PDF

Common Requirements Challenges

All organizations produce myriad information about their products. However, transforming that information into accessible knowledge is difficult. In product development, understanding how a product is intended to function and how to apply that understanding to create an appropriate product is knowledge; and capturing, managing, and reusing that knowledge effectively is a competitive advantage. The history of the design process is embodied in CAD models. However, this history doesn’t convey all of the knowledge about how or why the product was created in a specific way or what requirements such as specifications, standards...

Dassault Systèmes (DS) and Engineous Software, a market leader in process automation, integration, and optimization, today announced an agreement in which DS would acquire Engineous Software. DS will incorporate Engineous’ process automation, integration, and optimization capabilities into their SIMULIA Simulation Lifecycle Management (SLM) solution suite. The proposed acquisition at an estimated price of 40 million USD, should be completed before the end of July subject to specific closing conditions.

Engineous’ FIPER software is designed to enable organizations to access, execute, and reuse design simulation tools and processes. Engineous customers include: Boeing, General Motors, Nissan, Procter & Gamble, Caterpillar, Canon, Rolls Royce,...

SAP AG today announced its intent to acquire Visiprise, Inc., a privately-held provider of manufacturing execution software solutions delivering integrated manufacturing operations to companies of all sizes. Acquisition of Visiprise is part of SAP’s "Perfect Plant" strategy and supports their PLM roadmap and its goal of helping customers achieve operational excellence and product and service leadership. SAP anticipates that the acquisition will be completed in July 2008 pending necessary regulatory approvals in the United States and Europe.

The combination of SAP Business Suite applications, the SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP MII) application and Visiprise Manufacturing should help customers deploy end-to-end,...

 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...

 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...

 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....

 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)...

 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...

 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...

 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...