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June 12, 2011, PTC opened their US end user event, PlanetPTC Live 2011, at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in front of over two thousand attendees and announced that a “new era of product design” had begun with the release of their Creo 1.0 applications. Marketing bravado aside, PTC has aggressively re-emerged into the product design and development arena. Brian Shepherd, Executive Vice-President of Product Development, detailed Creo 1.0, the major release of Windchill 10.0, and the acquisition of MKS, a leading supplier of solutions for managing embedded software development. All combine to draw...

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Companies are always on a quest to find and employ best-in-class solutions to help them improve their product design process. This is particularly true in the area of simulation and analysis (S&A) for which hundreds of computer-based analysis codes are available. One vendor can’t possibly satisfy all of the specialized needs of companies in this critical area of product development since the range of solutions crosses a number of highly technical domains such as finite element analysis and computational fluid dynamics. Altair Engineering, based in Troy, Michigan, has created an innovative program that allows...

On 27 April 2011, Dassault Systèmes (DS) significantly upgraded their formulation, recipe, and specification management offering by acquiring Enginuity, a Connecticut-based software company. While no terms of the agreement were announced, the DS earnings call presentation suggests they spent no more than 30 million Euros for the acquisition.

In business since 1992, the privately-held Enginuity focuses on PLM solutions for the CPG, personal care, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and specialty chemicals industries. They support implementations in 26 countries, from 30 to more than 800 users. Enginuity has a strong customer list, including P&G, Revlon, Pfizer, Merck, Schering-Plough, AkzoNobel, and Clairol. According to Enginuity,...

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In recent years, manufacturers across all industries have had to contend with an expanding list of increasingly stringent and complex regulations governing issues such as health, safety, recyclability, and materials traceability. Complying with these regulations is now a fact of life in most industries, where the new business mantra is “comply or die.”

Tough New Green Regulations & Requirements

For years, regulatory compliance applied mostly to pharmaceutical, food and beverage, medical devices, and aerospace companies—industries with governmental regulations requiring them to be able to identify the precise components or sources of materials/ingredients (e.g., in the case...

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Benjamin Franklin, the well-known 18th Century publisher of Poor Richard’s Almanack and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, is credited for stating, “The only things certain in life are death and taxes.” Well, we’re not sure that there are only two things that are certain in life. We think many would argue that there are a few others, such as our need for food and our basic instincts for seeking out health and safety. So you might ask, what does this have to do with product lifecycle management (PLM)?...

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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...