CIMdata 博客

During a recent visit to Oracle’s home page (www.oracle.com) we were unable to find an obvious web link to PLM. Fortunately, with some intelligent digging, one can find a link at the bottom of the “Applications” column entitled “More Applications.” There it is, “Product Lifecycle Management,” right in between “Procurement” and “Project Portfolio Management.” This started us thinking … “How far and how integrated has Agile’s organization and PLM solution offerings progressed since Oracle acquired the Agile Software Corporation some eighteen months ago in July 2007?” For Oracle, the Agile acquisition was fairly small in size from a financial prospective—the $492 million spent was relatively small compared to many of Oracle’s other acquisitions. At the time of the announced acquisition we commented that Oracle’s move was positive, that we believed it reflected a continuation of the consolidation activities that have been transforming the PLM market landscape, and that it reinforced the

Recently, CIMdata had the opportunity to participate in Siemens PLM Software’s Siemens Innovation Leadership Summit, which was held November 9-11 in Scottsdale, Arizona. This was a “restricted invitation” event attended by industry executives and produced by Siemens PLM Software (Siemens) to facilitate the sharing of strategies and experiences among their customers. Overall, we thought it was an excellent event with executive-level participation from both customer speakers and attendees. The seniority of attendees was as high as we’ve seen at any PLM-focused event that we’ve had the pleasure to attend. A wide range of industries and products were represented by both attendees and speakers, with speaking executives from automotive, aerospace and defense, lighting, bearings, test equipment, high-tech, automotive racing, engineering services, software, and business consulting firms. Not surprisingly, the uncertain worldwide economic situation was a major topic of concern among participants. This issue was addressed by numerous presenters and attendees, and PLM’s role

 PDF For more than 25 years CIMdata has reported on the product lifecycle management (PLM) industry. For most of this time, the primary focus of the “mindshare leading” PLM solution suppliers that make up the majority of the market has been targeted toward large discrete manufacturers. Much of this has been due to the historical roots of most of the major PLM solution suppliers, which encompasses various discrete product development activities, especially mechanically-oriented computer-aided design tasks, bill of material creation and management, engineering release and change control, and related activities. This history has resulted in a well-educated set of PLM solution suppliers and industrial organizations, many of whom are still predominantly mechanically- or electromechanically-oriented. Currently, we’re seeing a growing focus on many non-discrete industries (e.g., food and beverage, consumer packaged goods, petrochemical, specialty chemical, etc.) where specifications are the foundation upon which the product lifecycle operates—not bills of material. For Selerant

 PDF Over the past several years, MSC has been building market awareness around their solutions that are targeted at product development enterprises. These have stressed the role of simulation data management in expanding analysis and simulation beyond their traditional user base of analyst specialists and engineers. We have heard some people in the user community wondering if MSC is losing sight of their deep roots in developing new and compelling technologies and solutions that support the day-to-day needs of analysts and engineers to deeply evaluate and simulate new products. It is CIMdata’s opinion that this has not been the case at all and we will provide some of the reasons that we believe support this conclusion. A very good example of building out the technology is MSC MD (multi-discipline), a solver framework that has been developed, and continues to be refined, to support multi-disciplinary, coupled analysis and simulation. It builds on

 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 or regulations drove that development. Requirements play a critical role in product development today. The reach of requirements extends from conceptual ideas that are based on customer needs to the techniques used to create a product on the shop floor. A hierarchy of interrelated requirements, or requirements that define a next level of requirements, exists and must

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, "plan to make" processes across multiple plants through an integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution systems (MES) solution. CIMdata believes that integrating MES with ERP is a core precept for the merging of PLM and Automation. SAP’s acquisition of Visiprise is a solid step toward providing their customers with

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, United Technologies, General Electric, Samsung and Toyota. The acquisition of Engineous continues the DS’ drive to develop a comprehensive SLM suite that effectively complements their CATIA-based design solutions. The Engineous products will be incorporated as part of DS’ V6 PLM 2.0 platform and will be managed as an integral component of

 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