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Back in the 70s when I was much more of a baseball fan, the Cincinnati Reds were the Big Red Machine. Powerful. Efficient. Talented. Complete. Why would I use this as a title for a blog post? Because in our role as strategic consultants to end user companies (60-70% of CIMdata’s revenues in most years), we often help them to define their PLM strategies, develop requirements, and select and implement PLM-enabling solutions. In this role, we have front row seats to solution benchmarks, where the leading PLM solution suppliers are asked to show how their solutions can meet a set of customer-defined scenarios. And this is why I chose the Hall of Fame catcher for my title. All of these companies should be like the Big Red Machine. Efficient. Talented. Complete. They should hit these meatballs out of the park. Why do we believe this? Because in our analyst role, we work

 PDF The industrial equipment (IE) market is large and varied, ranging from fabricated metal components and sub-assemblies to manufacturing equipment that convey, assemble, or produce products, and mobile machinery like farming or construction equipment. IE companies have different business models, development and production requirements e.g., build to order (BTO). In order to be successful, IE companies must respond to changes in market needs, new technologies, ever-increasing product complexity, expanding end customer and regulatory requirements, and relentless cost pressures. Products may have lifecycles measured in years or decades, which require ongoing service, and may be significantly modified or upgraded over time. To successfully meet changing global market requirements, IE companies need PLM solutions and technologies that enable them to produce innovative, customized products faster, achieving both accuracy and profitability. IE Company Business Challenges Customers of IE purchase that equipment based on performance specifications tied to return on investment (ROI) rather than on features and

 PDF The choice of the company’s new Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system has been made and the team of decision makers celebrates the challenging selection effort. But now the real work begins—planning and executing the migration of data from the current legacy systems to the new target PLM platform. A company’s existing data contains a significant portion of their intellectual property (IP) and therefore the company’s competitive advantage and value. The success of the new system depends heavily upon an effective migration of existing data in an intelligent, quality, and timely manner. This scenario is repeated in varying degrees across the globe and in every industry vertical. With the rapid pace of improving technology, competitive pressures drive many companies to continually evaluate their PLM solutions and undertake improvements. The decision may be driven by the recognition that their current legacy solution, or more often their maintenance of multiple legacy systems, has grown

 PDF On September 7-8, Siemens PLM Software held their annual analyst event in Boston, Massachusetts. Approximately 150 people—including analysts, journalists, bloggers, and representatives from across Siemens PLM Software and other Siemens businesses - convened to listen to Siemens PLM’s executives and customers provide a business, technology, and strategy update. According to those Siemens PLM executives, the state of the business is strong. While Siemens AG does not report on business unit revenues, Tony Affuso, Chairman and CEO of Siemens PLM, cited the strong 2011 results of their main competitors, Dassault Systems and PTC, and claimed Siemens PLM is exceeding them. Going further, he referred to the high win rates in competitive selections against those firms and listed many specific customers who are replacing their current PLM solutions with Siemens PLM offerings. In a consistent message with years past, Affuso claimed that their focus on openness and their mantra “we never let a

When speaking about design processes using Computer-Aided Design (CAD) solutions, people often refer to “engineering intent.” Not being a CAD guy (and not playing one on TV either), I would ask colleagues about exactly what this meant. Most of the conversations left me confused, because they would talk about history trees, and the problems with one person having to make changes to another’s design and having to unravel the steps that were used to transform shapes into the desired part or assembly. This left me believing that a lot of what people referred to as engineering intent was really “geometric intent,” the steps that a person executed using their CAD solution of choice to create the desired result. As a lapsed mathematician, I knew that there were many geometric ways to skin the cat, if you will. You can get to a desired geometric end result using different transformations. How you

 PDF On June 26 and 27, Dassault Systèmes held their annual Industry Analyst event in La Defense, the business district just across the Seine from Paris. As has been past practice, it was held in conjunction with a Dassault Systèmes partner event, the Application Innovation Summit (AIS). The renaming of this event is significant in and of itself, as it illustrates Dassault Systèmes’ rededication to growing its partner base for the V6 architecture. CAA2, the second generation of their successful CAA partnership program, finally provides the tools necessary for partners to build applications tightly integrated with the V6 platform. The breadth of CAA applications made the V5 platform a powerful competitive force in the high-end CAD market, and with this event Dassault Systèmes is putting that same muscle behind V6. Scheduling issues put Bernard Charlès on stage for the day two keynote, but he did not disappoint. He stated that there are

 PDF 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 renewed attention to PTC’s position in the broad PLM industry. Real immediate impact is felt, however, with the delivery of Creo. Over the past twenty-five years, PTC fundamentally changed the MCAD industry when they introduced parametric solid modeling in their flagship product, Pro/ENGINEER. Now, PTC hopes to re-energize their fortunes with a combination of both parametric

 PDF 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 it to provide its customers with access to a portfolio of solutions from other sources that augment its own product offerings. CIMdata believes that this program, called the HyperWorks Partner Alliance (HWPA), offers substantial benefits to engineers and analysts as well as the S&A vendor community. Altair’s well-regarded suite of S&A and related solutions, called HyperWorks includes

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, their solution runs on multiple backend data management solutions. Their strong use of XML should make the move to ENOVIA straightforward. DS will continue to offer ENOVIA Specification Central to support some customer use cases. Specification Central is the specification management capability started at MatrixOne that has continued to evolve.

 PDF 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 of an identified problem such as pharmaceutical side effects in patients, food recall, or accident). Considerable focus is now being made on environmental regulations and sustainability (or “greenness”) issues for companies around the world that are “going green.” Some of the toughest such regulations are in the European Union (EU), including the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS)