more information on this event.

Arrivederci for now!

 

 

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Tags: product development | Manufacturing | Aberdeen | manufacturing | MES | ARC |

by Nik Pakvasa | 08 Jun 2010

Recently we announced the High Definition PLM (HD-PLM) technology framework, which will enable decision makers throughout the product lifecycle to make better informed decisions more efficiently and with a higher level of confidence. You can read the press announcement and also see Jerry's blog about the launch in Shanghai. Here Steve talks about what HD-PLM will mean to our customers.

 

 

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by Nik Pakvasa | 08 Jun 2010

This is the second part of my interview with Steve. In this video he talks about opportunities for customers to continue to improve productivity, cycle time, quality and cost with PLM.

 

 

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by Susan Cinadr | 08 Jun 2010

After a brief hiatus, we are resuming our Solid Edge Tips and Tricks series with 10 new videos. Check back weekly to see new videos.

We begin the series with Helpers, designed for new users. 'Helpers' provide hints and explanations as you learn the system, allowing you to be productive as you learn Solid Edge.

Note: The video above is from YouTube. If you subscribe to Siemens PLM channel, you can be notified right away when we post the latest video from our Tips & Tricks series. There is a playlist on YouTube just for the Tips & Tricks, check it out here. We also realize that some of you do not have access to YouTube, so you can always check out the Solid Edge Demo Page.

 

 

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by Nik Pakvasa | 04 Jun 2010

During my recent visit to the Siemens PLM Software facility in Milford, Ohio I had an opportunity to sit down with Steve Bashada, VP, Teamcenter Product Development. (Steve has an insanely busy travel schedule so I was lucky to find him in his office). We talked about customer transitions to PLM from PDM, PLM opportunities for customers, and HD-PLM, our recent announcement at the World fair in Shanghai. Steve had some valuable insights. I’ll be sharing more of his views in upcoming blog entries.

 

 

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by dorasmith | 04 Jun 2010

I’ve seen a lot of conversation lately in regards to openness in the CAD/PLM industry. So it seems timely to share some of the discussion and reiterate how important open standards are to us as a company and the PLM industry.

First some of the recent conversations along this thread:

 
• Evan Yares recently blogged in An Open Data Manifesto:   
  “there are few companies (or rather, company leaders) that really recognize the importance of a commitment to open data (and, more generally, open interoperability) as a foundation to a trust relationship with their customers.” 
  Some of you may remember Evan’s humor two-and-a-half years ago in suggesting a Proprietary 3D for All t-shirt.
 
• Rob Jamieson noted in his A new common CAD standard blog post on Develop3D: “I’d hate to think the only way we will reach a common standard is through multiple acquisitions and the creation of one master CAD company.”
 
• Randall Newton wrote in the latest issue of VEKTORRUM: 
  “JT has become quite popular in automotive as a common data format for visualization and related data sharing. This is partially because Siemens PLM’s Teamcenter application for product data management is far and away the best selling PLM data application in automotive.”   
  Randall went on to comment:   
  “Spatial’s explanation for dropping JT support rings hollow… Choosing to drop support for a popular visualization standard is contrary to the stated goal.”
 
• Ralph Grabowski recently blogged Spatial explains why no JT in InterOp Release 21. He passed the ball to us for comment. See his subsequent post Siemens PLM responds to Spatial’s complaint on JT, and check out his blog from today JT import/export not a problem: Okino does it.
 
• Back in March, Deelip Menezes sparked some conversation on his blog regarding Dassault’s lightweight data format where Al Dean shares his thoughts on the format and openness. Al noted: “While each vendor claims to be opening up their formats, fact of the matter is that these initiatives are there for one reason and one reason alone – to assist them sell more software.”

We are definitely in the business of selling software. But we believe that the best way to do that is to meet our customers’ needs. Open standards are demanded by our customers. So openness is not just a philosophy I’ve heard Tony Affuso talk about nearly every time he speaks to our customers. We have to deliver on it – otherwise JT and Teamcenter would not be as widely used as they are today.

We commit and deliver openness in five ways: open business model, open data model, open architecture, open applications, open communities for innovation. That’s why we published the JT data format over four years ago and we continue to publish the JT specification so it is openly available. Last year the ISO gave it Publically Available Specification status.  Next month, we will release the 9.5 revision of the specification.

Ralph notes in the Okino blog post that the company licensed our JT Open toolkit. It’s available to any company – including our competitors. See the JT Open member companies and vendors we’re able to list on our website. They are the folks driving the ISO work. It’s not our community, it’s theirs. We just get to be part of it.

So let’s continue the “open” conversation. Please leave us a comment, question or complaint and we’ll address them here in the open.

 

 

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Tags: PLM | Siemens PLM | 3D | teamcenter | Teamcenter | product development | CAD standard | JT | Spatial | JT Open |

by Mark Burhop | 01 Jun 2010

PLM Connection is coming up and I’ve got a few more presentations and hands-on that last year. Like any of you, I’d like to present the right information so I’m thinking about the best mixture of content.

At the same time, I’ve been noticing an increasing use of new polling technologies on the web. I just created one with Zoomerang but I’ve heard good things about SurveyMonkey too. They are useful in that you can just drop a link in your favorite social media platform and off you go, collecting interesting and relevant data (one hopes!)

So, I put together a simple five question survey that I’d love for you to take (even if it is to tell me you hate taking surveys!) Part of it is to help guide me toward the right mixture of content for some simulation presentations I’ll be making for designer and engineering CAD folks. The other part is to learn more about these survey tools and their growing influence in social media.

Click Here to take survey

Or just comment below if you have thoughts about these tools, the usefulness of surveys, or what I should talk about in my Solid Edge Simulation and Femap presentations. I’ll be glad to report back on what I learn.

 

 

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Tags: CAD Survey PLMConx |

by Markus Erlmann | 27 May 2010

Avatars assemble vehicles at Ford?

Yes they do! Virtual vehicles, of course, and the avatars are called Jack and Jill.

In a recent article for Bloomberg Businessweek, Nick Barber highlights the details of how Ford uses virtual and augmented reality in combination with Tecnomatix Jack. There are several reasons why Ford invests in this area: They want to be sure that the vehicles can be assembled easily and safely as they are designed. Previously, this so called assembly feasibility was tested using physical prototypes at the plant just shortly before the start of production. Now, Ford is able to validate the assembly virtually, two to three years earlier. This allows Ford to adjust and optimize the assembly process, and if needed, influence the product design.

The results? Virtual feasibility tests enable Ford to produce high quality cars with minimized effort and minimal risk of injury for the workers.

The article highlights an augmented reality system that combines Jack with motion tracking technology. However, Jack and Jill can also work on their own.

On the Tecnomatix Jack homepage you can find detailed information about the Motion Capture Toolkit used by Ford.

 

 

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Tags: tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | Jack | Ergonomics | Human Simulation | Assembly Planning and Validation | VR | AR | Ford |

by JerrySarfati | 26 May 2010

This is the 4th post on the new items in NX7.  In today’s post, I will review CAE or Lifecycle Simulation.

NX 7.5 offers major enhancements across the entire CAE portfolio.  Some of the highlights are in the areas of multi-body dynamics, FE modeling of thin-walled structures, beam modeling, meshing, laminate composites and support for multi-physics solvers. 

In addition, we have new product offerings for flexible body dynamics, durability analysis and model correlation.

Here are some of the key highlights:

NX 7 CAE Integrated Design and CAE
NX assists you with developing analysis models faster than with traditional CAE pre-processors. NX 7 helps improve productivity with the introduction of new workflows for working with complex geometry, meshing thin-walled parts, beam and bolt modeling and more. NX’s tight integration with geometry means your engineers can keep pace with the latest design.

NX 7 CAE Integrated Multi-Discipline Solutions
NX speeds multi-discipline workflows by integrating the broadest set of solver technologies all within a single environment. Access to multiple CAE solutions within one system and one user interface eliminates data transfer errors for faster coupled analyses. NX 7 expands its integrated multi-physics solutions to include durability and motion analysis with flexible bodies along with even more solutions for structural, thermal and flow analyses.

NX 7 CAE Integrated Analysis/Test Correlation
NX 7 introduces two new products to enable rapid model correlation and update. Correlating digital models with measured test data enables engineers to gain confidence in a model’s ability to predict performance. While testing may still be required it can be significantly reduced. Even saving a single test has been shown to save weeks and months of development effort and thousands of dollars in budget.

 

Learn more about NX7 and NX7 CAE.

Find out more details about what’s new in NX7 CAE.

Let me know what you think about this post.  Leave me a comment below.

Jerry

 

 

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Tags: NX | SiemensPLM | CAE | Design | Analysis | Simulation | simulation | Modeling | NX7 |

by JerrySarfati | 25 May 2010

As I previously mentioned, Siemens PLM Software launched its HD-PLM Technology Framework at Expo 2010 Shanghai China with a press event and product demonstrations. This was an ideal venue for addressing the globalization demands that manufacturing and process industry companies are facing today.

HD-PLM is based on four basic tenets that define how the technology framework will help users make better decisions faster so they can spend more time innovating.

• PERSONALIZE – Personalize the users’ experience by recognizing who they are and actively presenting them with only the information they need to perform their tasks.
• ASSIST – Assist users proactively to make collaborative decisions, by aggregating, analyzing and monitoring information, notifying them when action is required and suggesting collaborators to aid in their decision making.
• CLARIFY – Clarify the users’ understanding by presenting “rich” information in the most intuitive way and enabling them to navigate to associated data from different disciplines and sources.
• VALIDATE – Validate user decisions against best practices, by applying analytical techniques to assess alternatives and capturing decision-making best practices for future reference.

Here are some highlights from the event:

Dr. Helmuth Ludwig, President of Siemens PLM Software introduced “Siemens PLM Software’s Strategic Vision”.  Here he unveils the HD-PLM key messages to the audience

Dr. Chris Holmes from IDC, delivered his presentation on “Revitalizing Product Lifecycle Decision Making”

Chuck Grindstaff our EVP Products and Chief Technology Officer,  formally announced the launch of the HD-PLM Technology Framework

Eric Sterling the Sr VP Global Marketing, joined Chuck for the technology demonstration

Mr. Hamatani Masahide from Canon on “Product Development Vision”

Joan Hirsch our VP Product Design Solutions highlighted the key features of NX7

Group visit to Siemens Showcase in EXPO site: We Are the World. Key messages on HD-PLM and NX7 are reinforced during the networking session.

Siemens is contributing technology to infrastructure projects that are making the Expo an overall success. For a look behind the scenes, visit the Siemens Youtube channel.

Let me know what you think about this post.  Leave me a comment below.

Jerry

 

 

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Tags: NX | CAD | PLM | SiemensPLM | Design | Siemens | Manufacturing | manufacturing | NX7 | HD-PLM |

by JerrySarfati | 24 May 2010

One of the highlights of NX7 is the extension of Synchronous Technology into freeform modeling.  NX freeform modeling streamlines the advanced shaping process by making it easy to work with any geometry, including imported models.  Users can start with simple prismatic or analytic geometry and use advanced shaping tools to form complex organic models in significantly less time.

NX 7 Freeform modeling brings advanced shaping capabilities traditionally found in niche surface modeling tools into a full featured product development solution.
This new functionality gives you access to the full power of Synchronous Technology, with the ability to apply relationships and constraints at the time of change.  More importantly, this data is fully reusable from concept through to production.

What else would you like to know about NX7?  Leave me a comment.

Jerry

 

 

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Tags: NX | CAD | SiemensPLM | Design | Modeling | NX7 | freeform | shapes | i-form | x-form |

by JerrySarfati | 21 May 2010

Yesterday, 20 May 2010, we announced NX7.  In this second blog post, I will review some of the new features in NX7.

For existing users, we have made NX7.5 even more compelling. Following is a short list of our goals for this release:

• Faster Design with Synchronous Technology including Streamlined freeform modeling (I’ll discuss this in more detail in my next blog post)

• More intuitive reporting for improved decision-making in HD3D

• Better leveraging of PLM information

• Faster validation and issue resolution

• Faster, easier geometric modeling

• Improved use of imported models

• Accelerated analysis processes

• Multiple CAE solutions in one system

• Better confidence in CAE predictions

• Reduce CMM inspection programming time

• Generate NC programs for blisks and impellers

• Reduce tool path calculation

For a detailed list of enhancements, take a look at our “what’s new” document
Read the NX7 Press Release
Learn about High Definition PLM (HDPLM)

What would you like to hear about in NX7?  Leave me a comment!

Jerry

 

 

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Tags: NX | CAD | PLM | SiemensPLM | CAE | Design | Analysis | Modeling | CAM | HD3D |

by JerrySarfati | 20 May 2010

Today in Shanghai China at the World Exposition Shanghai China 2010 (Expo 2010), we announced NX7 the latest release of our NX software.

NX 7 is the first product to support Siemens’ new high definition PLM (HD-PLM) technology framework, unveiled earlier in the day.

Key Facts:
CAD—NX 7 delivers powerful new design capabilities including unique freeform modeling tools and advanced 2D design to improve efficiency, accelerate design, and lower costs.

CAE—NX 7 CAE integrates leading geometry tools with powerful new analysis technology for modeling, simulation, automation and test correlation to synchronize simulation with design, perform faster design-analysis iterations, and deliver better products faster.

CAM—NX 7 enhances manufacturing productivity with the introduction of Turbomachinery Milling for programming complex blisks and impellers with expert results in half the time, and CMM Inspection Programming with automation for faster inspection programming on 3D solid models

Over the next few days, I’ll post additional info about NX7.

Is there anything specific that you’d like to know about NX7?  If so, leave me a comment!

Jerry

 

 

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Tags: NX | CAD | PLM | 3D | SiemensPLM | CAE | Design | Siemens | Analysis | Simulation |

by dorasmith | 14 May 2010

Below are a few videos on the flooding in Nashville that started two weeks ago. Our thoughts are with all those affected.

As you can imagine, it’s created a little havoc for our PLM Connection Americas event that was planned for later this month at the Gaylord Hotel in Nashville.

 

PLM World and our event planning folks have been hard at work and secured a new date and location. The event will now be held the week of June 28th in Dallas, TX. Check out the registration site for more info.

Some of the speakers include executives from Ford Motor Company, Black Diamond, Teradyne, Timken and Boeing. Here’s the complete agenda.

BTW, if you’re attending, please join me in discussing Social Media in PLM on Tuesday at 10:15 a.m. in the user community track. Feel free to leave any comments or questions you’d like addressed in that session.

Hope to see ya’ll in Dallas!

P.S. We’ll be using #plmconx as the event hashtag on Twitter.

 

 

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Tags: Siemens PLM | plmconx | PLM Connection | PLMConx | PLMconx | PLMCONX |

by Markus Erlmann | 07 May 2010

This is not an easy task as the amount of information to take into account is huge. Starting with architectural information like the plant layout to libraries of standard manufacturing equipment which can be used to build the products to the required output of the manufacturing lines.

In addition there are a lot of people from different departments involved which need to communicate to finally get an optimized, reliable and well functioning factory.

In a previous blog post Brad Whitmore from Procter & Gamble described how he and his team solved this challenge. One part of the solution was the Tecnomatix product FactoryCAD which is part of the Plant Design and Optimization solution. This month we released an update which provides support for 64-Bit and Windows 7. In addition AutoCAD® 2010 and AutoCAD® Architecture 2010 are now supported.

FactoryCAD works in conjunction with AutoCAD® to help you create detailed 3D models of your plants. It enables you to accelerate the process of plant layout creation by the use of “smart objects”. These smart objects represent all the resources used in your plant, from conveyors, mezzanines, cable trays, fencing and cranes to material handling containers and operators. They are smart because there is some logic included. For example, stretching a conveyor to the required length is simple and the logic in the smart conveyor object allows FactoryCAD to calculate the required supports along the way. At 15 feet long, for instance, FactoryCAD automatically puts a support every four feet once you start stretching the conveyor to this required length. All this visualized in 3D which was one of the benefits Procter & Gamble used as a basis for the communication across multiple teams from different departments.

Want to know more? Take a look at the Plant Design and Optimization solution homepage.

 

 

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Tags: tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | Plant Design and Optimization | FactoryCAD | Layout Planning |

by Markus Erlmann | 03 May 2010

Do you want to hold you CAD models in your hand? I mean, physically?

This is already possible for several years and known as rapid prototyping, 3D prototyping or direct digital manufacturing. And the price of these 3D printers is getting down. Still it’s something fascinating. I had the opportunity to see the whole process live at the Hannover Fair. Starting with the design in NX and then just using the regular printing capability to launch the HP printer driver. After some additional calculations the printer starts working. A few hours later you can already hold the part in your hands.

Take a look at this video to see the whole process in action.

UPDATE

Our partner alphacam in Germany is a vendor for the new HP DesignJet 3D Printer. This printer is based on the FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) technology from Stratasys and currently sold only in Germany. But there is an even easier way to get your 3D CAD models as physical parts: go to www.teilefabrik.de (German), provide your CAD models as STL files and alphacam will print it for you and send it directly to your office.

 

 

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Tags: NX | SiemensPLM | tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | Rapid Prototyping | 3D prototyping | Direct Digital Manufacturiing |

by Markus Erlmann | 29 Apr 2010

As mentioned in my previous blog post about Hannover Fair here are some interesting pictures from the fair.

The first one is from the introduction video for the Virtual Commissioning showcase which we run every hour. Take a closer look and you will realize the move from virtual too real in the picture.

The next one is from the workflow we showed at the main Siemens booth. NX is used to design the part. In our case we use a die for a press line. To define the machining strategy for this die we use NX CAM. In order to validate the machining strategy a 3D-Model of the GROB-machine, the 3D CAD part, the NC code and the virtual SINUMERIK controller are combined into a virtual machine. The validated NC Code is transferred to the machine, equipped with the SINUMERIK 840 d controller.

As the die is ready, it will be simulated inside of a virtual press line. The Press Line Simulation solution from Tecnomatix together with the SIMOTION controller allows for shortened try-out time, reduction of tooling design costs and increased stroke rate – finally optimizing the press line.

This picture shows visitors and customers discussing the solutions from Siemens PLM Software.

There are several other înteresting pictures available on Flickr.

 

 

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Tags: NX | SiemensPLM | tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | NX CAM | Virtual Commissioning | virtual commissioning | Hannover Fair |

by Nik Pakvasa | 28 Apr 2010

Peter Thorne is Managing Director, Cambashi, IT/PLM Industry Analysts & Consultants based in Cambridge, England. I had first met Peter almost 20 years ago in Cambridge when he was a manager with the Siemens software team in Cambridge and I was the product manager for Parasolid in Cambridge. I met Peter in Scottsdale during the COFES2010 conference rin April 2010. Peter in his capacity as the managing director of Cambashi consults with many customers, and has unique insight into European companies, and their challenges and priorities.

Peter was kind of enough to sit down for this interview. He believes the next big opportunity is to integrate Requirements Management, System Engineering and product development into a seamless process.

 

 

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Tags: PLM | analyst | social media | social_networking | Cambashi | COFES |

by Nik Pakvasa | 28 Apr 2010

Jim Brown, President, Tech-Clarity, has been an early advocate of social networking in product development/PLM. He has been follower of the social networking phenomena and has actively written about the intersection of social networking and product development.
I caught up with Jim at recent the COFES2010 conference in Scottsdale. I asked Jim to share his thoughts on what role he sees for social networking in product development.  He believes it is still early for social networking in product development. He sees early adopters experimenting with soocial networking as PLM vendors start bridging social networking and PLM into more streamlined process. He believes that the ability to bring social network chatter about product intent into the product development environment is very critical.

Jim Brown is going to join Dora Smith’s Social Media session at PLM Connection on Tuesday, May 25 at 10:15 a.m. Dora and Jim will be discussing the topic in more detail.

 

 

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by Markus Erlmann | 28 Apr 2010

You may have read our latest press release about the product and production lifecycle initiative. At the press conference at Hannover Fair, Helmuth Ludwig talked about this as well. He highlighted in his presentation two important topics: the extended offering of Siemens Industry Automation in regards to the industry software market and an update about the integrated product and production lifecycle. I would like to share Helmuth’s presentation with you.

The major projects for the integrated product and production lifecycle are:

1. Virtual Commissioning
2. Virtual Machine
3. PLM and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES)
4. PLM and Plant Design (Comos)

Especially the first project “Virtual Commissioning” was showcased live every hour. You might realize that the guy on the right and myself look quite similar

Take a look at the presentation for more insights.

If you have any comments or interests in one of the projects, just let me know. And stay tuned, I’m collecting pictures from the fair and will publish them soon.

 

 

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Tags: Siemens PLM | tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | virtual machine | Virtual Commissioning | Virtual Machine | virtual commissioning | Hannover Fair |

by Mark Burhop | 24 Apr 2010

Today, I’m in at the Siemens PLM Connection for the Netherlands trying to take maximum advantage of the volcano extended stay in Europe. Derrek Cooper has suggested I come up with a @Burhop European Tour shirt. Branden Loock was reminded of the Griswald’s European Vacation and I’m tempted to do the roundabout around the Arch de Triumpe just to complete the picture.

Jokinging aside, the extension has turned out to be a big positive for me. I’ve been able to “make the connection” (I think this is marketing’s new catch phrase ) with many more designers, customers, and resellers than was possible in my original trip. Yesterday, I was part of what I thought was a very successful roundtable in a packed room talking about work being done for Synchronous as well a large number of customer requests we addressed in ST2 and are looking at for ST3.

It’s good to have a direct, open discussion with people viewing the product from all aspects both to help solve existing problems as well as to helping guide the development of the product in a way that benefits everyone. In addition I was able to expose more people to Solid Edge Simulation as well as get much more feedback from those already using it. I don’t know if any of the meeting participants are reading this blog but I’d love to hear your thoughts on how this went. Was it useful? Should we do more of this?

 

 

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Tags: plmconx | PLMConx | PLMconx | Solid Edge Simulation | Volcano | Europe | Siemens PLM Connection | PLMCONX | volcano |

by dorasmith | 20 Apr 2010

We made a number of announcements at Hannover today. In case you missed them, here’s a brief summary. One of the announcements provides an update on our product and production lifecycle initiative so I’ve also included a video from one of my colleagues taken at Hannover that explains how a customer integrates product and production lifecycle with Siemens software.

Today’s announcements included:
- an important new agreement with HP. Proton is noted in the release as teaming with HP to implement Teamcenter.

“As we move on to our business expansion program reaching out to international markets, an integrated and seamless product development solution is crucial to ensure efficiency and productivity of our regional operations,” said Dato’ Haji Syed Zainal Abidin Syed Mohamed Tahir, group managing director, Proton Holdings Berhad. “The implementation of the PLM solution in our organization will provide the necessary support to manage our products, processes and services from initial concept, through design, launch, production and use, to end of life of vehicle.”

- an update on our product and production lifecycle initiative. In our booth at Hannover, there are demonstrations on integrations between Comos, NX, Teamcenter, Tecnomatix and Simatic IT.

“The demonstration of these software solutions represents a major milestone in Siemens achieving its vision of becoming the first software and hardware provider to unify the product and production lifecycles, which means true value for our customers,” said Anton S. Huber, president of the Siemens Industry Automation Division.

- two Teamcenter win announcements at Mitsubishi Motors and SCM Group.

Here is a video from Magnus Edholm of Siemens Industry Sector explaining the five areas of our product and production initative:

Let me know if you have any questions about these announcements.

 

 

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Tags: NX | tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | Digital Factory | product development | CAM | engineering | Process Simulate | sinumeric 840 | Hannover Messe 2010 |

by Mark Burhop | 20 Apr 2010

European Tour, Part II

As you have seen from my post last week, the Icelandic volcano has caused my flight home to be canceled. Fortunately, Siemens is big worldwide company and finding things to do has not been hard.
Yesterday, I drove up to Brussels Belgium to catch the Siemens PLM Connection for Benelux. They started with a very impressive video on Siemens showing all the company has accomplished over its long history.
But what was even better was this guy, Captain Eureka…



It was a very futuristic video. In the future, everyone speaks Dutch so I didn’t know what he said but I’m sure it was something about how great Solid Edge is

Jeff Walker, product manager for all of Solid Edge was supposed to present here today but as you might guess, his flight was canceled. So I stepped in and am quickly ramping up on the rest of Solid Edge so I can give a 30 minute talk.

Right now, Edwin Severijn is Vice President and Managing Director for Siemens Industry is giving a short talk at the kick off presentation talking about 2008-2010 economy, what is new with Siemens PLM, and how we “never let a customer fail”.

 

 

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Tags: Solid Edge | plmconx | PLM Connection | solid edge | PLMConx | PLMconx | Benelux | PLMCONX |

by Markus Erlmann | 19 Apr 2010

A quick update from Hannover Fair 2010; the world's largest industry fair is opening the gates today. Siemens PLM Software will be present on two different booths. One is our own in hall 17 and the other one is the Siemens AG booth in hall 9.

Here is a sneak-peak from the preparation we did on Sunday afternoon.

Stay tuned. More to come.

 

 

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Tags: SiemensPLM | tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | Digital Factory | Digital Manufacturing | Hannover Fair |

by Mark Burhop | 19 Apr 2010

II thought I'd pick up on some of the discussion happening last week around FEA Al Dean and Deelip Meneze had a couple posts about the barriers to entry for this type of analysis. Kenneth Wong and Derrek Cooper did a couple post that talked about Solid Edge Simulation. With Inventor 2011 Simulation launching recently, we will likely see more on this topic. (BTW, the links above lead to all the articles).

The picture above is of Pascal Devantine's automobile window as we drove around France visiting Simulation customers (yes, I'm still here - can you say "Eyjafjallajökull"). Because the crack creates a stress concentration, it continues to grow across his window every time there is a bump or some vibration. Most of us have seen this before in windows or sidewalks.

One of the points being debated is exactly where FEA fits in for the designer. I think this is far from a black and white issue so where you stand often depends on the type of problem and the level of the designer. I’d visit one of the post above if you want to join into the dabate. For me, I thought I’d throw out a more concrete example.

Consider the simple bar below which is constrained on the left side and has a force of 1000 lbfs on the right side. PMI is in inches. You might think the maximum stress is at the thinnest part and would be 1 ksi (1000lbf/1in2).


However, because of the sharp corner, the maximum stress is more than twice this. If you are a mechanical engineer, you know there are tables you can use to look up the stress concentration around this corner.


See the full document here: http://www.mae.ufl.edu/haftka/structures/stressconc.pdf

A quick analysis with Solid Edge Simulation shows the stress distribution through the part:



While most of us are aware of the problems with stress concentrations (often from personal experience when cracks in your sidewalk or window seem to keep growing), the the tables or FEA results allow us to understand how much bigger this stress will be and how we can reduce it. Clearly, from the table, a larger radius fillet is a good idea. Less intuitive is that reducing the height of the thicker part (H) will also reduce the stress.

The advantage of tools like Solid Edge Simulation is that, unlike the table I used above, FEA can work with all types of geometry. We could add additional forces or other changes in the geometry to determine how this affects the maximum stress of the part. These types of problems are also simple enough that non-FEA experts can do them with little training.

Why not “no training at all”? I’ll talk about that in my next post.

 

 

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Tags: Solid Edge | Simulation | simulation | solid edge | Solid Edge Simulation | stress concentration | stress | FEA for designers |

by Mark Burhop | 17 Apr 2010

Those that follow me on twitter know I’ve been traveling in Europe this week. I’ve been off visiting designers and some of their resellers asking what they think of Solid Edge Simulation, what they think we could do better, what they think works well, and what they want in the next version and version after that. Since this is a new product, I’m also trying to build some relationships so that they can get their needs communicated to me well after I’m gone. If you were one of the people I talked to this week, thank you. I know you have busy schedules with work to do and I promise your time spent with me won’t be wasted.

Of course, now that I’m done with all my meetings and presentations, I’m ready to fly home... or am I? My son sent me the first IM about the Volcano in Iceland and it wasn’t long before I started seeing others are now stranded in Europe. This morning I got word that my flight is canceled. I also see that the COFES conference is the US has a few international travelers (I hope you have a good extra stay in the US )

Eating dinner last night, I overheard many conversations from travelers trying to rent cars or get places on the trains. It is proving difficult. I’m keeping track of a few Siemens PLM colleagues also stuck in Europe or others trying to get here. It’s very stressful for a lot of people and I really feel bad for those traveling with children. So, in my case getting “stuck” in Paris for the weekend after a very good week meeting with designers is nothing I can complain about.

If anyone wants to talk about Solid Edge Simulation or social media, catch me here http://twitter.com/burhop It seems I’ll have some free time

 

 

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Tags: Solid Edge | FEA | solid edge | Solid Edge Simulation | Volcano | Paris |

by dorasmith | 14 Apr 2010

Automotive News announced its PACE Award winners this week. PACE stands for Premier Automotive Suppliers Contributions to Excellence. The annual awards program honors innovation, technology advancements and business performance by automotive suppliers.

Our Teamcenter In-Vehicle Software (IVS) Management System won in the Information Technology and Services category.

From the judges: "The current number of lines of code is about 10 million in a typical vehicle. By 2015, 100 million lines of code will be within connected vehicles. Siemens and Ford have created a software management system permitting them to monitor every vehicle variation on a global basis down to the vehicle identification number. This innovation extends the lifetime control Ford has of its global fleet by leveraging existing software management processes that also maintain security protocols for firewalls between competing suppliers."

PLM technology like IVS helps OEMs address maintenance issues by integrating mechanical, electrical, electronic and software data in one system. See the videos on Automotive News’ website that highlight each of the winning technologies. The video on IVS notes Ford saved $100 million in warranty costs. Ford won several PACE awards with their suppliers.

 

 

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Tags: PLM | Siemens PLM | product development | product design | engineering | innovation | automotive |

by Nik Pakvasa | 13 Apr 2010

In the last blog we discussed corporate Social Networking in a product development environment. We wanted to talk to customers who have implemented a corporate social networking to enable their product development collaboration, and learn about their experiences. Here is an example of a customer – Northrop Grumman who has implemented Social networking in their product engineering. Jim Ayers, Systems Engineer, Northrop Grumman, has been involved with the project from early concept days to implementation and now supporting it. Jim is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt. He also leads the Teamcenter Community Collaboration Special Interest Group of the PLM World. He is based in Huntsville Alabama, USA. Here is the excerpt from my interview with Jim:
Question:
What was Northrop’s product development environment before you implemented corporate Social Networking?
Answer:
Most of our product engineering work is large contracts for the US Air force and Navy.  These projects involve large teams, including partners, in different geographic locations; we were no different than most other companies. We relied mostly on e-mails, Microsoft Office Outlook, to communicate ideas, issues, input, etc. Most of our meetings were teleconferences. When the Navy had even a simple question it required the Navy to write a formal letter asking for clarification. And vice-a versa, when we had a question about an RFP or the contract we would follow the same process.  This whole process often took weeks.
Our e-mail exchanges were becoming difficult to save and trace due to storage size limitations. Meeting notes were hand written in a notebook and eventually transcribed to e-mail.
Then in 2004 we were bidding jointly with Lockheed on a US Air force project. The Lockheed facility was in Northern California and our team was 300 miles away in Southern California. The Air force’s question to us was: could we be as productive with teams in 2 different locations versus our competitor in a single location? Suddenly we were forced to look at technology to help us overcome barriers of our project teams in 2 locations. The word Social Networking, as we know now, was not even coined at this time.
Question:
What did you do to break down the barrier of project teams in multiple locations?
Answer:
We had to find a solution in hurry. We studied available technology and tools. We evaluted Lotus Notes, Microsoft SharePoint (by itself) and Teamcenter Community Collaboration developed on Microsoft SharePoint. After extensive evaluation we felt that Teamcenter Community Collaboration offered most of the functionality we needed out-of-the-box and also it was based on the Microsoft SharePoint platform which were very familiar with. We felt Teamcenter Community Collaboration offered us simple Web parts customization to make it the way we felt our people would like to see the home page and able to navigate to right information easily and quickly.

Question: What were the biggest initial challenges?
Answer:
We had no product issues. However, the biggest early challenges were all around security – firewall, access control of information. We started the project with 3 engineering work stations in a DMZ (demilitarized zone is a physical or logical sub network that contains and exposes an organization’s external services to a larger untrusted network, usually the Internet). We continued to work with the vendor development team to resolve security issues. You have to recognize that these projects are top security projects!
I can happily say now looking back that we started with “creative chaos”, not knowing where and how this tool will evolve. We started with information sharing which was one of the main objectives of this tool. We were learning different new uses every day. For example, the VP of Engineering started using the tool for managing his staff meetings. He was able to track issues and actions from each meeting, he could trace who the attendees were for each meeting, what actions are completed.  We started using visual collaboration capabilities of Teamcenter Appshare (Application Sharing). We can now review designs and drawing, do mark-ups where all the participants are on teleconference and are also viewing the same design on their PC. It allowed different people to take control and give their input. Our management realized, after some coaching by us, that they can use it for any application, like PowerPoint, Word, PDF, Excel, etc. The executives working on a presentation, proposal or financial spread working collaboratively with large team are now able to use the tool’s notification capabilities whenever the latest document is checked in. This is especially important for executives traveling to make a presentation to corporate headquarters, or the Navy and Air force on a proposal they are able to access and synchronize to have the latest document.
We saw its usage growing beyond engineering. We saw the executives, non-engineers and the contracting agencies adopting and using the tool in their daily work. We have grown from 3 seats, to 10,000 users and 4 major deployments over the past 3 years.
Most users can start using the tools after only 1 hour of training. The beauty of this tool is it is so familiar and easy to use.
Question: How has your engineering process evolved with Social Networking?
Answer:
We have now organized information by product and contracts. We have created WBS – work break down – by contract. We have made easy to navigate and find the right information quickly.  The information is secure, firewalled to only authorized users.
We have also created visual navigational models using JT (Siemens PLM Software’s high-performance, compact visualization format). So users can now visually navigate to the right context quickly. For casual users this is very productive since they always may not know the contract number.
We have eliminated off-line storage. All meeting notes along with issue list are stored in the system. It has also made it easy to educate users about the workflow.
We have been able to reduce and in some cases eliminate travel. Payback for the tool is “one-day”!

Question: What else?
Answer:
Ad-hoc meeting/collaboration with US Navy and Airforce has become part of our formal process. What used to take 3 weeks to resolve simple questions now we can resolve them in a few minutes. We all get on the phone and Appshare. There is no ambiguity since we all can see the same document. And we capture the outcome of the meeting in the system.
Social Networking is integral part of our engineering release/change workflow. It has to be. It must be integrated with product data management/PLM. Our engineers continue to create CAD designs, save it in their work-in-process PDM repository (Teamcenter), and when they are ready to “release” the workflow automatically transfers it into the social networking space to send notifications for the review process.

Question: What advice would you give to someone who is thinking of social networking in their product engineering environment?
Answer:
- Get your users involved early
- Get the right stake holder involved
- Understand user workflows and show them how this would enhance it

 

 

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Tags: PLM | teamcenter | Design | Siemens | Teamcenter | microsoft | PDM | social_networking | collaboration | Microsoft |

by Susan Cinadr | 11 Apr 2010

This past week, I had an opportunity to visit in our Huntsville, AL office. "The Rocket City" is home to Redstone Arsenal, Cummings Research Park, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and, most importantly, Solid Edge development.  Several of my European and Asian colleagues have never been to Huntsville so we took a quick tour only to come across this office:

(Note the outdated NCAA Bracket! It's ok Mark, I had Kansas vs. KY in my final too. Bummer)

Several people on this blog, in our customer forums and other places online have asked, "Does Burhop really exist?" "Is he only an avatar?"  I am here to tell you that indeed he does and I have proof

Mr. Mark R. Burhop was giving a couple of colleagues a demo on the upcoming release of Solid Edge when I stopped by. As you can see, Burhop IS INDEED, very much real. Next you are going to say, "That's Solid Edge on his monitor!?!?" No, it's not. It's a pretty image of linear contact we put up to take the picture. We can't show anything about the upcoming release....YET! (just like I can’t show Mark’s real face…YET.)

Mark, being the geeky FEA guy that he is, was excited to tell me that that Kenneth Wong's recent article on Solid Edge with synchronous technology 2 about Sheet Metal contained a demo with meshing and solving on a sheet metal part. Kenneth notes: “With apologies to fans of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, I’m appropriating … a musical term to discuss sheet-metal modeling in Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology 2. So no shaggy-haired dudes, no amplified guitars — just a few words about bending metal in pixels.” I had not read the article but after doing so, I searched some of the back issues of CAD publications they keep in the Huntsville office, only to find an old picture of Kenneth. Admit it, you had a shaggy-do, right Kenneth?

 

  

Read Kenneth's Part 1: First Encounter and Part 2: Stress Relief on Solid Edge with synchronous technology 2

 

 

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by Mark Burhop | 31 Mar 2010

Yesterday for April fool's day, I released a blog post about a fictitious product called CADVille. This was a running joke within the CAD community on Twitter and I thought this might be a fun post. I sent out a tweet asking some of the CAD bloggers if they wanted to participate and got a few replies.

The joke quickly got a life of its own catching both me and my company by surprise. It was still early in the morning so after bouncing a few emails around, I pulled the post. I also notified those people who knew ahead of time that I was doing this and in one case, I asked one of the bloggers, as a favor to me, to pull his post. In retrospect, we should have kept these live and just dealt with issues that arose.

So below is my original post (Siemens PLM is not censoring me!) What do you think? Did I cross the line? What are the best April Fool's jokes you saw yesterday?

---------------------------------------------------------

Social gaming is becoming a hot topic in 2010. If you have a Facebook account its likely you or one of your friends or family members is playing Farmville. You may have also gotten emails or tweets from your friends trying to recruit you for Mafia Wars. It is big business right now.

Those of us in the PLM industry think this social media fad might just catch on. Our experts searched the Internet for the best of both CAD and social media. After much research, I’m pleased to announce our social media development team is ready to launch its first product, “CADVille”.



CADVillle is the first in a line of cloud based Social Product Games where you can design with your friends. Each player is given a 12x12x12 volume of space in which to set up his or her design studio and create products to sell or trade. Over time, you can further expand and improve your design space.

You begin with a fixed number of primitives such as cubes, spheres and cylinders. As you advance in the game, you can “unlock” new tools (e.g. “Boolean subtract”) and new primitives (e.g. swept surfaces). Your friends can add their own studios next to you and you are able to use the arrow keys to walk over and see their work. You can even give them gifts like exotic rounds, champers, and threaded holes. Or, you can trade your products at the community market.

We are now taking signups for a limited beta. If you think you are CADVille material, sign up here!

FAQ

1.) Will my friends be able to track my progress? Yes, we plan for CADVille to have a Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter interface so as you build, trade, get or receive a gift, or unlock new tools, a steady stream of updates will go to everyone in your network. We will also periodically invite them to join you on CADVille giving you more time to immerse yourself in CADVille.

2.) Does CAD Ville work with my Design system? We are providing an API called CADVilleOpen . If your CAD system does not yet support CADVille, please call them right now and tell them “I want CADVille Support!”

3.) I do FEA. What about me? We are currently expanding the CADVille API to support the creation and trading of elements, nodes, and Solver tokens (good for 1 minute of solve time). Each “FEA analyst” starts with over a dozen nodes and elements!

4.) My company does not allow me to participate in social media or gaming while at work. Will I be able to use CADVille? Yes. When we charge your credit card, it will be listed under “Collaboration Tool”.

5.) Is MY Data Secure? We take advantage of the latest Cloud technology. We relieve you of all the burdens of data ownership by owning all your data for you. Your data is never lost as you no longer own it.

6.) Will this run on my iPhone? Yes. Simply bump your iphone against your monitor to being the download process.

7.) My design tool only does 2D. Can I play too? Really? 2D? I guess we will let you play too but good luck selling your lines and circles and title blocks.

8.) This is really cool! Do you have any other product planned? Yes, we have several products under development. Watch for CADSquare, CADLife, CAD Wars, and World of CADCraft.

9.) This is a joke right? Yes. Many people are unaware of the April Fools tradition and we felt it necessary to include this in the FAQ as well as all product documentation.


Need more information? visit our Facebook Fan page, follow us on twitter, and see what people are saying about it right now!

 

 

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Tags: CAD | CADVille | Social Gaming | April Fools |

by Markus Erlmann | 26 Mar 2010

Just recently I had the chance to do a video interview with Ziyon Amram, Vice President Tecnomatix Digital Manufacturing solutions. He discussed the digital manufacturing market in North America and how the Tecnomatix organization supports this important market.

Furthermore he took a closer look at the Aerospace and Defense industry. Ziyon shared some examples about how the digital manufacturing solution integrated to the PLM platform Teamcenter helps this industry to manage today's challenges.

Important to mention that Ziyon will present at the PLM Connection Americas in Nashville, TN. so don't miss the chance to get more details and meet the Tecnomatix management team.

 

 

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Tags: teamcenter | tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | Teamcenter | Digital Factory | Digital Manufacturing | aerospace and defense | Aerospace and Defense |

by Mark Burhop | 23 Mar 2010

The Femap Symposium just wrapped up so I thought I’d include one last post with some notes from the group.

If you have visited more than one Siemens web site, you have seen we have a fairly consistent UI across all our sites. However, one customer at the Femap Symposium pointed out this can be a bit heavy if you just want to look up information on Femap.

If you just want to check out Femap, you can go to http://www.femap.com and it links the right place. You can also use http://www.solidedge.com to go right to the Solid Edge page (I’d bookmark them now )

There was some interest in many of the Femap videos that can help with learning the product or updating to new releases. Those can be found here:

http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/velocity/femap/demos/index.shtml



At the Q&A at the end, Mark Sherman mentioned the yahoo group below which is fairly active.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/FEMAP-USERS/

There was also talk about doing more symposiums either at different locations or virtually. Some of the Femap and Saratech people have done web based training with mixed results and I think everyone is looking for the optimum medium for this.

 

 

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Tags: CAE | FEA | Femap |

by Mark Burhop | 23 Mar 2010

As I type this, Femap is doing a Symposium in Huntsville, AL. Mark Sherman is presenting some of the history of FEMAP and George Rudy is off to the side… These guys are employee #1 and #2 from the orginal group of people that created Femap. I did a post on them a couple years ago here.

At the same time Chip Fricke is another room providing some update training for Femap. Chip is an analysis expert and one of the key people the Solid Edge Simulation team uses for those hard questions.

Along with these people are about 50-60 of the smartest engineers around. These are people that design airplanes and satellites. Huntsville is known as “Rocket City” and I’m just waiting for one of them to say “Why yes, I am a rocket scientist”.

 

 

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Tags: FEA | Femap |

by Susan Cinadr | 22 Mar 2010

Kenneth Wong of Desktop Engineering just completed a series of reviews on Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology 2. I have posted both Part 1 and Part 2 on the Solid Edge blog; Part 1 covers modeling and Part 2 covers simulation. Our own Mark Burhop spent a few minutes with Kenneth sharing his knowledge of meshing & solving before leaving Kenneth to try it on his own.

Enjoy!

 

 

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Tags: ST | Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology | Simulation | simulation | Modeling | Desktop Engineering |

by dorasmith | 16 Mar 2010

The closing keynote for the Innovation Leadership Summit was Jason Jennings, an avid researcher and author of numerous business books.

In his research, Jason has studied data on 120,000 companies. He looks at metrics like revenue per employee and return on assets and investing capital. For one of his sales books, he looked at 72,000 companies. He found 120 that had consistently grown revenues by double digits for more than 10 years - but only 20 that had done so with double digit profits as well.

From that research he highlighted these five companies that stand out as leaders:

• IKEA – they were the first  in their category. While the average furniture company captures $400,000 in revenue per employee, they bring in $2 million per employee annually.
• Smuckers – They’ve grown tenfold from $500 million per year to $5 billion by expanding their product line and brand.
• Staples – They are on track to reach $42 billion in revenues this year due in a large part to their employees thinking and acting like owners.
• Koch Industries – they are the world’s largest private company with approximately $120 billion annually. Their CEO asks his business units two key questions each year: have you created authentic value and have you been a good steward of capital.
• Steelmaker Nucor – Jason thinks they are most innovative company in world.

Jason shared these key leadership characteristics for innovative companies:

• Innovative companies have a cause. This is not a mission statement. It’s the non-financial reason for doing what you’re doing. He noted causes go beyond a goal. They provide a noble purpose, fuel passion and drive momentum
• Innovative companies let go. He shares an analogy of catching monkeys. The monkey wouldn’t get caught if he could just let go of the gourd trap. Jason said you need to be able to let go of yesterday’s breadwinners. Ego often gets in the way.
• Innovative companies make certain that everyone within the organization knows the strategy. Some companies protect their strategies with no competes. Others, like Smuckers, willing share 80-page strategy documents.
• Innovative companies make certain that everyone within the organization thinks and acts like an owner.
• Innovative companies are stewards. The share information, are accessible, and keep their hands dirty. He noted leaders who are stewards spend at least 50 percent time of their time with customers. They are coaches and mentors and feel called to serve.

It was the kind of motivational speaker the executives in attendance could connect with. He had data to back up his assertions and like many of the great leaders he talked about, he told great stories.

One of the things I liked about Jason’s approach to speaking at an event like this is that he did his homework. He had interviewed several of our customers ahead of time. He also didn’t just fly for his speaking slot. He attended all of yesterday’s event and brought in things he saw in the PLM stories yesterday to his presentation today.

 

 

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Tags: Siemens PLM | productivity | Productivity | innovation | new product development | leadership |

by dorasmith | 16 Mar 2010

At our last Innovation Leadership Summit, Bill Duggan from Teradyne talked about PLM as the “backbone of innovation.” Bill shared that despite the tough economy – what he calls an “economic blizzard” – they continue to invest in that backbone and now focus on creating “sustainable PLM.”

That focus has helped them achieve significant savings both in hard dollars and in cycle time reduction.

I talked with Bill after his presentation in this video about Teradyne’s PLM focus and framework, as well as lessons learned over the past year and a half. One lesson is to treat process improvements as new product development projects so they get the attention and commitment they deserve.

 

 

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Tags: PLM | product development | engineering | innovation | semiconductor | sustainability | engineering factory | Teradyne | automation | ECM |

by dorasmith | 16 Mar 2010

Chuck Grindstaff, our CTO, is at the Innovation Leadership Summit to meet with customers and present our technology vision. I caught up with him this morning in this video interview. He comments on Siemens PLM from the three-year anniversary of the Siemens acquisition as well as what is top of mind of customers he spoke with this week.

 

 

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Tags: Siemens PLM | Chuck Grindstaff | COMOS | PLM vision |

by dorasmith | 16 Mar 2010

Marci Rossell delivered a keynote speech last night that was both educational and entertaining. She discussed the root cause of the financial crisis and where we need to focus to recover. Here is a brief video interview where she repeats the three key elements about this particular economic recovery.

 

Marci had some very interesting insights. Here are a few:

 
• She believes the roots of this economic crisis grew out of the 1997 Asian currency crisis. it was followed by the failure of Long-Term Capital Management.
 
• She pointed out several times the issues with a “too big to fail” mentality. She noted a democracy can’t credibly commit to a no bailout policy but part of the current situation is the safety net spread to all. She noted: “Recovery creates jobs. Jobs don’t create recovery.” Thus unemployment always peaks after a recession.
 
• Marci noted that there is a lot of blame on the subprime borrowers and the banking institutions that lent to them. But she said that subprime borrowers have always existed, they just got their money from pawn shops not banks in the past.
 
• She called the 2001 recession “girlie”, pointing out that GDP didn’t even go negative but that it was the first “media recession.” The minute-by-minute coverage exacerbated the perception. Then the Federal Reserve adjusted the interest rate so that we had a negative real interest rate. That forced such low margins for banks that they had to make up for it in volume – thus the bad lending practices that followed.
 
• She discussed the savings rate, noting it was zero three years ago and now is 5 percent. It was 9 percent for nearly 40 years.
 
• She emphasized that “if spending got us into this mess, it will not get you out.” She thinks more folks need to have the recommended six months of their income liquid.
 
• She highlighted the issues with folks counting on their home as part of their retirement. “Houses are not assets…they can store value but not create it.”
 
• She noted it is still a long haul, saying it takes 10 years for the nominal price of most items to recover.
 
• Marci sees job growth in 2010 but in an unusual place for the U.S. – exports. She pointed out the U.S. is the world’s largest importer and if China’s exports were adjusted for population, the U.S. could become the largest exporter. U.S. exports have been up 17 percent and 22 percent respectively the past two quarters.

Whether or not  you agree with Marci’s economic or political views, she presents some compelling points and reminds us of historical lessons we should keep top of mind in working our way out of this recession.

 

 

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Tags: innovation | recession | economy | "Siemens PLM" |

by dorasmith | 15 Mar 2010

Mike Burkett of AMR Research presented earlier on economic value in the PLM market. He shared insights from research released late last year. Here is a video interview of Mike recapping some of the key takeaways from his presentation and the other customer presentations he heard today.

 

 

One challenge for manufacturers in 2010 is that cost reduction continues while they also ramp up with new products.

Mike noted the defense industry is taking its cues from commercial manufacturers and focusing on platform reuse, program execution, and total lifecycle management (not just new products). So PLM must manage product complexity but deliver differentiation.

 

Design for manufacturability is not new but Mike highlighted that now manufacturers are doing it in both a distributed engineering and plant network. That requires greater optimization among the segments a company serves.

While there are many PLM frameworks and graphics out there and even a few presented here at this summit from the viewpoint of each company, I liked the visual Mike shared (below) on process-driven PLM. It highlights the three areas companies focus their PLM efforts: demand, new product development and supply.

Here are the slides from Mike’s presentation:

 

 

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Tags: PLM | Siemens PLM | product development | product design | engineering | Manufacturing | AMR | manufacturing | program management |

by dorasmith | 15 Mar 2010

Jill Wagner, general manager and vice president of global operations for Mosler Automotive, brought the MT900S to our Innovation Leadership Summit. She revved up the car last night and gave me a some background on the company and car.

 

The car is a lightweight car that goes from 0-60 in just 2.9 seconds. We are a technical sponsor of Mosler. You can check out more on the car’s specifications. The car costs $329,900 (USD), which I’m told is affordable by racing standards. There are a few more pictures of the car and the CAD vs. real images from its brochure on our Flickr page.

 

 

 

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Tags: NX | Siemens PLM | product development | product design | Mosler |

by dorasmith | 15 Mar 2010

I’m attending our Innovation Leadership Summit in Scottsdale, AZ, today and tomorrow. Attendees are executives from some of our enterprise customers. They’re here to hear and share best practices on PLM implementations and achieving product success in today’s economy.

.

They represent nearly every industry we support. I’m interviewing some of the speakers and attendees and will share more with you shortly. The event’s signage notes “new rules, tough questions, straight answers.” So if you have questions you’d like me to get answers to, just leave a comment.

Dora

 

 

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Tags: CAD | PLM | CAE | product development | CAM | engineering | Manufacturing | PDM | manufacturing | program management |

by dorasmith | 11 Mar 2010

  
I often point out a Jim Brown example when I talk about social media here at Siemens. It was probably a year and half ago when Jim and I realized from respective tweets that we were both in the Philly airport. The next thing you know we were eating some fried green beans and catching up live. So when people ask “why do you tweet where you are at or what you are doing” I point to that example as how it helps you make live connections.

Jim and I haven’t been in the same airport for a while so I caught up with him over e-mail to find out what he’s working on. He’s become the driving analyst voice in our industry on social computing so I’m always interested in what he has to say.

Q: What kinds of projects are you working on right now?

 

A: I am researching a number of topics. The common theme is how companies can improve business processes and the use of technologies (such as PLM) to improve business performance. The business areas I focus on are product innovation, product development, and engineering. I also touch on other issues for the manufacturing industry. Sample projects include the business value of simulation on one end (engineering), to the evolving nature of product portfolio management (on the marketing / strategy end). I also focus on issues like roles of ERP and PLM and how they should work together. Perhaps the newest topic I have been spending my energy on is the use of social computing in PLM. Some very interesting possibilities.

 

Q: How has PLM evolved in the past few years in your opinion?

 

A: I believe PLM has evolved in four major aspects. I started writing about that in my blog post “http://tech-clarity.com/clarityonplm/2009/what-i-learned-plm-please-take-3-giant-steps-forward/”>What I Learned – PLM Please Take 3 Giant Steps Forward,” but that was only considering three of the four, and the fourth was “honorable mention.” It has since been promoted. The three areas of expansion are to include more people, to cover a much broader view of the product (commercial and technical), to a greater portion of the product lifecycle (including ideation / innovation on one end, and service management on the other). The fourth is to cover more business processes. See graphic below.

Q: Where do you think PLM is headed?

 

A: More of the same, really. The one major shift that I see (that I didn’t predict) was the increased use of social computing. That has really taken me by surprise. But the potential is significant. It is fascinating to see how creative companies are being in how they use it, although adoption is still in the early, experimental phases for most. But product development is a “team sport” and what better way to get a group of people on the same page?

Q: How has your view of the industry and software changed as you changed roles from user to vendor to analyst to consultant?

 

A: Good question. You missed management consultant in there too. I think having those different roles has been very important. I don’t think of “users” of software, I think of people I used to work with. When I was a consultant, I knew there was a difference in what the vision that companies were striving for and what it is like in the trenches trying to get your job done in less than a 10 hour day. I try to keep that perspective. I think it keeps it real. That is also why I spend so much time talking to manufacturers for my research. To keep it real. Even if I am talking about something that is a couple of levels of maturity above where most companies are, I want to make sure I am sensitive to that.

Q: Why are you on Twitter?

 

A: To communicate with my peer group, and to learn. I like Twitter because of the community, which is the same reason I like Facebook. I am not as active in the “water cooler” chit chat on Twitter (although I enjoy it sometimes), I am more interested in seeing what articles and insights people share, and sharing my own.

Q: Can you give me an example of an interesting conversation you’ve had on Twitter or LinkedIn the past year?

 

I was tweeting about a conference I was attending, and I got a direct message back from a woman that works for a very interesting vendor in the Quality Lifecycle Management arena. The last time I spoke with her she was at IBM. Because we were both interested in the context of the event and both communicating via Twitter (using the hashtag for the event), we ended up reconnecting and I was able to learn about her new software company. There is real value in connecting the community around common interests, whether it is a topic, an event, an organization – or perhaps a product development project

Q: You recently did a social computing & product collaboration report that we provided some funding for. What were your key takeaways from that research?

 

A: I should ask what your takeaways are after you read it, with the depth of experience you have gained in social media. If you remember, you were one of the people that first got me started with Twitter. I believe there is a “Product Collaboration 2.0” on the horizon. There are a few.

Fundamentally, product collaboration and social computing are a natural fit. Social computing helps people collaborate in a way that has been lost with virtual teams and global business. It puts the community back in touch. Very importantly, it puts them in touch around a context – the product. At COFES last year a guy from Boeing said “we aren’t going to design an airplane on Facebook.” Too true. But the concepts behind something like Facebook, when coupled with PLM are huge. But you know that.

The two new things that I am trying to point out relate to product knowledge. Social computing helps develop more electronic conversations around product development. That leads to better sharing of existing knowledge, but also the discovery of new knowledge. The traditional form of collaboration is usually only with people you know. Social approaches lead you to discover new knowledge from people you are connected with through your network, but would typically not find. Whether that is a public network (less likely) or corporate social networking within your company. Finally, there is knowledge capture. All of the decisions, discussions, debates, conversations, and arguments that were previously lost can now be associated with a project so future projects can leverage that information. How powerful is that? To imagine that your company can really learn from all of their past intellectual work, and not just try to copy the answer (which may not apply)?

Q: What are the top issues you think users of CAD/PLM software have on their minds in 2010?

 

A: The recovering economy. Most people are happy to have jobs. There are signs that the manufacturing industry is hiring. Last year companies were in a “survive and thrive” mode. Survive the down economy, and then innovate behind the scenes as much as they could to set themselves up for the recovery. Now is the time where the dust is starting to settle and we will see who was just able to survive, and who had the ability to continue to innovate despite lean times. But mostly, I think they are just saying “thank God 2009 is over.”

Thanks Jim for answering my questions. See you on Twitter.

If you have a question or comment for Jim, please leave a comment here or visit him on his Clarity on PLM blog.

Dora

 

 

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Tags: PLM | twitter | social_media | Tech-Clarity | COFES | Twitter | product_collaboration | social_computing | knowledge_capture |

by Nik Pakvasa | 02 Mar 2010

We have heard all the buzz around social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. The question is how one uses Social Networking in a product development process. How can we leverage this to improve ideation, collaboration, knowledge sharing, etc? We must separate enterprise Social networking from casual Social networking ala Facebook. You can also apply social networking techniques internally to develop your products faster, better, and cheaper. Wikis, blogs, instant messaging, videoconferencing, and team sites are all capabilities that can be leveraged in your product development process.

Here is short list of few use cases that comes to my mind:

1. Wikis - A wiki is a collaborative website. A wiki is essentially a database for creating, browsing, and searching through information. Wiki’s are used to create collaborative websites, to power community websites, for capturing best practices, processes and policies; all authorized users can contribute to the wiki, it grows from the collective experience, and serves as a knowledge capture & retention mechanism.
2. Blogs - A blog is a type of website with regular entries of commentary, ideas, information, etc. Blogs used internally to enhance the communication and culture in a corporation or externally for marketing, branding or public relations purposes are called corporate blogs.
3. Instant Messaging (IM) – is now ubiquitous. We are all familiar with it. IM now includes audio as well video.
4. Presence - technology that allows you to see when other people are online. People think of presence as the instant messaging list, but the truth is that presence can be embedded into any application or document. This is very useful when you are collaborating with a large team and have a specific question. You can see if the person is online or not and if he/she is online you can send an instant message from within any application.
5. Search for resources with specific capabilities, knowledge, experience, etc.
6. Visual conferencing – we know all about video conferencing. Visual conferencing is about ability to collaborate visually by sharing your desktop application with the team. This allows you to review your projects, specifications, designs, etc and get instant feedback.

The benefits of social networking in your product development environment could be huge. However, like every technology the challenge is to integrate it with the business processes, and overcoming the cultural barriers. Social networking is no different than any other new technology.

There is raging debate in the blogosphere about Facebook-like Social networking in Enterprise software. Here is a very interesting post “Is the Facebook imperative really so great for Corporate America?” by Larry Dignan, the chief editor of ZDNet and SmartPlanet.

Social Networking, like Facebook and Twitter, can provide important insight into customer input. It is also a way to engage with your customers directly. Here is very interesting case study about example how Comcast leverages Twitter to interact with customers. In the future, with Mashups, language parsing and data mining tools, we probably will see companies find rich nuggets of their customer insight from the chatter on Facebook, twitter, etc for product and service competitive advantage.

Jim Brown of Tech-Clarity just wrote a great whitepaper on this topic. You can get it here.
Over the next few months we will explore customer examples where they have enriched their product development environment by adding social networking.

What do you think?

 

 

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by dorasmith | 01 Mar 2010

One thing I realized while reaching out to some of our customers in honor of Engineers Week is that we really need a CAD Designers Week, a CAD/PLM Administrators Week and maybe even CAE Analysts Week. There are many folks in engineering without the title “engineer” or even the traditional engineering education. Some are focused on design or the administration of engineering tools.

In light of Canada’s Olympic gold-medal win in hockey last night, I thought it was appropriate to feature a Canadian CAD Administrator today! Cory Goulden is CAD Administrator at National Steel Car. I met Cory live during the initial launch of Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology two years ago in Toronto. We recently caught up in this “e-interview”:

Q: Cory, you mentioned to me your son is really into the Titanic boat right now – and it had nothing to do with your house flooding last summer. When you were his age, what were you fascinated by?

A: Lego and woodworking in my Grandfather’s shop. Both had limitless possibilities. The latter lead me to eventually creating my own scaled drawings of my designs. It also has an element of fine detail and creativity, which I enjoy.

Q: What did you think you would be when  you grew up?

A: I never really focused on one job. I always had a difficult time as people would always tell you how tough it was to get a job in any field. Eventually I realized that if there are only 5 jobs for 1,000 possible candidates, all you have to do is make sure you are in the top 5 right?  If it is what you truly want to do and you have the aptitude there should be no problem.

The simple answer though was maybe a pilot of a F-18 Hornet as a wish but the first job I really wanted was a Kindergarten teacher.

Q: What do you think is the coolest invention ever?

A:  I LOVE the computer.  There have been other inventions that are great but on a personal level, the computer.  From the first day I touched a “portable” Apple II or a Commodore PET/VIC 20/64 my imagination kicked into overdrive with the possibilities.  I spent two full days writing code and recorded it on a tape just to make “birds” flew across the screen.

Q: What engineer do you most admire (living or dead)?

Right now I am still pretty fascinated with Guy Kawasaki. I heard him present at PLM Connection and a part of my brain had the lights turn on.  I was enthralled with his presentation. I never like to focus on just one thing for too long. I love to learn and everyone can share something towards bettering your life.

Q: What do you love most about being an engineer?

A: Technically I am not an Engineer…yet.  I have always been amazed at what can actually be calculated. Every since the first time I got my hands on the Machinery’s Handbook, I see everything differently. The world seems like it is a little less random and chaotic.

Q: What kind of projects do you work on?

I get to work on regular CAD administrator and design projects but I love the opportunity to try to fix something or improve something…especially if it has little chance of success or is very difficult. I have done many things at NSC and I am very grateful for the opportunities provided this far.  Intranet, Internet site, cross departmental use of Solid Edge are a few opportunities outside the normal everyday tasks.

Q: What’s a typical day in your life? (how much time spent at the computer…how much time collaborating with coworkers…how much time playing video games )

A:  A typical day is anything but typical.  All day firefighting, high pressure projects, restricted timelines…That’s in my spare time!  Collaboration is the key to determining what the end result should be. Oh, I am not a kid anymore but video games are the reason I like computers. I can never turn my back on an old friend!

Q: Two years ago you filmed your son using Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology to design a vacuum cleaner…any recent projects you two have collaborated on?

A:  My son is about to try ST2. I am going to leave it up to him and see what he comes up with but I am sure it will have something to do with the Titanic. By the way – thanks to Designfusion and Z Corp. printers for Conor’s birthday present – a prototype 3D print of his famous vacuum model. They really do care about the little guy.  Thanks Sandi!

Q: Do you love railcars so much you’d like to live in one?

A:  I think I know more than I ever thought possible about railcars. I thought that there was nothing to them and that my future was bleak. That was 12 years ago. Thanks for the chance NSC!

Q: Anything you’d like to add to this post in light of Canada’s victory last night? You can rub it in if you like

A: That win in that manner proved that the U.S. has great interest in the sport.  It very easily could have gone the other way.  We did win though, as I predicted...  This team was destined to win… We could not be denied.

In a few words though  Woo Hoo!!!

Cory, thanks again for your time and inspiring the next generation of designers, engineers – and CAD administrators.

(fyi, previous blog posts on Cory include: Chris Kelley’s video interview and see Susan Cinadr’s blog post featuring Cory’s son designing in Solid Edge.)

Let us know if you have any questions for Cory and if like these e-interviews.

Dora

 

 

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Tags: Solid Edge | Synchronous Technology | Siemens PLM | synchronous technology | solid edge | CAD adminstrator | engineers week | National Steel Car | railcar |

by Mark Burhop | 01 Mar 2010

I’m happy to say there has been a good deal of interest in Solid Edge Simulation by customers. To help with some information flow, I’ve uploaded last year’s PLM Connection presentation to Slideshare. When I gave this, SE Simulation had not yet been released and the demo’s were many people’s first view of the product.

Of course, you miss some of the live demos and interaction you might have had at PLM World but at least you didn’t have to travel for this.

If you are thinking about PLM World this year, I’ll be back talking about Simulation. For many people, FEA is the new CAD* so this is a good chance to try out the product and talk to others about using FEA in your company.

For the people that have already purchased Solid Edge Simulation, I’ll include some new material on using the product. This is also a good time to talk about future versions and what additions you want to see.

* I think I heard this first from @bcourter on twitter. Quite a few FEA folks starting to show up there.

 

 

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Tags: Solid Edge | FEA | Simulation | simulation | solid edge | Solid Edge Simulation | Slideshare | PLMWorld |

by Markus Erlmann | 24 Feb 2010

Demographic change and healthcare is one of the megatrends engineers all around the world looking for innovations for. People are living longer and want to remain mobile in old age. One piece of a solution for this, are unique implants like artificial knee and hip joints. These implants are mostly made out of titanium and cobalt chrome, as they are very durable. The challenge is to manufacture and machine sophisticated and unique implants in a short time from these difficult materials.

At this year’s METAV which is one of the big machine tool fairs with over 700 exhibitors, you can take a look at how these implants get manufactured. There is a special booth focusing on the medical devices industry: "Metal meets Medical". You can see the design and virtual manufacturing of an artificial knee joint.

Once you turn around the knee joint is manufactured based on the results of the virtual manufacturing.

Well, not much to see here. Without the cooling water it might look like this.

For more details and case studies visit the Machinery and Industrial Products Solution homepage and take a look at NX CAM.

 

 

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Tags: NX | tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | CAM | NX CAM | Machine Tool | Machinery | Medical Devices | CNC |

by JerrySarfati | 23 Feb 2010

In honor of Engineers Week, attached is a short “e-interview” I did with Mike Thompson of Wagstaff. Mike works at Wagstaff, Inc (http://www.wagstaff.com) as a mechanical engineer. He works primarily on the billet product line. (Billet is mostly cast by aluminum smelters and remelter/recyclers to be extruded into aluminum shapes.) Wagstaff is the world leader in direct-chill aluminum casting equipment.

Q: Mike, tell me more about Wagstaff Billet Casting System.

A: Every piece of equipment we make is custom, but they all follow basic design rules. A billet system could be small and have 4,000 parts, or very large and have over 12,000 parts. This lends itself very well to parameterized seed parts. Over the past three years I’ve been working to help our product line make the transition from our previous 2D software to NX.  Now with NX6,  I am working on migrating our seed parts to Product Template Studio to further streamline our reuse process. 

We were recently asked to build a system for an Italian extruder that already has a working casthouse. I started with our billet table seed model and modified it to fit within our given parameters. Last week while at the customer’s site, I was able to show them the models and give them a real sense of what their equipment was going to look like. With NX6 I was able to rotate a model around and show them exactly what they’re getting. I was also able to make quick changes in response to situations I found on site, revise drawings and get them approved all within the day and a half I was there.

Images courtesy of Wagstaff, Inc.

Q: What did you think you would be when you grew up? Did you want to be an engineer?

A: I don’t think my story is very unique. I always loved math and I loved my Legos. It didn’t take long for me to realize that engineering was the place for me.

Q: What do you think is the coolest invention ever?

A: I know it’s not related to mechanics in any way, but I would have to say Pandora.com and the Music Genome Project. I created a station two years with one band and now I have a custom station with hundreds of songs and dozens of bands, many of which I had never heard of before. I consistently changes itself to adapt to my needs as an individual customer. It is a single product that can be configured an infinite number of ways. It reads my mind. It’s awesome!

Q: What do you love most about being an engineer?

A: I love seeing something that I’ve designed on my computer screen come to life out it the shop and have it actually work. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that.

Q: What’s a typical day in your life?

A: It changes from day to day. Some days I actually get to spend all eight hours at my computer working on my current project. What normally happens is I spend time helping other NX users with questions they have, I get called down to the shop for question or solutions to projects currently in production, answer questions from sales, purchasing and planning and get to spend a few moments here and there at my desk to work on what I need to work on.

Q: How will engineering be different in the next 10 years? 

A: As engineering software becomes more and more complex, I think we’ll start to see a growing dichotomy between engineers who know engineering and those who assume that software will solve all of their problems. A beautiful model and a colorful stress analysis are wonderful things to have, but only if the engineer understands exactly what they are doing and that they are running the software, not being run by the software. We are seeing a situation right now where a major car company may have had their analysis correct, but their inputs to that analysis were incomplete. I graduated in 2006 and noticed many of my classmates who would try to let the computer do their work for them. They didn’t understand that software was an amazing tool, but the real innovation came from their own minds.

I am all for advancing technologies that increase our capabilities as engineers. I just hope we all remember who the engineers are and what that means.

Mike, thank you for your time, and for sharing your insight with our readers.

---

Please let me know what you thought of this article, by adding your comments below.

Thanks,
Jerry

 

 

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Tags: NX | product development | Product Template Studio | Wagstaff |

by Markus Erlmann | 18 Feb 2010

Are you working in a manufacturing planning department? Are you an industrial engineer working on manual or semi-automatic work stations? If yes, the new capabilities of Jack (our digital human model) might be of interest for you. And if not, this might give you some insight about the work of a manufacturing engineer.

Let’s take a look at the left part of this picture:

Well, beside the coffee machine in the front … you get an impression of a situation which requires a pull activity. As an industrial engineer you now might ask yourself two questions:

1. Is this an acceptable task from an ergonomic point of view?

2. What is the maximum force a certain worker can pull?

Both questions can now be answered by Jack much more precise and quicker. The new force influenced posturing allows you to analyze such kind of situations. Based on the influenced force, Jack automatically set the right posture. You can now easily validate this posture using the ergonomic analysis capabilities of Jack. BTW: the same is valid for push activities as well.

You can answer the second question by using the new force-solver capability. It allows you to predict the maximum acceptable force a human could exert under certain condition. This new sophisticated human performance assessment enables you to execute what-if scenarios or assess design proposals and provide force-specifications. With the force-solver, you do not need to know the weight or force of an object a priori to conducting the assessment. The force-solver will calculate the maximum acceptable force for the human for you.

Another new capability now enables you to validate if the same activity could be done by a Chinese or Japanese worker. Jack now supports both populations with dedicated anthropometric data bases.

You can get more detailed information about all the new and cool features of Jack by joining the free webinar on Feb 24th. This webinar will include a live demonstration. So, don’t miss it.

** Update ** The webinar will show a video demo not a live demo. We detect some issue, which seems to be due to the bandwidth. To keep a high quality visual impression during the webinar, we are recording the demo upfront and will show the video.

 

 

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Tags: tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | Jack | Ergonomics | Human Simulation | Assembly Planning and Validation |

by Susan Cinadr | 18 Feb 2010

In celebration of Engineers Week, we’re honoring one of our own. If you look in room 2.18 in the Munich, Germany Siemens PLM office, you will find 24-year veteran Axel Mundhenk working with Solid Edge and our channel partners. Axel began his career as an application engineer for NC software but changed focus when version 1 of Solid Edge came to fruition. He even jokes that he started with the software before version 0.01.

Axel leads a team of four people with the responsibility to work with our current 16 channel partners for Velocity Series in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Their focus is to train the technical employees of the partners to be able to demo and benchmark the software. For software modules that require special knowledge, Axel’s focus, with the help of his team, is mold tooling and rendering. He also assists with the localization of Solid Edge into German.

One of the many benefits of working for Siemens is the opportunity to use Solid Edge personally. Axel supports Formula 1 in Schools (Global Site, German). His sister, a teacher at high school Rahlstedt, encouraged Axel to become involved, spending extra hours at night or on the weekends to help the students. This school has four teams that will participate in the German championships on May 7 & 8 in Munich. World championships are in September 2010 in Singapore.

Watch this short video as Axel tells you how he used Solid Edge with synchronous technology to help Formula 1 in Schools design the bronze, silver and gold trophies. What he doesn’t tell you is Formula 1 in Schools were able to use the Solid Edge data to send to a machine shop that created a model in Aluminum, resulting in the appropriate ECO’s.

 

 

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by Nik Pakvasa | 17 Feb 2010

We salute Engineers everywhere. We join them in the celebration of Engineering Week.

Engineers are invisible. They work in their corner and create the most amazing things…things that matter to us. Engineers design, and build innovative things that touch, enhance and change the world and make us more productive.

Engineering has become more complex because products and processes are more complex. A decade or so ago “engineering” was done at single geographical location. Engineering has gone global. Engineering is a creative process but also collaborative process.

Besides creative process, Engineers are now faced with the challenges of finding and managing engineering models, drawings, customer requirements, compliance documents, international standards, and collaborating with internal design and manufacturing teams, suppliers, and customers. Engineers today deal with more data, communicate with more people, meet more regulatory compliance requirements, cope with more complex engineering change processes, become more innovative, design faster and do it at lower cost!

Recognizing these challenges engineering CAD/CAE/CAM software vendors developed product data management (PDM) solutions in 1990s, and these PDM systems have evolved over the past few years into product life cycle (PLM) system.

PLM systems, like Teamcenter from Siemens PLM Software, enable engineers to capture, manage, control and collaborate information throughout project’s life cycle - from the project portfolio planning to project requirements phase, to project design and build phase and service phase. Program execution and project management is also integral part of PLM system.

With PLM engineers can evaluate more ideas because PLM systems allow engineers to validate new design concepts very quickly against the context of the overall design. Engineers can do design review by visualizing and doing spatial analysis of complete design in 3D. Engineers can validate new design against customer requirements. They can also conduct live customer design reviews over the Web. They can validate their design against environmental compliance. The potential benefits are huge.

If you want to see some very cool things that are done by Engineers, check out some of these videos. These are stories by our customers, in their own words. They are truly amazing stories!

To learn more about PLM visit Siemens PLM Software’s web site.

 

 

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by Markus Erlmann | 17 Feb 2010

This is about Brad Whitmore from Procter and Gamble. He is the technology section head of the global CAE department helping to build new plants and improve existing ones.

Procter & Gamble sells their products in 180 countries around the world with operations in more than 85 countries. Most of these plants are multi category plants which manufacture a variety of products like paper towels, tooth paste or shampoo which are just a few of the products. P&G has more than 300 brands which lets you imaging the complexity Brad has to handle when designing plants.

One of the challenges he face is the required collaboration between the global and regional teams to discuss different plant concepts and optimize them. P&G was designing these plants by using 2D drawings. But not all people involved in the discussion understood these 2D drawings. Switching to a 3D layout design system solved this issue: “Seeing a layout in 3D brings it to life, especially for people wo have trouble interpreting 2D drawings,” Brad says. “We now get input from people who might not have given their input in the past.” He estimates that as many as 20 design review meetings can be held to fine-tune a plant layout. It is important for the team to understand how operators can access the manufacturing equipment or where material for the manufacturing process can be placed. All these discussions are now based on the 3D factory layout which gets optimized before the plant is physically build.

BTW: A lot of the plant equipment was design using Solid Edge or comes from the equipment vendor. JT is used as the 3D format for this equipment, which is then easily used for the 3D plant layout design and the optimization.

You could get more insight about Brad and his work by watching the five minutes version of this video.

 

 

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Tags: tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | collaboration | Plant Design | Collaboration |

by Mark Burhop | 15 Feb 2010

Did you know it is National Engineer's week? There is even a foundation set up to promote it.

If you are not an engineer, I've collected together some of the better youtube videos to help you understand who we are and what we do. Even the engineer might find these videos helpful, especially if you have cats or are still mourning the end of Star Trek.

Thank an Engineer: World without Notebook PCs, Texas Instruments


Our Hero’s aren’t like your Heroes


Volkswagen: Un-pimp Your Ride I


Along with our ability to do advertisings as demonstrated above, engineers also make the best instructional videos. Even if you don't have a cat, you will be fully trained after watching this video.

An Engineer's Guide to Cats



Surprisingly, there are very few songs about engineers but I did find this one.

Whose line (song styles-Engineer)




Now this last one isn’t funny, it’s a tribute to the “Best Engineer Ever”, Scotty from Star Trek. Its likely half of you are engineers because of him.

Best Engineer ever

 

 

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Tags: humor | Engineer's Week |

by Markus Erlmann | 12 Feb 2010

This is the first part of a series of tips & tricks for Jack. Take a look how easy it is to scale Jack and adjust it to different populations.

Want to know more? Just visit the Jack homepage and stay tuned for the next part of this series.

 

 

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Tags: Tips & Tricks | tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | Digital Factory | Jack | Digital Manufacturing |

by Mark Burhop | 10 Feb 2010

I think most of you know my real job is working with FEA and Solid Edge Simulation. One of the questions I sometimes get is about modeling contact between assemblies.
For Linear static problems, Solid Edge Simulation supports both NX Nastran's Glue and Linear contact. I put together a simple example to show the difference.

Below are two iron parts both constrained at their back sides (shown by blue spheres). In this model, I'm going to put a 1000lb force on the top part to see how the model reacts. As you might guess, the top part will bend and push into the bottom part. How should we model this?



If we do nothing, the top part will simply pass through the bottom part as the elements at the top part don't know anything about the elements at the top. Obviously, this is not the right answer.



The easiest solution is to use glued contact. This tells NX Nastran that any of the elements that are touching each other should transfer the forces to the elements on the other side. The problem with a glued connection, as you might guess, is that it doesn't take into account when the nodes and elements might pull away from each other either by separating or sliding. If your parts really are glued or welded, this is good. If not, you will get the wrong answer.



The next option is to use NX Nastran's Linear Contact. This allows nodes and elements to separate or slide. This is a more complicated problem for NX Nastran to solve and will take longer than using the glued connection. It can also be more confusing to the new user. A glue contact will fully constrain the glued part while the linear contact will not. So a model that solved with glued contact may start telling you your model is not fully constrained when you switch to linear contact.



Note that the maximum stress location in both the glued and linear contact is at roughly the same location but the stress differs considerably for exactly the same load, constraints, and parts.

Solid Edge Simulation can output video files so I took a few examples and included them on a youtube. It includes the options above as well as some other ways to display results.

 

 

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Tags: Solid Edge | FEA | Simulation | simulation | solid edge | NX Nastran |

by dorasmith | 10 Feb 2010

Some of my colleagues were at the Singapore Airshow over the past week. It was only the second year the event has been held in Singapore. The show’s success can be attributed to Asia’s fast growing commercial airline passenger traffic and Asian aircraft OEMs challenging traditional aerospace industry leaders.

Below are some video reports from my colleagues and our partner HP.

 

Rajiv Ghatikar reports from the butterfly garden at the event.

Gavin Spier and Edward Glueckler report from the show floor.

 

Martin Dube touches on cloud-computing.

 

Art Prangley highlights new performance-based logistics technology.

 

In addition, you may want to check out Aviation Week’s complete online report. Their video gallery has some interesting stories, such as Asia’s focus on the MRO market, heavy turnout from business jets (noting Asia should account for 12 percent of the world business aircraft market over the next 10 years), and the retiring Royal Australian Air Force F111.

We also issued a couple of announcements around the event in case you haven’t seen them:

 
• PLM Technology "Critical to the Future of the Aerospace Industry". See comments from Eurocopter and Honeywell Aerospace.
 
• Diehl Aircabin Selects Teamcenter to Help Optimize Processes, Enhance Collaboration and Boost Innovation.

If you’re in the aero and defense market and want to know more about our capabilities for that industry, see our main Aerospace and Defense website or leave us a comment so we can connect.

 

 

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Tags: Siemens PLM | teamcenter | Teamcenter | HP | aerospace and defense | Singapore Airshow | SAS | MRO |

by Mark Burhop | 01 Feb 2010

Created by Sam Johnston from Wikipedia

There are quite a few CAD people talking about cloud computing in 2010. It’s a term that has been extremely overused (kind of like “social media” ) so I thought a quick post might help lift the fog

Acording to Wikipedia, “The term ‘cloud’ is used as a metaphor for the Internet”. There are a number of more tangible technologies that make up Cloud computing with names like SaaS, HaaS/IaaS, Web services, SOA, MSP, and Web 2.0. For this post, lets keep things simple and avoid the acronyms and fancy names.

Below is a short youtube video that explains cloud computing in a simple and direct way.



I’ll also point you to a simple “How Stuff Works” article which explains a bit why cloud computing is useful.

Of course, as with most things ,cloud computing creates some concerns. In Ira WInkler's "The Real Problem With Cloud Computing", he says “Cloud computing puts your data outside of your organization”. He is concerned with security and levels of control that may be missing in a Cloud bases solution.

After security, the next concern is the network. Moving data between your computer /network device to the cloud takes more time than moving to your local harddrive. Applications need to make efficient use of the bandwidth and/or networks need to be upgraded to support the greater volume of data and higher levels of reliability. These problem lead to a trust problem that has slowed cloud computing in its early years. However, IMHO, trust is building and Gartner has identified it as one of 2010 top strategic Technologies.

Now I haven’t really touched on what this all means to PLM and CAD. It something that does come up in many discussions and I think that its going to be an interesting topic for 2010. So stay tuned…

 

 

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by Susan Cinadr | 29 Jan 2010

I have an upcoming work trip to Europe at the end of February that will take me to four countries in 12 days. I will be writing more about this including interviews with our channel partners and some of our own Siemens PLM folks, pictures and insights into what is happening in the SMB market. 

My last stop in London, England provides me with an opportunity to tour the Red Bull Racing facility in Milton Keynes. Siemens PLM is a sponsor of the Formula One team; they use NX and Teamcenter to help develop their cars and improve their performance on the race track.  Expect a post from me about their use of our technology along with some pics of our tour. For now, you can read our case study for more information.

This week, I was speaking with a colleague about my impending trip. Back in 2008, Dora shared a video on Andretti Green Racing and Hendrick Motorsports but we, Siemens PLM, have never fully shared the scope of the race teams that use our software here on the blog. Below is a list of teams from the US and their drivers that use PLM software from Siemens:

 

Hendrick Motorsports Dale Earnhardt Jr. #88 Jeff Gordon #24 Jimmie Johnson #48 Mark Martin #5

Joe Gibbs Racing Kyle Busch #18 Denny Hamlin #11 Joey Logano #20

Red Bull Racing Scott Speed #82 Brian Vickers #83

Roush Fenway Racing Greg Biffle #16 Carl Edwards #99 Matt Kenseth #17 David Ragan #6

Andretti Autosport

Marco Andretti #26

Tony Kanaan #11

Danica Patrick #7

Ryan Hunter-Reay #37

KB Racing

Greg Anderson

Jason Line

Wayne Taylor Racing

Max Angelelli

Ricky Taylor

 

Back when I started my job in 2000, I had the opportunity to meet Mark Bringle, technical sponsor and marketing director for Joe Gibbs Racing. I gave Mark a quick call and asked him about the upcoming start to the season. (NASCAR begins on Valentine's Day, February 14, in Daytona Beach, Florida) Here's what Mark had to say:

We’re coming off a good year; Kyle won Nationwide, Logano won rookie of the year and Denny Hamlin finished fifth in the chase. We probably have the youngest group which is good for our future. What Hendrick did last year finishing 1st, 2nd and 3rd was incredible. Some one is going to take Jimmie down.

Mark also shared that JGR is using Social Media to it's advantage. They now have an "internet guru" named Bryan 'Boris' Cook who blogs and tweets from pit row.

Good luck to all the Siemens race teams this year!

 

 

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by dorasmith | 26 Jan 2010

For those of you who received one of our print 2010 calendars, you saw this bar dispenser, aka a “bar gun”, from Schroeder America gracing the month of January. All of the images can be seen in our Global Image Gallery. The “Best in Class” are the 12 who appear on the print edition.

Now if you were a kid like me who grew up in a household where soda was a special treat, you probably like the idea of a gun that shoots a near endless supply of the sweet juices. If you’re a designer or engineer, you'd probably like to know a little more about this design.

Deborah Absalon from Schroeder America was kind enough to fill us in.

Q: How did the ICON bar gun get its name?

A: The term “Bar gun” is a common reference in the industry. We made several improvements to the industry standard and wanted to give our product its own name to differentiate it. Our Marketing department chose the name “ICON” to represent a new image in bar gun technology.

Q: Who are your primary customers and what is most important to them in this product?

A: Our primary customers are Coca-Cola and Pepsi. They have their own red and blue bar guns, respectively. The black ICON Bar Gun is primarily sold to “neutral” bars and restaurants, primarily through distributors.

Q: Was this a new design or redesign?

A: The ICON is a new product for us – we are in fact a new company, only 3 years old. The design is actually a redesign of the existing industry standard.

Q: What were the design challenges you faced? How did you address them?

A: We wanted to make a dispenser that was more reliable, easier to service, and most importantly had better ratio control (for a more accurately mixed, better tasting drink). In order to do so, we had to completely redesign the manifold/valve system, incorporating our flow controls and adding a positive shutoff to the system. We redesigned the handle itself to allow greater flow, used better materials for durability, and developed a manufacturing process to ensure greater accuracy in machining.  The biggest challenge was identifying the negative aspects of our competitors product, while incorporating designs changes into our product that our customers were asking for, thus giving the “ICON” a competitive advantage in the market place.

Q: Tell me about the complexity of a design like this. How difficult is it to create one product that outputs multiple different liquids? How many designers worked on this gun?

A: The design is surprisingly complex. You have many places - from nozzle, through the handle, the sheath, flow controls, and shutoff assembly – where fluids can leak. In a restaurant or bar, a leak equals disaster. Also, there are strict NSF requirements for any material coming in contact with water/soda. We were a brand new company, with a design team of 3 people – myself, our main engineer David Santy, and our company founder Jud Schroeder. We relied very heavily on our VP of Manufacturing, Sam Brown, and his manufacturing personnel to help us develop the manufacturing processes concurrently with our ongoing design.

Q: Once you complete the design, where does it go from there?

A: It’s not as simple as completing the design and then sending it off to manufacturing. Being a startup company, it was imperative to bring a product to market as quickly as possible. So design and manufacturing really had to be concurrent processes. The handle laminates were designed in NX, programmed in NX Machining, and sent to our Mazak milling machines. While manufacturing was working out how best to bond the laminates, we were designing other aspects of the bar gun, including over 80 plastic parts. We used SLA and machined parts directly from NX to prototype. So while our plastic parts tools were being made, we were working out manufacturing processes, including pressure testing devices, etc.

Q: Do you test these guns out at your office? Is there an endless supply of soda and water? And be honest, do you ever have a drink fight (vs. food fight) with these guns ?

A: Yes, we do test the bar guns at our facility. In addition to using pressure decay testing throughout the manufacturing process, we perform a check on the final assembly using pressure decay testing as well as pressurized water testing to ensure there are no leaks in the system. The final step of the process includes a sanitization cycle using chlorinated fluids, which are blown out before being placed into inventory.

Q: Anything else you think might be of interest to other design engineers about  the gun or other work Schroeder does?

A: We have 3 horizontal Mazak milling centers, 2 vertical Mazak milling centers, 1 vertical Hurco CNC milling machine, all equipped with automated tool changers. We also have 3 Cincinnati molding presses, ranging between 55 tons and 138 tons. We have a Dukane high output ultrasonic welder, a Dukane spin welder, specially designed  SoftTest equipment for valve testing, a specially built Printex pad printer, and  a specially built Acme micro-welder for parts assembly. Lastly, we have the latest technology in evacuation/refrigerant charging equipment.

We use rendered images heavily in the early design phase of a product to make sure the customer is getting the look they want. NX Shape Studio is a must-have there.

Lastly, there definitely is a continuous supply of water/soda, as we’re always testing some new process, material, or configuration. We also produce a “Bubbler” – think lemonade at Chik-Fil-A (fast food restaurant) – and a couple of those are usually set up and running as well. Did I mention the 29 degree counter top beer unit? I’m just waiting for a chance to design a Margarita machine! 

Thanks Deborah for taking the time to answer some questions.

Stay tuned for next month’s model of the month. In the meantime, visit the other design contest images in the “Special Selections” and “Images from Around the World” galleries.

if you want your own print copy of the calendar, you can request one here (if you’re in the Americas). If you’re in Europe or Asia Pacific, leave a comment and we’ll get you in contact with the right person.

 

 

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Tags: NX | CAD | product design | engineering | calendar | Schroeder | NX Shape Studio | ICON bar gun | design contest | NX Machining |

by Nik Pakvasa | 25 Jan 2010

Most of us lug around on our travels multiple gadgets, Blackberry Phone, Laptop, mp3 music player, e-reader and probably a note book for taking notes.

Wouldn’t it be cool if a new device could combine all these into a single hybrid device so I can listen to music, surf the web anywhere anytime, read books and news papers, watch movies, take notes, jot down ideas and observations, work on my presentations and even make phone calls? And to top it off it would have multi-touch interface that goes beyond iPhone i.e., I could flip a page as I do with normal books, or I could drop & drag objects with touch, or I could draw, sketch, write, etc with my fingers!

Apple is rumored to introduce a new “tablet" gizmo this week.The hype and mystery surrounding has created tremendous buzz. There are many unconfirmed reports about what it is, its capabilities and specifications.

Apple has always been able to take dots – technologies- and connect them. iPod was not the first MP3 player but what iPod did was to connect hardware and software to deliver a compelling user experience. Can Apple connect multi-touch user interface, personal computing, phone, e-reader, smart phone, video games, cloud computing and streaming, etc to deliver a compelling new computing experience? Will this revolutionize our computing, surfing, reading, audio and video experiences? Will Apple make “tablet” main stream? Will Apple “tablet” change our concept of computing?

Tablet computers are already here, having been launched as long ago as November 2001 by none other than Jobs's arch-¬rival, Bill Gates. "I'm already using a [Microsoft] Tablet as my everyday computer," Gates told his audience at the Comdex show in Las Vegas back then. "It's a PC that is virtually without limits…Within five years, I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America." So in some sense we have been waiting for the perfect “tablet” since 2001.

Mr. Jobs, we are ready. Surprise us. Call it what you want. I want two of this “tablet”.

 

 

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by Susan Cinadr | 22 Jan 2010

Last week, Siemens announced a new release of Femap - version 10.1.1. It is the latest in a series of more than 30 successful product releases for the product. Thanks to my colleagues from Germany @SiemensPLM_DE who tweeted this out last week.

Driving the Femap 10.1.1 release is the inclusion of the latest version of our flagship simulation solver, NX Nastran 7. On the graphics and modeling side, Femap 10.1.1 continues the visualization theme of the previous 10.1 release, enhancing visibility control of solid parts, as well as adding the following capabilities:

• New bearing load definition
• Enhanced entity selection with keyboard shortcuts
• Text based filtering for selection of titled entities

You can find more details about Femap 10.1 and 10.1.1 from the Femap web site.

How our customers use our products never ceases to fascinate me, and proving to be no exception to that rule is SpaceWorks, a company that designs satellites. Challenged with developing off-the-shelf structural modules for fast satellite assembly (plug-and-play style), SpaceWorks worked with the consultant firm Predictive Engineering to gain insight into the satellites performance using Femap with NX Nastran. Using a hybrid modeling approach, the large and complex satellite design could be simulated efficiently, giving good correlation with experimental results, and in very fast solution times.

Read the SpaceWorks case study to find out more.

 

 

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by Markus Erlmann | 22 Jan 2010

What’s the big deal with Teamcenter here? The manufacturing engineers now can use the same environment as the product engineers. This enables the manufacturing engineers to get product updates immediately without data conversion.

In addition Teamcenter provides platform services like revisions, effectivity, and change or variants management. And not to forget the communication and collaboration capabilities which support global engineering and manufacturing.

Let’s take a look at the planning workflow and focus on weld points. They are used to hold the nearly 400 single parts of the car body together.

These weld points are sometimes defined by the product engineer or by a weld specialist. Sometimes the weld points are not in the CAD system, but delivered via a Microsoft Excel file including x-, y- and z-coordinates. How do you know which weld point is relevant for which part or better parts? You can use the new and automatic capability to connect welds and parts based on spatial proximity.

Sometimes it happens that weld points are missing or that additional ones are required. In this case you can use the weld point creation wizard which guides through the creation process and demands all relevant information.

If you would like to go on working in Excel, the Excel Live integration enables you to load the weld points in Excel. Now you can change them having the rules engine of Teamcenter in the background ensuring the consistency of the data.

Once the weld points and parts are connected, the manufacturing engineer goes on assigning the single parts to the robotics stations.

The next step is the creation or re-use of weld operations and assigning to stations. These operations are later assigned to the single robots. But before that, the manufacturing engineer chose the relevant weld points and assigns them to the operations. The extended manufacturing search capability helps to find these weld points, e.g. find all welds in a certain area or from a certain type.

Finally the definition of the right sequence of operations is done, so that the cycle time (or takt time) is utilized as good as possible.

Once the planning part is done, you can go on with the 3D planning and simulation by using Process Simulate. You can launch this directly out of Teamcenter. But that’s something for a different post to write about.

You want to know more? Take a look at the Tecnomatix 9.1 or the Robotics and Automation Planning page.

 

 

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Tags: teamcenter | tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | Teamcenter | productivity | Productivity | Robotics |

by JerrySarfati | 20 Jan 2010

Have you attended a Siemens PLM Users group meeting in the past? Are you aware of the annual conference and that there are users group meetings held regionally throughout the year? If not, you should.

I have just returned from the Northern California Regional Users group meeting, which was held in San Jose California.  This event provided a forum for users to hear the latest about the Siemens PLM family of products.  More importantly, this event helped Northern California users network with other users to share experiences and new ideas.

There were 2 keynote sessions.  First John R. Baker, reviewed what’s new in NX7, and gave us a preview of some of the many things coming in the next release of NX.

(I apologize for the poor picture quality, I forgot to bring my camera, so these were taken with my camera Phone )

Next up was Dave McLaughlin, who provided us with an update to Teamcenter 8.

In the afternoon, there were six different break-out sessions;

NX CAE Update

Marilyn Tomlin

NX7; HD3D & Synchronous Technology

Jerry Sarfati

Managing Electronics; MCAD, ECAD, & Software

Krish Krishnamurthy

Motion Control; Overview of Siemens Controllers

Daniel Martinez

Tecnomatix; Part Assembly/Planning & Simulation

Sean Bradley

NX PMI - The shift from paper to electronic

Dave Wingrave

I’d like to thank everyone (Dave, Lorena, and many others) that helped put on this event. I was very impressed with the cooperative nature of the attendees. Everyone wanted to learn and share and it appeared that all would walk away with new ideas for making their environments more productive.

The next time you hear about a local users meeting – do your best to attend. You will learn something, you will make new contacts, and even more importantly – you might just help a fellow colleague.

Jerry

 

 

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Tags: NX | PLM | teamcenter | tecnomatix | CAE | Tecnomatix | PLM World | Teamcenter | Simulation | simulation |

by Mark Burhop | 19 Jan 2010

I had a talk with one of our software developers the other day asking what it is like to work on CAD software. You might think this was over coffee in the break room but really, we were separated by several thousand miles. For Solid Edge Simulation, we have developers contributing from all over the world (Alabama, Pennsylvania, Ohio in the US and England and India outside the US.) and this is just a small product.

In this case I was talking with Sameer Kanikdale in Pune, India. It’s amazing how hard communication over this distance used to be. Now we can video conference and IM in less time than it takes to walk to the office beside you.


Photo of my monitor while doing a video conference with Sameer

Sameer tells me Pune is famous for its scenic beauty, rich natural resources, and historical and religious places. It’s known globally for its R&D institutes. I occasionally joke they need to create some problems over there so I have to come visit to fix them

Since software development is much the same around the world, I asked him what skills are good for an engineering software developer. He feels you need some good understanding of mechanical engineering, geometry and CAD. For FEA you also need to understand the processes of FEA like meshing and pre and post processing. Good analytical skills are important where you might have to develop complex algorithms. Strong software development skills are also key. In his case, he mainly works in C++ and COM.

Later Sameer started Solid Edge Simulation running an analysis while I watched (we use a Teamcenter application for this). Sameer talked a bit about the FEA solve command which he implemented. It gathers up all the information from Solid Edge and sends it to the NX Nastran Solver and then retrieves this information after it is done. This is what allows Solid Edge to create the pretty rainbow colored pictures.


Solid Edge Simulation running in India

We still haven’t found a way around time zone issues but it really is amazing what we can do today.

BTW…
If you like the idea of working internationally and with cool technology, I’ll also point out we are hiring. North Americans might want to look here.
If you like the Solid Edge application, we are even hiring here in Huntsville, Alabama where you will see me frequently talking to my monitor.

 

 

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Tags: Solid Edge | CAD | solid edge | Solid Edge Simulation | Huntsville | NX Nastran | Pune | C++ |

by Markus Erlmann | 18 Jan 2010

Last June we launched Tecnomatix 9 which focused on driving productivity in planning and manufacturing. Today we release Tecnomatix 9.1 enabling our customers to increase their productivity even further.

These are the highlights of the new version:

• Automotive Body-in-White (BIW) Planning on Teamcenter

• Quality Management Further Streamlines Analysis and Improves Usability Across Industries

• Assembly Planning on Teamcenter

• Jack and Jill Around the World

The image about shows one new capability: the existing time management together with the new time data card. Important to mention that our customers can use the pre-defined MTM standard times or configure the time data card to use their company specific ones.

There are more details available at the Tecnomatix 9.1 page or just watch the blog in the coming days.

 

 

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by JerrySarfati | 11 Jan 2010

Siemens PLM Software has a very strong and active academic program, serving more than a million students annually at more than 10,000 partner institutions, offering software for use at every academic level.  However, we have not provided a solution for individual students who wished to purchase, learn and use NX. Recently, we have addressed this need, and we are pleased to announce the NX Student Edition.

The NX Student Edition has been developed as a single-user solution.  The Student Edition includes the complete suite of NX modeling, drafting, assemblies, and rendering capabilities, with NX Product Template Studio, complete documentation and self-teaching aids.  NX Student Edition is delivered with a simple license install and a click-wrap license agreement.

The NX Student Edition is available initially through a specialist academic reseller, JourneyEd, and is listed on their websites, which include:
JourneyEd - http://www.journeyed.com/item/Siemens/NX+6/100965802
Academic Superstore - http://www.academicsuperstore.com/products/Siemens/NX+6/1307799

An international company, JourneyEd will handle all aspects of the transaction, including verification of student credentials and payments via credit cards or PayPal.  JourneyEd will also promote NX Student Edition in their physical catalogs.

NX Student Edition is not intended to replace the existing academic solutions, but to supplement them. We believe it will help increase the availability of NX trained students in the future.

Jerry

 

 

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Tags: NX | CAD | PLM | Siemens | Modeling | rendering | Student | University | GO PLM |

by Nik Pakvasa | 06 Jan 2010

I mentioned about the "Sixth Sense" technology in the comment section of my previous blog. However, I think it too important to leave it into foot notes. It deserves its own blog.

One of the most exciting projects MIT’s Media lab is working on “Sixth Sense” project. The project objective is to augment reality. The Sixth sense technology blends physical reality and digital world in very creative, intuitive and compelling ways. The prototype of the "Sixth Sense" is a wearable, gesture-driven computing platform that can continually augment the physical world with digital information.






"All the work is in the software," says Dr Pattie Maes, head of the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT, "The system is constantly trying to figure out what's around you, and what you're trying to do. It has to recognize the images you see, track your gestures, and then relate it all to relevant information at the same time."






The “Sixth Sense” will not make us throw away our laptops and smartphones. Probably not anytime soon. Will this change CAD or PLM user interaction? However, this could be a game changer. It is just matter of time before some Silicon Valley geniuses, like Steve Jobs, will package this technology into compelling consumer products that will change our lives!!!

If you haven’t seen the video I strongly recommend it you see it.


http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html

To read and see more pictures and video please visit

http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/

 

 

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Tags: SixthSense AugementedReality Innovation MIT |

by Nik Pakvasa | 31 Dec 2009

My 2009 list of things:

It is December 31. Another year and a decade is gone by. 2009 was very eventful year but I am not here to dwell on it. I am here to share things I enjoyed.
Books I enjoyed:
1.    In Other Room, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin – Wonderful short stories based in Pakistan that weaves old traditions with the modern times.
2.    A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore – Beautiful novel about coming of age of a mid-western girl after 9/11. It is tender, funny, and poignant.
3.    Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout – Pulitzer prize winning fiction based in rural Maine is a series of linked short stories. The story revolves around a teacher and her family and her connections.
What books did you enjoy? What would you recommend?
One book I can’t wait to get my hands on!
The Help by Kathryn Stocket – “….Told from three different points of view, The Help takes place in Jackson, Miss., in the early 1960s, when the Deep South was beginning its immersion into the civil rights movement. Stockett masterfully captures both black and white voices with astonishing believability, and all three main characters — renegade debutante Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, and housekeepers Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson — are complex, admirable women….” (from NPR)

Movies that I enjoyed
1.    The Hangover – stupid but thoroughly enjoyable. Fun. Fun Fun.
2.    Precious – very sad but also uplifting. It’s all about the human spirit and perseverance.
Movies I still want to see before the new year (but have to wait for dvd release because I prefer to watch at home: convenient and cheaper than going out. I will have to make an exception for Avatar which must be experienced in IMAX 3D))
1.    Up in the air
2.    Crazy Heart
3..    Inglorious basterds
4.    Avatar

What movies would you recommend?
Gadgets I wish I had but can’t afford right now, with 1 kid in college and other starting in 2010. So you know where my priorities are!!
1.    Sony 40” OLED TV…wow it is 1 CM thin!
2.    Smartphone….love iPhone but my life would be misery trying to manage and decide how and when to use 90,000 apps. I would be worried it would take over my life.
3.    Canon 7D or Nikon D90 DSLR…I was happy to get rid of my SLR when point and shoot came. I like the point shoot. It fits in my pocket and besides I have no artistic bone in my body.
4.    Bose Quiet Comfort 15…this I could use but seems bit pricey.
5.    Livescribe’s Pulse smartpen…. very useful for jotting notes during travels,  meetings , observations, etc. Unfortunately forgot to sms my wish list to Santa this year..
6.    E-Reader like Kindle, Nook or Sony Reader ( 3 more e-readers will be announced at 2010 CES in a few weeks And there is always Apple. Rumors abound about Apples’ new hybrid gadget- e-reader, tablet, etc. ). E-reader must be wonderful: to have all my books, journals and newspapers in my shirt pocket! But I still prefer feel of book. I could see e-readers being very useful for people spending too much time at airports, taxis, and hotels.
 
This is only partial list. My list is too long and continues to grow!  I have promised myself to do more with less.. What gadgets you can’t live without?
New internet tools that I love:
1. “Readability” – It makes world of difference to read online documents with it. No more clutter. Give it a spin.
2. Evernote – This is the coolest tool. I love it.  And it is free! There are many uses of it but for me just the ability to save any part of the web page instantly with one click and tag it is just very handy. With Evernote you can Remember, Tag and Find everything, anywhere , anytime! Read 100 Different Evernote uses and decide how you can use it.  Read Give it a try.
What technology/products I think will have impact in 2010 and beyond
1.    Google Goggles – Ability to recognize images and search and find information. Implications are far reaching not in the short term but in the long term.
2.    Google Chrome OS & Google Chrome OS Netbook ? – Since I spend so much time on Internet it seems my sole purpose in using my PC is to get to the web as fast as possible. With my PC it takes me almost 3-4 minutes (depending on wifi connection). How cool would it be to be able to fire up OS and be on the internet in 7 seconds or even 20 seconds!!! Plus this new Chrome OS device would weigh and cost a lot less.
3.    Google Wave – Without getting caught into all the hype around it I believe Wave is about collaborative distributed computing. 
4.   Microsoft Office 2010 version on “cloud”
5.   Apple – iTablet? iSlate? A hybrid gadget – e-reader, iTouch, tablet? Whatever it is it will be cool and I will want it!
6.   Cloud computing – there is raging debate but I think it is here to stay and grow. Cable connection will be as good as our old landline telephone. We expect them to never go down. And as for security I trust my data with Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, salesforce.com, etc. They do this for living. It is in their interest to provide highest level security. They will invest in best computer science that money can buy. I seriously doubt corporate, especially mid-to-small, can afford IT investment to compete with them.
Another thing Cloud computing apps have shown is that it has to be easy.  That is where the future battle ground will be for even enterprise software.. Easy to deploy, maintain, train, integrate and use, and at the same time secure and less costly. It may take few more years to reach there but I have no doubt where we will end up.
I am hooked to ‘cloud’ computing. Here’s how:
A. My local library – reserving books online
B. Banking
C. Netflix – I love Instant watching! Have you tried the Roku player?
D. Apple TV – Stream your digital photos to your lcd/plasma tv and buy or rent movies instantly. Netflix and Apple TV is our entertainment since we don’t have live TV (we disconnected TV cable 12 years ago when my children were 6 and 8 and never turned it back on)
E. Shopping
F. G-mail
G. Google documents
H. Google voice
I. NPR.ORG
J. Rotten Tomatoes
K. NY Times
L. WSJ
M. Social networking (Twitter, blogging)
N. Wikipedia

Wish you Happy , Healthy and Prosperous 2010.

 

 

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by Nik Pakvasa | 15 Dec 2009

Anyone who has ever attempted to move from one version of an enterprise software application to the “new improved” version knows that upgrades can be painful and costly. The critical elements of any enterprise software upgrade are data compatibility, ease of deployment, and compelling business benefits from the upgrade. Data compatibility is something that cannot be an afterthought. It has to be designed into the new version of the software. Ease of deployment of complex enterprise software requires robust and flexible state-of the-art architecture. It requires hardware and networking considerations. It requires that the software solution has captured the customer business process it is trying to transform. And above all it demands a unique long term partnership with the software vendor.

I met Teamcenter customers, Rolls-Royce, Sandvik Mining & Construction, Philips, BSH, and other, during a recent Siemens PLM Conference. All these customers have either gone through transition or are in the process of transitioning to the “new improved” version of Teamcenter – a unified PLM environment. They all are driven by similar motivation. They all want global engineering collaboration. They all want to reduce the number of different applications/systems used in the PLM process. They want, for example, visibility of requirements throughout their products’ lifecycle. They all want the ability to present the right BOM for the right function. They want to be able to develop a reusable platform strategy. For these customers this is transformational. They are going beyond simple PDM – CAD data management and check-in/check-out.

We are excited about this transformational transition. So with that in mind, we worked with industry analyst firm CIMdata to develop a white paper on the subject of “PLM Transitions” in an attempt to share some lessons learned from real world companies. The white paper is a detailed case study of 3 Teamcenter customers from different regions and different industries. Each one with a strong vision of unified PLM. The case studies highlight their journeys of Teamcenter upgrades and their continuous evolution of transformation of the innovation process. As you might imagine, some of the keys to success include planning, communication and working closely with your PLM vendor.

If you are considering a significant PLM upgrade, you might want to read this white paper first. You might also want to listen to an interview that our own Bill Carrelli, VP of Strategic Marketing, conducted with CIMdata’s Ken Amann on this same topic.


After you read the white paper and listen to the interview, let me know what you think – especially if you can offer additional thoughts on how to best execute a successful transition to a “new and improved” PLM environment!

 

 

(6) Comments • Permalink

Tags: PLM | teamcenter | Siemens | Teamcenter | customers |

by Markus Erlmann | 15 Dec 2009

What can I write about this short video? Maybe that it was done in about two hours. Actually, the simulation took only about 15 minutes to create using the task simulation capabilities of our digital human models, Jack and Jill. The majority of the time was consumed deciding on the wall paper design, curtains, and floor covering

I wish you happy holidays and all the best for you, your family and friends.

 

 

(3) Comments • Permalink

Tags: tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | Jack | Xmas |

by Markus Erlmann | 14 Dec 2009

The goal of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen is a global climate protection convention. One part of this goal is the reduction in CO2 emissions, which could be achieved by reducing energy consumption. How can manufacturing contribute to this goal? Or how do we become green in manufacturing?

You could look at the way the energy you consume is provided, e.g. from burning coal, oil or gas or from hydroelectric power stations, wind turbines or solar cells. Changing your energy source will help you to become green. Another possibility is the reduction in energy consumption of manufacturing processes, which will save costs in manufacturing too. How to do that?

Here’s one example: the transportation of goods from one manufacturing station to the next one is part of the manufacturing process. This can be done by automatic conveyor systems (BTW: these are used for the luggage system in airports too). Do these conveyor systems need to run all the time even when there are no parts to be transported? Just shutting down the conveyor when there is no part to be transported might not lead to the optimum between throughput and energy consumption. This is because there is a peak in energy consumption when starting the conveyor system which is higher compared to the running system.

We used a material flow simulation to get to the optimal parameters of such a transportation system. In this video Georg Piepenbrock, Product Manager Tecnomatix Plant Simulation, talks about the approach and the results.

This presentation will provide you even more details about the different parameters which were evaluate.

For more details about Tecnomatix Plant Simulation, which was used for the simulation, please visit the product web page.

And if you want to contribute to the UN Climate Change Conference, please have a look at the United Nations’ Hopenhagen initiative.

 

 

(3) Comments • Permalink

Tags: tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | green | Plant Simulation | Green Manufacturing | Green |

by Markus Erlmann | 07 Dec 2009

Recently, Jim Brown of TechClarity posted a blog on Siemens PLM Software’s new Dimensional Planning & Validation (DPV), solution for quality. Jim wrote, “One of the main things that manufacturers can do to improve quality is to “close the loop” on quality by feeding actual results back into the manufacturing and design processes to improve quality.” He goes on to say, “One of the key elements that make this beneficial is the analytical engine behind it, similar to other trends to use business intelligence (BI) in PLM.”

This is exactly why Siemens has developed DPV. Capturing as-built quality data from the shop floor, e.g. from coordinate measurement machines or visual measurement systems, and integrating it directly to the PLM platform Teamcenter. This enables for continuous product and process improvement through product design, manufacturing planning and production. More importantly with DPV, the design and manufacturing engineers do not need to switch between different IT systems. The quality data is available in a single source, fully associated to product, process, resources and plant information.

What does this do?

First, it significantly lowers the cost of quality of the next product versions. The product’s quality is defined during the design process: dimensions, orientation or location tolerances, surface-finish quality and more. Bringing actual quality data back to design now allows you to identify issues and correct them where they were initiated. By not closing this loop, ,manufacturers have to deal with with quality issues in later stages of the production process where the cost of change is much higher.

As an example, a high performance turbo charger assembly is monitored. It is found that an end-cap has too much gap at the mating surface causing a drop in pressure output which increases rework on the assembly. To solve this issue it is determined that the torque on the five bolts in the assembly must be increased. The bolt torque design spec is modified and new inspection points identified to more accurately monitor this issue.

Second, by associating actual measurement results to 3D product data and process information, you now have the ability to find the root cause of product quality issues. How important is this? It allows you to reduce rework, repair, scrap and non-conformance processes which ultimately impact profitability.

One example is a milling cutter which can be used only for a certain amount of parts or hours. Eventually the edges become too dull to cut material within a specified tolerance or for a particular surface finish. At some point, the surface starts to deviate from the design spec. Of course experienced shop floor workers know that they should exchange the milling cutter after a specific amount of parts or cutting hours. But with DPV, they will know when tolerances or surfaces are reaching limits and can plan accordingly. But what if the cutter was recently changed and you still identify quality issues? It might be that the fixture holds the part much too strong on one side and forces the part to bend, which finally leads to the quality issues. Now with DPV’s integration to the PLM platform Teamcenter, all of the other potential contributors, e.g. tooling, fixture, machine set-up, etc. are available and can be used to identify the root cause of the issue.

Here’s a picture about different surface qualities.

The Siemens PLM Software solution gives you full flexibility to capture, store, manage and analyze critical quality data. Imagine multiple global plants running daily, capturing hundreds of thousands of data points. DPV is a unique solution to efficiently visualize this data, identify the critical areas and take appropriate actions.

For more information just visit the Dimensional Planning & Validation product page. And take a look at my previous post from the PLM Connection Europe including a video interview about DPV.

 

 

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Tags: teamcenter | tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | Teamcenter | Dimensional Planning and Validation | Quality Management | DPV | Quality |

by Mark Burhop | 07 Dec 2009

I just thought I’d send out a reminder to the Solid Edge customers to let them know there is not much time left to try Solid Edge Simulation for free. You don’t even have to call anyone, just install Solid Edge ST2 and turn it on.

In the past, getting FEA software vendors to just give you a copy of their software was difficult. These tools could be hard to use so it was better if a knowledgeable user walked the customer through the process rather than risk them getting frustrated trying to run it themselves.

With Solid Edge Simulation, we really focused on ease-of-use. So our marketing group decided to just let you have it – no salesman doing demos for you, no need to give out your email or phone number to get a license… just turn it on and try it out.

So, even if you are not ready to buy today or are not sure what value FEA might bring to your company, this is a good time to get educated about what can be done.

 

 

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Tags: Solid Edge | FEA | Simulation | simulation | solid edge |

by dorasmith | 02 Dec 2009

image via Origamiancy on Flickr

At PLM Connection two months ago, a customer of ours asked me if I knew Ashley Eckhoff, who works in the same building I do, just on a different floor. I did not but was interested to learn more about how he did his job. He’s been so busy gathering customer requirements for NX 8 that he dodged an interview several times. But I caught up with him today.

Ashley has the fun and sometimes tough job of gather requirements from customers and then figuring out how we build what they need into our product in a way that serves many customers.

He told me one idea that came from a customer turned into the NX Flexible Printed Circuit Design software. The customer designs cameras and does what Ashley called “electronic origami,” folding PCBs (printed circuit boards) smaller and smaller to fit inside a camera. They used to design the flat and folded shape separately. So the software helps them cut their design time in half.

 

 

(1) Comments • Permalink

Tags: NX | CAD | Siemens PLM | product development | product design | engineering design | PCB design |

by Markus Erlmann | 30 Nov 2009

Many of you probably use or consume Procter & Gamble (P&G) products in some fashion almost every day. I certainly do, at least when I shave anyway. But it wasn’t until I thought about the fact that P&G uses simulation software – to optimize material flow, resource utilization and logistics – that I realized just how many products they produce every day around the world, and the high volumes associated with each of those products.

We had the opportunity to talk with the P&G Technology Section Head for Global Computer Aided Engineering, Brad Whitmore about the challenges they face and the success they’ve achieved by using our simulation software. Actually, Jeff Miller will be talking about them at the Winter Simulation Conference and highlighting the success they have had with the Tecnomatix Plant Design and Optimization solution.

I just got a sneak-preview from him

BTW: Georg Piepenbrock, the Tecnomatix Plant Simulation Product Manager will be at the conference available for discussions and latest news and trends.

For more information about the Plant Design and Optimization solution, just visit the solution web page.

 

 

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Tags: tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | Plant Design and Optimization | Plant Simulation | PDO | Winter Simulation Conference |

by dorasmith | 25 Nov 2009

Since the U.S. is on Thanksgiving holiday the next two days, I wanted to do a quick thank you post. First, I want to thank our team of bloggers here. Blogging is something they fit into their work in all their spare time so I’m thankful that they can and do. Thanks Mark, Jerry, Markus, Susan, Chris, Dan and Nik!

I’m also thankful to so many in this industry who have engaged in social media this past year. The growing conversation is getting interesting. I’m particularly thankful to Twitter right now for lists (see: There’s a List for That). Twitter announced the capability earlier this month and it’s made a part of my job just a little easier.

Folks here that are getting started in social media always ask “where do I start?”. The answer is simple but not always easy: “Listen.” Thankfully, the new Twitter list functionality makes listening a bit easier. It enables you to create a list that others can see and use. You can also do private lists. So for those of you who have asked me for a list of who to follow or where to listen, this PLM Twitter List is for you.

It’s just a big list of all the PLM/CAD related folks I’ve run into on Twitter. Some are customers, some competitors – and yes some are customers of our competitors. Here is a sampling from some light, pre-Thanksgiving conversation:

Hey that last one talks about the very list I’m blogging about! Thanks Alan!

If you’re not on my BIG PLM List but in this industry, just leave a comment, tweet me or pick up the old fashioned phone and let me know.

Here are a few other PLM/CAD related twitter lists you may also want to check out:

• Our own Mark Burhop, who is followed by no less than 60 lists, has his own @burhop’s PLM top 30 (Hey, Mark I only see 26 on there today – so 4 more lucky folks who can still make this list!)
• Blogger Josh Mings has @CADTwitList. This is a list he started a while back before there were Twitter lists. There are 300 folks on it with lots of CAD users.
• I also have a PLM/CAD media analyst list (a subset of the BIG PLM list). I’m still building out our Siemens PLM Family list as we add more social media voices on Twitter shortly.

Building lists is a good exercise. I had never taken the time to do this on Tweetdeck, my desktop Twitter client. It’s a good way to really go through who you are following and group them in similar interest areas so that scanning updates is much easier. It also helped me see what some other folks in this industry were doing with Twitter.

Twitter’s blog also noted TLISTS, a tool to help you build, measure and distribute lists and Listorious, a listing of awesome lists. Maybe the PLM/CAD list will make it there someday!

Gobble gobble folks.

Dora

 

 

(2) Comments • Permalink

Tags: CAD | PLM | twitter | social_media | Twitter |

by Markus Erlmann | 13 Nov 2009

Did you ever think about how a whole manufacturing line is set up on the shop floor? And wonder why it is running smoothly and at an optimum in regards to throughput, reliability, flexibility, safety and sustainability. Well, I’m not sure if all manufacturing lines run at an optimum, but I’m always fascinated seeing the complex system of a whole manufacturing line working smoothly.

Finding an optimum is a difficult task for manufacturing engineers. How can this be done?

Let’s take a system-oriented approach. As with any complex system, it’s divided into separate components, e.g. divide the overall line into zones, cells or workstations. In addition, sub-divide a cell into mechanical, electrical and automation components. Each of these sub-systems will then be optimized independently. There is a downside to this approach. Sometimes the interconnection between the different components gets lost, which leads to issues during set-up and ramp-up of the physical manufacturing line. Here a virtual commissioning solution can help. Virtual commissioning basically allows testing and optimizing manufacturing lines upfront to the start of production. This is done in a virtual environment taking into account the mechanical and automation equipment like robots and PLCs (Programmable Logic Controller) as well as conveyors, fixtures, light barriers, etc.

There are two aspects of virtual commissioning. One is to ensure that automation equipment like robots work smoothly together with the control components like PLCs. This can be validated using Tecnomatix Process Simulate Commissioning in a 3D environment (I talked about this solution in one of my previous posts). The second aspect is to ensure the overall material flow and operation which can be simulated with Tecnomatix Plant Simulation.

Ralf Tobel, Director R&D, talks about the need to simulate PLCs and the differences between the two aspects of virtual commissioning.

For more details about Plant Simulation just visit the product page. Want to know more about virtual commissioning in a 3D environment; take a look at the Process Simulate Commissioning product page.

 

 

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Tags: tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | Manufacturing | Plant Simulation | Virtual Commissioning | Process Simulate | virtual commissioning |

by dorasmith | 11 Nov 2009

My colleague Branco Liu sent me some highlights from our recent PLM Connection Greater China event. Here is a pretty cool video of a sand art artist. At the end of the video, the artist spells out in Chinese these two phrases:

创新于思: Innovation comes from great ideas

卓越于器 Excellence is forged from cutting edge tools

Since YouTube is blocked in China, the video is on youku.

See more from the event in this coverage report. There were over 800 attendees at the conference. Customer presentations included SAIC, H3C and Luo Yang Optical. Siemens PLM executives Hans-Kurt Lübberstedt and Chuck Yuan provide these video updates:

 

 

 

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Tags: Siemens PLM | plmconx | PLM Connection | PLMConx | PLMconx | SAIC | Greater China |

by Markus Erlmann | 04 Nov 2009

The Plant Simulation User Conference 2009 was a very interesting conference with 110 customers participating and 10 of them presenting the usage and success they achieve with Plant Simulation. Additional presentations from development and marketing as well as live demonstrations were shown during the conference.

The first session of the Plant Simulation User Conference was done by Jeff Miller, Tecnomatix Marketing Manager. He provided an overview about the Plant Design and Optimization solution. Plant Simulation is a major component of this solution.

The use of the Plant Design and Optimization solution enables you to design factories in 3D (which is actually faster than the design in 2D due to smart objects). In addition to the design, the simulation and optimization of the material flow is a major benefit.

Want to view more pictures from this great event, just take a look at Flickr.

For more details and additional customer case studies, visit the Plant Design and Optimization web page.

 

 

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Tags: tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | Plant Design and Optimization | Plant Simulation | PDO |

by Susan Cinadr | 03 Nov 2009

These shortcuts speed up navigating directory structures directly from the Solid Edge & file open dialogue.

Note: The video above is pulled from YouTube. If you subscribe to Siemens PLM channel, you can be notified right away when we post the latest video from our Tips & Tricks series. There is a playlist on YouTube just for the Tips & Tricks, check it out here. We also realize that some of you do not have access to YouTube, so you can always check out the Solid Edge Demo Page.

 

 

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Tags: Solid Edge | CAD | Tips & Tricks | 3D | Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology | solid edge | product design |

by Markus Erlmann | 02 Nov 2009

On Tuesday, the Plant Simulation User Conference in Stuttgart, Germany will start. I will share details from the conference here on the blog and on Twitter. It will be a very interesting conference with more than 100 users attending. Several customers from different industries like automotive, shipyards and universities will talk about their projects. In addition the product management team will share insight about development projects and current trends.

For more details about the success and optimization of our customers just visit the Plant Simulation product page.

 

 

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Tags: tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | Plant Simulation |

by Markus Erlmann | 30 Oct 2009

Machine tools are products and resources; depending on your view point. For the machine builder it’s a product, while for many manufacturing companies it’s a resource they use to manufacture their products.

Siemens not only provides PLM solutions for machine builders, but as well the control and motion equipment. It’s a logical step to combine and enhance these solutions and provide the full service to our customers. One major step was done at this year’s EMO, where we presented the extension of our PLM solution for machine builder.

The solution now covers the full industrial process of a machine builder; starting with the design and simulation of the machine tool down to manufacturing, assembly and maintenance. We extended the solution to support the maintenance activities of a machine tool. These activities are part of the overall service package when selling machine tools. The second extension of the PLM solution is dedicated to all the electronic components and its management during the lifecycle of a machine tool. This is important as these electronic components are responsible for a major increase in innovations of machine tools.

For more details about the PLM solution for machine builders just visit the machinery and industrial products homepage.

Want to see more pictures from the EMO; visit us on Flickr.

 

 

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Tags: PLM | teamcenter | tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | Siemens | Teamcenter | Machine Tool | Machine Builder |

by dorasmith | 29 Oct 2009

A few folks have asked me what I think of the Dassault/IBM announcement earlier this week. So I thought I’d share some thoughts here and answer any questions you might have.

The first question is what do we think of this announcement. After reading through the press release, it seems what they’re really announcing is the next logical step in their relationship, which has changed over the years.

The next question is how it affects our relationship with IBM. You may remember we announced an expanded alliance in June emphasizing Teamcenter’s preconfiguration with the IBM blue stack of technology. From what I can tell it doesn’t – and in fact it probably helps. As one analyst put it this levels “the playing field.”

The interesting part for me is that over the past few years we’ve made a concerted effort to grow our indirect sales channel, signing many new partners (such as Rand) and focusing on helping partners become more productive. When I came back to this company four years ago it was the beginning of a whole new channel expansion effort. It appears Dassault is going the other direction. Who’s to say which way is best. Time will have to tell. There are challenges to both. We’ve always had a strong, integrated services division and now Dassault will too.

The good news for customers is that it removes any conflict of interest for the IBM PLM personnel we work with. In the past they were restricted from pursuing named Dassault accounts. So it should  enable more competition in those accounts, which is a good thing for customers.

I think this announcement also shows IBM’s committed to being a PLM advisor that is not dependent on a single PLM vendor. 

Those are just my thoughts but you may want to check out more of what media & analysts are saying:

Beth Stackpole notes: “While the IBM/Dassault partnership was never exclusive, the proposed sale will give IBM more opportunity to offer consulting and integration services around other PLM offerings. In June, IBM took some key steps toward that scenario with the announcement of a deal with Siemens PLM Software on a set of PLM applications and consulting offerings based on Siemens' Teamcenter platform and IBM's middleware and service-oriented architecture (SOA) framework.”

Jim Brown of Tech-Clarity blogged: “IBM customers may be using DS solutions, or they could be using software from Siemens, PTC, or others. So IBM has developed relationships with these PLM companies. This is just the natural way of things in a multi-vendor market, and it is probably the most beneficial relationship for DS and IBM customers…PLM is still very strategic to IBM. But directly selling and servicing PLM software from one vendor no longer makes sense…”

Monica Schnitger of Schnitger Corp. blogged: “For IBM, the sale of the PLM business is probably just a natural part of their business expansion and contraction. Their history with DS has, at times, been harmonious and, at others, fractious. … Too, IBM inked a technology pact with Siemens earlier this year that raised questions about its commitment to DS. All said, IBM can now focus its resources on partners that may be less contentious and technology areas that it sees as having greater potential…”

Brad Holtz of Cyon Research tweeted: “DS gets a great price. Siemens and PTC get a level playing field. Customers get direct relationship. IBM focus on PLM areas with > growth” and blogged: “Siemens PLM Software and PTC, long envious of the IBM-Dassault Systemes marriage, wish the former couple their best, but are likely to be thrilled at the opportunity to interact with an unconflicted IBM….Customers of the former couple are expected to rejoice at the clarity that the new situation brings.”

Ken Wong, Desktop Engineering reported: Beside simplifying the customer acquisition and retention process, DS can soon exercise greater control over its large accounts, which IBM now handles for the company. The transfer of the sales team to DS is expected to let IBM concentrate on providing PLM consulting and integration services, the domains Big Blue is best equipped to tackle. It also leaves IBM free to resell PLM products from DS’ rivals, if it chooses to.

And in case you missed it in June, here is a blog post and video of one of our customers, Tano Maenza, who is director of program management office for PLM implementations at Emerson. He noted how they work with a combined Siemens PLM-IBM team.

Feel free to share any of your questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to get you answers.

 

 

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Tags: IBM | alliance | Dassault |

by Susan Cinadr | 29 Oct 2009

Use these pro tips for quickly building assemblies.

Note: The video above is pulled from YouTube. If you subscribe to Siemens PLM channel, you can be notified right away when we post the latest video from our Tips & Tricks series. There is a playlist on YouTube just for the Tips & Tricks, check it out here. We also realize that some of you do not have access to YouTube, so you can always check out the Solid Edge Demo Page.

 

 

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Tags: CAD | Tips & Tricks | 3D | Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology | part design |

by Markus Erlmann | 28 Oct 2009

It’s all about integration. Imaging you are running a job shop using highly flexible machine tools. You manufacture in small lot sizes and need to adjust your NC programs quite often due to product changes. How do you keep track of all the product changes? And how do you ensure, that the updated NC programs and information about the required tools are transferred from the planning department to the right machine tool on the shop floor?

The joint solution from Siemens PLM Software and Siemens Motion Control Systems now helps you to answer these questions. The solution connects Teamcenter with the Motion Control Information System (MCIS). To be more precise; linking Teamcenter to two MCIS solution components – Direct Numerical Control (DNC) and Tool Data Information (TDI).

Have a look at the official press release and read about Peter Thorne’s (Managing Director, Cambashi Ltd.) assessment of this new solution.

And don’t forget to take a look at the NX CAM – SINUMERIK Advantage which allows you to get a post processor for the SINUMERIK 840D controller for free.

 

 

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Tags: NX | tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | NX CAM | SINUMERIK | Part Manufacturing | Virtual Machine Tool | Sinumerik |

by Nik Pakvasa | 27 Oct 2009

At recent the PLM Connection in Europe I attended an excellent presentation and demonstration by Andrea Nagler from BSH (Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH) about their global engineering collaboration and supplier integration project.

BSH is in 13 countries and have 42 factories with 38,600 employees.

As they grew globally, their business challenges were long delays and effort required for communication between distributed development teams. This included increased partners and suppliers - each using different CAD formats which added cycle time to communicate and collaborate as well as ad-hoc alignment between internal teams.

Their motivation was simple -
- improve quality with better and consistent communication,
- improve cycle time due to faster access to information, speedy decisions, early start of tolling, fewer meetings
- reduce costs due to reduced travel,sample parts, tool changes, and export/import procedures.

They have 900 Teamcenter high-end users, 1,500 low-end users, and 200 external partners.

She talked about how they plan to use the Teamcenter Community, Microsoft SharePoint-based, collaboration solution that is integrated with Teamcenter PLM for visual collaboration and supplier integration, using:

- Teamcenter Community as a web-based portal for internal teams and external partners and suppliers.
- Virtual project rooms for sharing and administration of projects
- Application sharing
- Visual conferencing based on JT.

Andrea then did a live demo of the collaboration project using Teamcenter Community and Teamcenter with her team in Berlin!!! That was quite amazing. Together they demoed a live visual conference collaborating on a spring design for a coffee maker. They showed power of visual collaboration, and visual issue management.

 

 

 

 

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Tags: PLM | teamcenter | Siemens | Teamcenter | microsoft | engineering | connection | Microsoft | collaboration global SharePoint |

by Chris Kelley | 27 Oct 2009

I was catching up with my social production feeds in Google Reader last night and ran across a report from Grant Thornton International from September (via Mass Customization and Open Innovation). I usually see these things pretty quickly after they come out, so not sure how this one slipped passed me for so long.

I dove right in (its a quick read and worth the time) and was surprised by the magnitude if not necessarily the direction of some of the responses in the survey the report was based on. Specifically the fact that most companies believe that the overall number one source of the best innovative ideas is customers, followed by heads of business units and general employees. In AP, nearly 50% of companies surveyed felt that customers topped the list. Open innovation is certainly not a new concept, but most discussions center on getting ideas from an extended supply chain or partners, not from end user customers them selves. When companies started to look beyond their four walls for ideas to their partner networks it was a somewhat natural evolution of what they had already been doing. The move to engaging customers in the open innovation process is potentially revolutionary.

The most obvious revolutionary aspect is the number of connections and relationships that will have to be maintained. When practicing open innovation with the supply chain, intellectual property and collaboration have to be maintained with a handful of entities that likely already have tools and established connections with the lead firm. When practicing it with customers, the number of connections increases exponentially and its more than likely that they won't have tools more advanced than a word processor and web browser to capture and express those ideas.

Perhaps a less obvious revolutionary aspect is the change in the balance of power between customer and company that this move will cause. Customers already have a tremendous amount of power in most vendor relationships since their is so much competition in most markets. However, once companies actually begin to depend on their customers as the prime source of their innovative ideas, then the final stage of dependency may bee reached since at that point customers will control the inputs (innovative ideas) and the results (the cash companies get for selling those innovative ideas bundled into products and services). The role of a company will have to fundamentally change when (if?) this model takes hold. It will have to view itself as a facilitator rather than a producer. The firm that has the best way for customers to flesh out and communicate their ideas, the shortest time from receiving a new idea to producing a product or service that incorporates that idea and the best reputation for respecting customer provided intellectual property will be the winner.

It's clear from this study that business leaders see where things are going and are looking for the customer to step up and provide more of their innovative ideas. The question is do they know where that path will lead them?

 

 

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by Markus Erlmann | 23 Oct 2009

At this year's EMO in Milan, Italy, more than 1,500 machine tool builders exhibited their new innovations. Siemens provided several innovations for these machine tool builders and their customers. Helmuth Ludwig talks about these innovations and how motion control and PLM specialists merge the virtual and real world.

For more information about these solutions, just visit the machinery and industrial products solution homepage and the virtual machine tool homepage.

 

 

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Tags: NX | PLM | tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | NX CAM | SINUMERIK | EMO | Sinumerik |

by dorasmith | 20 Oct 2009

In case you missed the posts from PLM Connection Europe, here is a recap of some our social media activity. Our blog team for this event is pictured above: Markus, moi and Nik. Combined, we posted quite a few highlights. They include some customer interviews and Q&A with some of our development folks.

Check out our videos on the YouTube event playlist. See photos from the event on Flickr. There are also a few presentations noted in our blog posts on Slideshare.

Read more on these blog posts:

• PLM Connection: NX CAM – SINUMERIK Advantage
• PLM Connection: Simulation Use Cases by MAYA
• PLM Connection: Swiss Perspectives
• PLM Connection: SOMFY on Teamcenter Unified Architecture Implementation
• PLM Connection: PLM Europe Chair Recaps the Event
• PLM Connection: Shape Searching With Geolus
• PLM Connection: Steve Bashada on Teamcenter Customer Conversations
• PLM Connection: Max Bögl on Building Lifecycle Management
• PLM Connection: Integrated CAM and Close-to-Reality Simulation
• PLM Connection: Rolls-Royce Connecting Top Floor and Shop Floor
• PLM Connection: NX Issues Management
• PLM Connection: NX Synchronous Technology
• PLM Connection: NX HD3D Visual Reporting
• PLM Connection: Does Teamcenter and Tecnomatix Work Together?
• PLM Connection: ASML Handles Large Assemblies
• PLM Connection: Extending Teamcenter Capabilities into Techincal Publications
• PLM Connection Europe: The road to 2007 UA (from V9.1)
• PLM Connection Europe: PLM Journey at Rolls-Royce
• PLM Connection: Bridging Planning and Production with Quality
• PLM Connection: 25-Year Attendee Rik Voels
• PLM Connection: KeyOx ID & Mechanical Design
• PLM Connection: More Assembly Planning and BIW on Teamcenter
• PLM Connection: All about Material Flow Optimization
• PLM Connection: Quality Everywhere
• PLM Connection: More about Tecnomatix Driving Productivity
• PLM Connection: Assembly Planning using Teamcenter
• PLM Connection Europe: Philips Lighting Global Engineering
• PLM Connection: KHBO Simulation Project
• PLM Connection: Teamcenter
• PLM Connection: Increasing Part Manufacturing Productivity
• PLM Connection: Astronaut Hans Schlegel Keynote
• PLM Connection Europe Kicks Off
• Reporting from PLM Connection at EMEA
• Roving Reporting at PLM Connection EMEA

We encourage your feedback on what you like or don’t - and what you’d like to see more of in the future. FYI, in case you subscribe to RSS, just a reminder you can add our feed to your RSS reader – or simply add to the RSS folder in your e-mail program. You may also want to follow us on Twitter for our latest 140-character comments.

 

 

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Tags: NX | plmconx | teamcenter | tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | PLM Connection | Teamcenter | product development | product design | PLM Europe |

by Mark Burhop | 19 Oct 2009

The buzz in the social media scene the last couple weeks has been Google Wave. This is a new technology coming out from Google that essentially reinvents email. Whether this is the best thing since email itself or just the next in a line of overhyped new technologies is still to be seen.

You can follow the link above for a long video on Google Wave or watch this far simpler version:


For me, I’m seeing enough good ideas here to at least start talking about it. For those of us working in product design, the potential for collaboration is probably the biggest. Right now Google Wave access is limited (you can request an account here) but the hand full of CAD people that have got access quickly found each other and quickly begin...well, collaborating.



The CAD wave above is one example. This is a public wave that has grown and morphed over the last week. The simple question… how might Google Wave be used in Product Design? I’ve seen a few more private, semi-private and public waves around CAD get started too. I’ll post more about them later as the landscape becomes more clear.

Another interesting aspect of Google Wave is that it is more of a framework than an application. Others can easily extend it into other domains via Gadgets, Robots, and hosting of the wave. Will we be seeing CAD based extensions? Time will tell.

BTW, Josh Mings is using Google Wave for an upcoming article on Google Wave (kind of clever). Be sure to check out Develop3D for more to this story. I suspect we will be seeing quite a few PLM articles and blog posts on this technology.

P.S. Hey Google, how about some invites for more CAD and design folks? We have collaboration to do!

 

 

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Tags: CAD | Google Wave | Colaboration |

by Markus Erlmann | 19 Oct 2009

Siemens merges the virtual and physical worlds … and you are getting it for free.

The integrative part is the post processor which connects the NX CAM system with the SINUMERIK controller of your machine tool. It allows you to create specific G-code for your SINUMERIK controller. Take a look at my previous post about the Virtual Machine Tool for more details about this technology.

Andreas Saar, head of the Tecnomatix part manufacturing solution group, talks about the NX CAM – SINUMERIK advantage program and the benefits for our customers.

You can apply for the NX CAM – SINUMERIK advantage program by visiting this dedicated web page.

 

 

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Tags: plmconx | tecnomatix | Tecnomatix | PLMConx | PLMconx | NX CAM | SINUMERIK | Postprocessor | Sinumerik |

by dorasmith | 15 Oct 2009

Remi Duquette from MAYA HTT was at PLM Connection  Europe presenting in several sessions on use cases with NX simulation tools. Last year Remi told me that using synchronous technology in NX he went from three days to two minutes for one project. This year he had some additional metrics.

Here are his slides from his presentation on “Breaking the Barriers Between NX CAD and NX CAE.” In this presentation, Remi shows how he took a process that used to take 10 days and now completes it in less than four hours.

I wasn’t able to attend all of Remi’s presentations but he was kind enough to share all his slides. So in case you’re interested, check out these presentations on NX Laminate Composites and Finite Element Model Correlation (minus the live demonstrations by Remi).

NX Laminate Composites including capabilities like ply-based modeling and draping.

NX FE Model Correlation is designed for analysts and test engineers to compare the level of agreement between test data and FE results in the NX environment.

For more information in this area, check out this blog post and video on synchronous technology applied in the new Solid Edge Simulation product or learn more about the functionality in NX on the NX CAE website.

 

 

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Tags: plmconx | CAE | PLM Connection | Simulation | simulation | product development | PLMConx | PLMconx | engineering design |

by dorasmith | 14 Oct 2009

 

I took the picture above last year when we visited family in Switzerland. It was hanging on a chalet high in the mountains. The Swiss flag was subliminally flying one evening last week at PLM Connection Europe when our Swiss customers gathered for a few drinks and country-specific comradery. I’ve always been impressed that a country about the fourth the size of my home state has four different languages. I asked my Swiss colleague, Sascha Rüttimann, to help me interview a couple of customers in English and German.

In Switzerland, the languages are diverse and so are the business conditions. One customer noted they experienced growth this year while another said it was a very tough year.

Here are our interviews with John Steerwood of the Gallus Group, which manufacturers printing presses and Daniel Baumgartner of ALSTOM (Switzerland) AG, which manufactures transportation and energy infrastructures.

 

Here’s Daniel talking about why he attends PLM Connection and what presentation he found most interesting:

In English:

In German:

Here’s Daniel talking about the business climates and challenges they look for PLM to address (in German):

Here’s John talking about why he attends PLM Connection.

In English:

In German:

Here John addresses the business climate for his company this year and where they look to PLM help them addresss business challenges.

In English:

In German:

 

 

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Tags: plmconx | PLM Connection | PLM Europe | PLMConx | PLMconx | Alstom |

by dorasmith | 14 Oct 2009

SOMFY manufacturers motors and controls for windows, doors and gates. Dominic Sebille, development and project director, presented at PLM Connection Europe on their implementation of Teamcenter unified architecture. Here’s a summary and a brief video sound bite from Dominic in English AND en Français.

Dominic noted that the company has grown and the need for tight control of product data has become a must. The drivers of this PLM project included providing a unique data repository for process and product design changes as well as implementing workflows.

In English:

En Français:

Lessons learned included:

 
• Keep it standard and simple (leveraging the architecture OOTB, avoiding custom development).
 
• Start change management early.
 
• Get the best expertise for each step of the project.
 
• Prepare – training PLM concepts and Teamcenter as well as aligning business needs with the solutions.

PCO Innovation supported the implementation and presented with Dominic.

 

 

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Tags: plmconx | teamcenter | PLM Connection | Teamcenter | PLM Europe | PLMConx | PLMconx | unified architecture |

by Mark Burhop | 14 Oct 2009

2:50 People arriving. Bill McClure Velocity Vice president talking with Solid Edge users:



3:00 we just started with Dave Ault thanking everyone one for getting together. Dave also gave me his Nikon Camera so ask him for Pictures

3:10 Ken Grundey is now talking about PLM World. He says this is an organization from the users for the users. He's talking about the regional user groups, and Special intrest groups. He has a lot of information on how to get more involved and make use of PLM World resources.

3:15 Jeff Walker (planning manager for Solid Edge) is up next. He is talking about the advantages of History based modeling and the advantages of Synchronous based modeling. Its important that customers can do there job.

3:21 Jeff says technology is great but there is only so much you can do with it. His job is to make it efficient and helpful for customers to improve their productivity.

3:30 Steve Webb from Saratech is giving an example using sketches in Solid Edge ST2 (the latest release)

3:35 Steve is now talking about the "Reorder rounds" command. In traditional modeling, how the intersection is created depends on the order in which the rounds are created. In Solid Edge ST2, it is a menu pick to select solution 1 or solution 2.

3:40: Jeff Walker is back talking about new ST2 tools for knowing where the model is changing when doing sync changes.

3.41: Now is talking about the chamfer feature which knows its a champher and keeps this information as there are changes in the model.

3: 43: Jeff talking about "History free threads that maintain size and position" and new commands for aligning holes. Can even align the holes that come from other CAD systems imported into Solid Edge.

3:45 Jeff now talking about how to go from 2D to 3D... not converting CAD systems but taking 2D drawing with dimensions from supliers or other 3rd parties and using this to create the 3D data.

3:47: Steve Webb is back - doing a demo of what Jeff mentioned in PPT... starting with a 2D drawing with front and side views. As Steve creates extrudes the geometry, the 2D dimensions attach to the part becoming 3D PMI. They are fully modifiable. Also, he is using keypoints in the drawings to create the 3D data.
(note from Burhop: this is really something you want to see for yourself. Try to get a demo of this)

3:53 Jeff and Steve discussing Live Sections. This is now for Solid Edge ST2. These are 2D sections you can create of your part that create a 2D cross section. Wit this, you can create 2D dimensions and then modify them to modify the section. The 3D geometry is then updated to match that section.



4:00 Jeff is now talking about the new Synchronous sheet metal.

4:06 Steve is showing how you can almost design the entire sheetmetal part without ever going to the ribbon bar. Flanges, can be created using just the steering wheel.

4:09 Steve asks, how many times did I go to the UI? "Zero, I built this whole part without going to the ribbon" (about an average complex part - I was too slow to get a picture)

4:16 Jeff now talking about Solid Edge Simulation (note from Burhop: w00t!!! -this is my real job)

4:20 Steve has taken over and doing a demo of a lawn mower blade. Is now using Sychronous to change the model and get the new results (no need to update any of the FEA).



4:26 Jeff talking about other technology - just lots and lots of medium and little things people have asked for.

4:27 talking about UI improvements - improved Quick Access Toolbar, Ability to use PMI in pixel mode.

4:30 now talking about updated to Teamcenter, Insight, SharePoint support.

4:35 Lots of questions being thrown at Jeff, mixing of traditional and sych, Express Route, etc (I wish I could type faster!). Jeff is now talking about how and when to move to Synchronous Technology. Recommends taking a measured approach. Synchronous and Traditional made to work together so mixing is not a problem. The key for most customers is productivity.

4:40 Imported data is a great place to start with Synchronous technology.

4:44 You can now "In place activate" into any document regardless of the document type. Create in place now works for any combination.

4:45 Jeff is giving some product structure examples of mixtures of sync parts, traditional parts, synchronous assemblies and traditional assemblies.

4:50 Jeff discussing when you might want to convert older parts to Synchronous technology (too much info on the slides to capture it all)

5:21 we took a break and are now back with Steve talking about Tips and Tricks for Solid Edge



5:29 Fred White, responsible for GTAC is now talking. Giving some advice on best practices on updating software.

5:33 there are two groups updates
- New Machines Graphics Car, 3D nput Devices, Drivers
- Solid Edge releases

5:35 Develop some basic acceptance tests - Verify critical workflow requirements, exporting data, inporting data, 3rd party applications, VB programs and other addins. For noncritical maintenace packs, try to get them out during slow times. Be sure to read the "readme" files. There is good information there. (Fred has much more information - sorry I'm a slow typer).

5:45 Next Up is a customer round table. Jeff is asking what people want most in Solid Edge. What could be better, what pet peeves they have. Jeff has a spreadsheet setup on the screen taking notes. Discussion topics include: tutorials, import from other CAD systems, and a number of individual issues.

6:51 Last post. Pizza and door prize.

 

 

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by Mark Burhop | 14 Oct 2009

A little later today we have a bunch of designers and engineers heading over to talk about our product.
I made a quick trip down stairs and it looks like we are ready to roll.



I'll be blogging and tweeting from there so stay tuned....

If you missed the meeting, here is what happened.

 

 

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Tags: Solid Edge | solid edge | Huntsville |

by Mark Burhop | 12 Oct 2009

If you missed the meeting, here is what happened.



For those of you living within driving distance of Velocity head quarters in Huntsville, Alabama, there will be a Solid Edge user meeting on October 14. You can find more info here.

This is a user sponsored event created by Dave Ault and Ken Grundey and is really meant to help you sharpen you design skills and meet fellow designers. I’ll be there blogging and twittering for those that can’t make it. I’d also love to talk about Solid Edge Simulation if anyone wants to pull me aside for a conversation.

A PDF on the agenda is here.

 

 

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Tags: Solid Edge | solid edge | Huntsville | user meeting |

by dorasmith | 11 Oct 2009

I sat down with Maarten Romers at the close of PLM Connection Europe to get his take on the event. Maarten is chair of PLM Europe. He discusses the quality of content and his favorite presentations.

Maarten also spoke quite a bit about social media and social networking in his closing presentation. He had shared the link to our blog with his colleagues back home at ASML so they could follow along with sound bites from the event.

Next year’s event may be in another country. Stay tuned to PLM Europe’s website for more info.

 

 

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Tags: NX | plmconx | PLM Connection | PLM Europe | PLMConx | PLMconx | ASML | social_media | social_networking |

by dorasmith | 09 Oct 2009

Erwin Argyle, product manager for Geolus Search, presented at PLM Connection Europe this week. You may remember we acquired Geolus about three years ago. I wanted to catch up with Erwin to learn a little more about why and how companies use shape (or geometry) search vs. traditional attribute search. Here’s our video interview and the slides to his presentation.

There appears to be some significant cost and time savings from the ability to reuse parts that you couldn’t find in traditional attribute searching. Erwin shared research from Aberdeen that noted:

“With the annual carrying cost of between $4,500 and $23,000 per item for the introduction of a new part number, duplicate part proliferation is an area of known cost exposure. Reductions in procurement costs translate into dollar-for-dollar increases in profits.”

Erwin shared use cases in engineering, procurement, manufacturing and business analysis. He demonstrated these in the context of NX and also Teamcenter.

He also shared with me that he had just learned synchronous technology in NX at the event. He was taught it in the morning and showed it in the afternoon for one of his use cases. The audience helped him out with a (not-so) tricky area .

 

 

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Tags: NX | plmconx | PLM Connection | product design | PLM Europe | PLMConx | PLMconx | PDM | geometry search | Geolus |

by dorasmith | 09 Oct 2009

There were quite a few questions for Steve in the customer Q&A at the event so I wanted to follow up with him – for just a few more. Here is my video interview with him.

Steve notes that 400 customers are currently migrating to Teamcenter Unified Architecture so he addresses many questions about transitioning.

One of the questions he got in the Q&A dealt with the size of Teamcenter – is it too big? Steve talked about the modularity of the product architecture and notes in the video that for any product to be at the Teamcenter enterprise level it needs to maintain that flexibility in its design.

Steve said his favorite presentations were those from Rolls-Royce and Astronaut Hans Schlegel.

 

 

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Tags: PLM | Siemens PLM | plmconx | teamcenter | PLM Connection | Teamcenter | PLM Europe | PLMConx | PLMconx | PDM |

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