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 PDF 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 may have serious consequences, as shown in the following example. After ten years of successful operations, a satellite owner decides to order a second and identical satellite. Meanwhile, the prime contractor had changed both CAD and analysis applications a number of times over this time. During the changes of tools, the original satellite data was not

 PDF 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 or in part to each customer's specifications. Elevators, chemical processing plants, and satellites are examples. While this can be a difficult process, ETO produces some important benefits: ETO allows highly-configured, specialized design solutions that satisfy specific customer needs. ETO can be used to design products that precisely meet customer specifications, requirements, and design expectations. Previous designs can be re-used

 PDF Electronic Design Automation (EDA) is a special domain where only the most seasoned Electrical Computer-Aided Design (ECAD) experts reside—at least that’s what many electrical engineers would say. Perhaps there is some truth to this statement. An electrical engineer’s need for vast libraries of components, specialized systems analysis functionality, and the inherent complexities related to the combination of electrical, software, and hardware components have all made their job increasingly complex and challenging. For many of today’s ECAD experts these challenges represent a fact of their day-to-day work life. The rapid emergence of products that are comprised of electronics, mechanical, and software components has placed many of today’s ECAD experts in the forefront of product development and this means providing them with tools that increase their connectivity to enterprise processes and data is more important than ever. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), which has traditionally been used to handle information and processes associated with

 PDF Companies are striving to design innovative products while reducing the cost of product development and time-to-market. The pace of product innovation has also increased dramatically and is a primary contributor to companies’ overall profits and market share. Factors companies must address include increasing product complexity, the time and cost to create physical prototypes, and a lack of resources that can perform required analyses and simulations. More and more companies are recognizing the importance of using embedded simulation and analysis tools within their main product development processes and tools to better design their products. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is one type of analysis that is being applied to a wide range of products. There is demonstrated real value in using CFD to analyze products earlier in the product development lifecycle. Embedding CFD analysis within the normal design environment (CAD) enhances the value of using CFD, allowing it to be used throughout the

 PDF Industrial machinery (IM) is one of the broadest and most diverse industry segments in the PLM industry. IM is both a market unto itself and a major component of other industry sectors. Industrial machines have a strong presence within many other industries, i.e., process industries. Some of the other industry sectors are built using industrial machinery. Examples of industrial machinery include: Specialty process equipment (e.g., food handling or material handling equipment) Mechanical drives and power transmission, engines and turbines Industrial heating, cooling and environment controls Machine tools and high tech machinery and equipment Industrial electrical and electronic equipment Mining, agricultural and construction equipment Others Because of the wide use of various types of industrial machines, we see a significant overlap between the IM sector and others, particularly in their manufacturing operations. This CIMdata Commentary looks at the IM market and Autodesk’s position as a supplier of solutions for that industry. As shown in the following figure, IM designers and

This CIMdata Brief looks at some of the issues impacting health insurance companies’ ability to meet their customers’ needs. The Brief describes how Product Lifecycle Management is being applied to enable those companies develop and maintain portfolios of innovative, personalized products in today’s highly competitive health care industry while meeting state and federal mandates. The health insurance industry continues to see an increase in the number and types of products being introduced in today’s highly-competitive health care market. In order to compete effectively, insurers must be able to respond quickly to the demands of their clients who seek products tailored to their unique needs. In meeting these challenges, insurers need to be more innovative and agile, e.g., innovative in streamlining the product development process to create a broad range of new offerings, and agile enough to respond quickly to market and regulatory pressures. So how can a health insurance company speed to

 PDF ANN ARBOR, Michigan, October 27, 2009—Dassault Systèmes (DS) has announced their intent to acquire IBM’s PLM sales and client support operations responsible for DS’ Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software application portfolio, as well as DS product-related customer contracts and related assets for US $600 million. The transition is expected to be completed in the first half of 2010, subject to the execution of local agreements and completion of regulatory processes and applicable labor relations requirements in various countries. PLM is a mission-critical, extended enterprise business platform that helps companies innovate and grow by enabling them to digitally create, build, support, and manage their products across their lifecycles. DS is one of the worldwide leaders in PLM software and services and is a supplier to customers in a variety of industries around the world, including automotive, aerospace and defense, consumer goods, high-tech electronics, and machinery industries. This acquisition is the next evolution

This CIMdata Brief takes a look at some of the main issues that typically impede an organization’s ability to efficiently and effectively localize product-related content. The Brief describes why companies need to produce and handle product-related documentation in a synchronized manner aligned with the product’s and the organization’s product development process. It also describes why companies need to begin their localization early in the development process and why organizations must seek to implement solutions that manage the componentization of product content so that it can be decomposed and subsequently re-structured in an efficient manner. By doing so, an organization can ensure that its new products are introduced to multiple markets at the right time, at the lowest cost possible, and as quickly as possible. In today’s global market, product documentation can take on many forms—the most common are user manuals, assembly instructions, labels, user interface menus, and online help. The localization

PTC announced the acquisition of Relex—a company with solutions focused on reliability analysis; they plan to integrate Relex’s solutions as part of their Insight program. The acquisition of Relex expands PTC’s focus on providing solutions that enable companies to better analyze both current and future product designs for compliance, safety, reliability, and maintainability. Integration of Relex functionality with other PTC products, particularly Windchill, will enable designers and engineers to use reliability information earlier in the product development lifecycle to create better designs and reduce downstream service and warranty costs. CIMdata believes that PTC’s acquisition of Relex will add value to their Product Development System and bring new and needed functionality into the PLM environment.

Recently, CIMdata had a chance to review think3’s released PLM solution, TD PLM 2009.1 (the “TD” stands for “task-driven”). TD PLM is a new web-based PLM solution that, according to think3, has been designed to support a company’s entire product lifecycle, from concept through to end-of-life. think3 has built this 3-tier Microsoft .NET solution from the ground up and has incorporated a number of notable features, including a task-driven, zero-footprint Web graphical user interface (GUI), tag-based search and classification, Shell integration, and a reasonable set of built-in localization tools that support global deployments. Upon reflection, what struck us more than anything else, is the task-driven approach think3 took in the design of TD PLM’s overall user experience. In many ways, the task-driven user interface (UI) paradigm, which we also see in the latest release of Microsoft Office, has the potential to impact how all PLM solution suppliers approach the design