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 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

 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) information into all kinds of static and interactive “documents.” Seemage has established a strong reputation as a provider of CAD-neutral data viewing and exploration combined with publishing this information into MS Office, Adobe Acrobat, and other popular formats. The 3DVIA products that evolve from Seemage (as well as Virtools, another Dassault Systèmes acquisition) should be enabled

 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 in providing lifecycle management-focused PLM solutions, and CIMdata recognizes them as one of the five key “PLM Mindshare Leaders.” Agile has consistently been recognized in the PLM market for their solid focus on solutions for high-tech based businesses. In recent years, they have expanded their suite of offerings to include solutions focused on some other industry sectors,

 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 functions such as design, manufacturing, and services have provided many companies with cost advantages. However, to do this, well-established communication channels, control procedures, and management practices, progressively built up over time, must change to take advantage of new processes, organizational structures, and enabling technologies. Another issue is that geographically-distributed companies potentially have a competitive edge, as their