CIMdata Blog

 PDF One of the driving pressures on businesses today is the need to deliver more “personalized” products to their customers. Customers are demanding that the product(s) they purchase be tailored to their specific needs. This includes functional capabilities, operational characteristics, and even look and feel (style). The growth of Engineer-to-Order (ETO) products and manufacturing is a reflection of this trend. Delivering individualized products in a cost-effective, timely manner requires that manufacturers be better able to leverage previous designs, capture more knowledge about their products and how they were designed and built, and be able to impart that knowledge effectively to all employees, especially new hires that have no corporate history. For example, ETO manufacturers typically have complex products that must be closely aligned with detailed customer specifications while simultaneously taking into account engineering standards, supply chain capabilities, and manufacturing constraints. While every organization produces data and information about its products, transforming that data

 PDF The explosion of information available has put increasing pressure on companies to provide search tools that enable users to more easily find the information that is pertinent to their needs. For the Web, companies like Google, Alta Vista, Microsoft, and many others have developed comprehensive search engines that enable users to search across multiple sites and sources. Initially, these tools simply returned links to any site or URL that contained any part of the input search criteria, and in many cases, users would have to look through a mass of results to find the desired information. Recently, developers of search tools have been adding technologies that constrain or filter the results in order to provide users with a more focused set of results. This is improving the usability of search tools and reducing the time spent in finding pertinent information and links. As companies have improved their business information systems and

 PDF PTC has announced their intent to purchase CoCreate, a long-established supplier of CAD, CAM, CAE, and data management solutions for manufacturing companies. CoCreate has been best known as a very early provider of explicit modeling software. However, they have also created very strong offerings in design collaboration and product data management. The combination of CoCreate's product suite with PTC's current offerings will provide users with a broad range of design methods, including 2D and 3D modeling using parametric design, explicit design, or models derived from existing designs as well as effective heterogeneous environment collaboration tools. The eventual adoption of all of these techniques into a comprehensive product offering will enhance the ability of existing and new PTC customers to utilize multiple design methods based on their need and will provide current CoCreate customers with multiple expansion and evolution paths. PTC also will gain CoCreate's substantial customer base, with many of those companies

 PDF Today Dassault Systèmes announced that they have completed the purchase of Seemage. The products developed by Seemage will support Dassault Systèmes’ push into 3D product documentation within Dassault Systèmes’ 3DVIA initiative. CIMdata considers this to be a synergistic acquisition that will provide Dassault Systèmes with a very strong base upon which to support the needs of industrial companies to leverage their 3D product definition information throughout the extended lifecycle of their products—including support for marketing, sales, installation, training, support, maintenance, and other non-engineering activities. The Seemage contribution includes strong capabilities to leverage 3D (and 2D) information into all kinds of static and interactive “documents.” Seemage has established a strong reputation as a provider of CAD-neutral data viewing and exploration combined with publishing this information into MS Office, Adobe Acrobat, and other popular formats. The 3DVIA products that evolve from Seemage (as well as Virtools, another Dassault Systèmes acquisition) should be enabled

 PDF On 15 May, Oracle announced their intent to acquire Agile Software Corporation for a total of $495 million. They expect to finalize the acquisition in mid to late-July of this year. CIMdata is positive on this acquisition and believes that it reflects a continuation of the consolidation activities that have been changing the PLM market landscape and reinforces the trend toward increased PLM focus from the major suppliers of ERP solutions. Agile also announced that they expect their FY07 revenues (ended in April 2007) to be around $134 million. They are one of the leaders in providing lifecycle management-focused PLM solutions, and CIMdata recognizes them as one of the five key “PLM Mindshare Leaders.” Agile has consistently been recognized in the PLM market for their solid focus on solutions for high-tech based businesses. In recent years, they have expanded their suite of offerings to include solutions focused on some other industry sectors,

 PDF Design Chain Issues Collaborative product development supports shared decision making through improved communications across the extended enterprise, with the goals of improving change processes, broader use of design information in decision processes, reducing product time- to-market, removing costs, improving quality, and supporting product innovation. Change is constant and to continue to improve their competitive position, companies which once designed, manufactured, and serviced their own products are now dramatically reorganizing the way they do business. Manufacturing companies face the challenge of extending their current capabilities outside the enterprise to include customers, suppliers, sub-contractors, and even competitors. Outsourcing functions such as design, manufacturing, and services have provided many companies with cost advantages. However, to do this, well-established communication channels, control procedures, and management practices, progressively built up over time, must change to take advantage of new processes, organizational structures, and enabling technologies. Another issue is that geographically-distributed companies potentially have a competitive edge, as their

 PDF Innovation results from applying best practice processes to product creation. In order to be innovative, an organization needs to understand its intellectual assets or knowledge base as well as how to use and apply these concepts to create new or improved products, processes, services, and markets. Fostering innovation requires an environment that supports access to information, the ability to view and interpret that information, knowledge management, and collaboration on that information to maximize the use of as much knowledge and talent as possible across the enterprise. In today’s challenging global markets, enterprises must innovate to improve their market position, to bring significant value to their shareholders, customers, and employees, and in many cases to survive. It is important that this innovation occur across all aspects of the organization—product, process, and organization—to improve competitiveness, quality, and overall business performance. Continuous innovation consistently results in right-to-market products and services. According to K. Pavitt

 PDF The widespread movement toward engineering collaboration represents a major trend for companies wanting to improve teamwork among people in different locations. A variety of technologies to support collaboration are now commercially available including synchronous meeting solutions, co-modeling systems, visualization software, digital mockup, and many others. For the most part, these tools use Web technology and the Internet to allow people in different facilities across town or around the world to interact, resolve problems, reach consensus, and otherwise work together online. Using these technologies is much quicker and more effective than telephone, fax, or mail delivery. They are much more economical and efficient than getting everyone together for face-to-face meetings. Collaboration technology is especially useful in integrated product development where designers in different facilities must work on the same project. Impressive Time Savings Collaborative tools have been used to resolve problems in a few minutes that otherwise would have required days of time in

 PDF There has been a lot of confusing discussion recently, particularly among people in the CAD user community concerning the definition of collaboration and the real value of the technologies that support it no matter how it is defined. The root terminology problem seems to stem from the haphazard use of the term “collaboration” in the marketing materials of the CAD and PLM vendors. It is probably not possible to get all of the various solution providers to adopt a single definition of collaboration because this would not serve their marketing needs. PLM vendors now use the term collaboration to mean any activity in which people have to communicate and share information. The term is applied to PDM systems that promote data sharing through workflows with automatic notifications of required actions and organizing data so that it can be easily found. The term is also applied to real-time, online meetings in which

 PDF As CIMdata announced in yesterday’s edition of its CIMdata PLM Late Breaking News, Siemens AG has announced their intent to acquire the UGS Corporation for US $3.515 billion, pending all necessary governmental reviews and approvals. After this acquisition, UGS will become a unit within Siemens’ Automation and Drives (A&D) Group, a €12.8 billion business unit headquartered in Nürnberg, Germany. Siemens and UGS stated that the long-term strategic views of the two firms are quite consistent and that the acquisition will allow them to blend Siemens’ and UGS’ complementary programs to deliver “Totally Integrated Automation” solutions to the market. They report that they plan to finalize the acquisition by the end of the first quarter of this year. CIMdata is positive on this acquisition and believes that it has the potential to be an excellent move for Siemens, UGS, and the industry, but there are some significant challenges that must be