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by dorasmith | 25 Sep 2009

The other night my son and I were reading Built to Last by George Sullivan. He loves the story about the St. Louis arch and its architect, Eero Saarinen. Maybe he’ll one day want to design buildings. Or even software.

Which reminds me of someone I met last week that I thought you might find interesting. I did.

At the analyst event, I met Raymond Kok who works in our “office of architecture” in our R&D group. He and his colleagues work on architecting new ideas in our software across all our products. Ray showed the analysts a skunk works project that we’ll share more about in NX 7.5. Many of the ideas he works on are a few revs out.

Ray started working at our company as an intern and returned after he graduated. Some of the work he did for his master thesis in mechanical engineering impacted technology in NX for automotive packaging. He also spent some time architecting and deploying NX Knowledge Fusion at various companies.

 

“I’m always on the front of innovation…big things…not just a little feature here or there…it’s about doing something new.”

In the video he shares a little about a day in his life working with colleagues around the globe. Let me know if you’d like to hear more about the folks behind the scenes who develop our software.

 

 

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Tags: Siemens PLM employee interview architecture R&D NX Teamcenter Tecnomatix |

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icconian

25 Sep 2009

That was interesting. Yes, do let us know more about the “behind the scenes” folks - they are the ones doing very important work!
One question - does a person like Raymond get to go to users conferences such as PLM World? It would seem that the feedback there from actual users (as opposed to “customers”) would also be important.

 

 

dorasmith

25 Sep 2009

Great point and I’m sure Raymond will be at the next PLM Connection event to do just that.

Dora

 

 

Maarten

27 Sep 2009

Hi Raymond,
Nice you got caught by Dora!
Indeed very nice Job! But how do you make sure the things you do is what business / customers are looking for?

Regrards,
Maarten

 

 

Rudolf Kriens

27 Sep 2009

To Raymond,

Great to see you ! Nice you mentioned our pioneering and breakthrough project on Vehicle Conecpt Design Wizards for the automotive industry.

Keep on going

Rudolf Kriens

 

 

Raymond Kok

29 Sep 2009

Thanks for providing comments to this post; I appreciate the comments from all of you. Let me try to answer some of the questions/suggestions given.

Do you attend PLM World? Yes! I typically attend PLM world every year when possible. For the last few years I have given several presentations in the area of NX. I also use the PLM world conference to get in touch with our customers and get their feedback about our software. It is always good to get this input. It always inspires myself and the rest of the product development team to make our products even better than they are today.

How do we make sure that our work reflects what our customers are asking for? The Office of Architecture is typically a primary point of contact for our customers with SPLM product development. A great example is the work I recently did with one of our customers in Japan. I spend 6 months onsite with the customer to work through the deployment of NX (customer migrating from Ideas). It is only then when you start to appreciate the solutions customers are after. My job is therefore is typically a mix of customer engagements and software development.

What are the further development for Vehicle Packaging? As mentioned by Rudolf (my professor from Eindhoven Technical University) the work for NX vehicle design wizard was something we initiated based on my Msc. thesis work. This has grown into a full NX product today. Further details to be found at http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/Images/nx general packaging fs W 3_tcm1023-4583.pdf

Again, appreciate the comments…