Neues

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Engineers generally think of the suppliers of engineering analysis or CAE (also known as simulation and analysis) solutions as engineering software tools developers and marketers. Based on CIMdata’s many years of experience working with CAE suppliers and users, we recognize that this is not the case with Altair Engineering (www.altair.com) headquartered in Troy, Michigan.

Founded in 1985, Altair is privately held and has offices throughout North America, South America, Europe and Asia/Pacific. Since its early years, the company has been an important provider of products and services in the areas of product design, advanced engineering...

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On October 24, 2011, Siemens PLM Software (Siemens PLM) announced a partnership with Local Motors, an American car company employing a distinctive, collaborative approach of crowd sourcing to vehicle design. While Local Motors calls their design methodology co-creation, it is known more broadly as community-based design. The approach leverages a global, open, design community that contributes to the definition and design of an automobile. On November 11, Siemens PLM followed with a second announcement that they will offer all contributors to the Local Motors’ automotive product designs a new, exclusive streamlined version of Solid...

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Continuous pressures to improve productivity, lower costs, compress delivery times, and enhance product quality are challenging manufacturers around the world. At the same time, the quest for innovation of both products and internal processes is essential for companies to be successful. In this environment, companies are investing in numerous initiatives that promise to address these challenges.

One of the key factors in delivering right-to-market products in the shortest possible time is improving how companies analyze, simulate, and test new designs and create physical products to validate that the design (i.e., the virtual product) meets the...

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Like any expanding and highly competitive software market, the PLM market is not immune to the technology refresh debate—a debate that marketing professionals love to use to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and technologists use to create elaborate justification matrices. If you remove all the hype and marketing adjectives you usually find that those technology-based solutions that sustain a positive revenue growth trajectory over at least a ten-year period usually are staying with the technological times. Those that appear to be a “flash in the pan” generally chose to go down a technological dead-end...

The decision announced last week by Daimler to adopt Siemens PLM Software’s NX as their mechanical design solution and Teamcenter for data management across all car and truck programs signals a new era in the PLM industry.Previously, the costs and risks of moving vast quantities of legacy 3D data from one solution to another was a major barrier to firms considering new tools. The last few years have seen the broader adoption of common formats, including the designation of Siemens PLM Software’s JT as an ISO Publically Available Specification (PAS), a necessary step on the path to ISO standardization. But...

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Alliances between software and services suppliers seem like natural business arrangements, and most of these companies at least try to foster them. Yet good alliances that really pay off for both parties are very rare. The pre-requisites for success fall into two categories: leadership commitment and a sound operational framework. Each of these has key elements, which are critical to success and will be discussed later. But first let’s consider the relative importance of these two main categories. The examples that follow are composite dramatizations drawn from research and life experience and are not...

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A recent visit to PTCʼs new Blaine, Minnesota software development center proved to be enlightening and refreshing—no trivial task considering this is coming from someone who has a degree in Computer Science and who in the past worked on some of the largest software systems ever coded. The visit proved that software development practices, processes, and facilities continue, at least in the case of PTC, to evolve to meet the needs of ever-increasing market demands. For the most part, you will not find anyone following the traditional waterfall software development approach here, but you...

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PTC today (28 October 2010) unveiled its new next generation computer-aided design focused product suite embodying advanced flexible design capabilities developed under the code name Project Lightning. The new suite, conceived and developed as an improvement on traditional CAD product design techniques, is named Creo™. Given today’s preview, CIMdata feels that PTC has made a significant step forward in providing flexibility in how designs can be created and modified. Creo eliminates some of the problems that currently inhibit shared design activities by providing:

• Support for both parametric and direct modeling paradigms that can be used...

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In today’s competitive business environment, companies must deliver more innovative products and services, reduce costs, improve quality, and shorten time to market, while achieving their targeted return on investment (ROI). To reach these goals, businesses must continually improve how they operate in order to become more efficient and productive. Innovation must occur in all dimensions—product, process, and organization to allow companies to present the right products to the right markets, at the right time, for the right cost (the money spent to develop the product) and right price (what the customer pays).

Lack of innovation...

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Two main product realization business models are in common use today: Make-to-Stock and Engineer-to-Order (ETO). While each of these supports a viable business model and some companies use both, this commentary will concentrate on ETO. However, to set the stage, both models are outlined here. Make-to-Stock supports volume-based manufacturing of products based on standard designs. This type of product model works well for commodities such as fasteners, household tools and appliances, consumer goods, and many other products. ETO is the most flexible from the customer's perspective. Products in this model are designed in whole...