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Mathcad for free

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Mathcad, from PTC, is one of my favorite computer math systems. It’s one of those “just right” programs for engineers: It’s far better for doing engineering calculations than Excel, but is a lot easier to learn and use than Matlab. Here’s a splashy video that shows what can be done with Mathcad:

PTC has just  released a version of the software, called Mathcad Express, that is free. Free, as in “free beer.” Free, as in “the software license never expires.”

There is a catch, as you might imagine: Some of the functionality in the full version (which is called Mathcad Prime) isn’t included in Mathcad Express.

Cubic Polynomial Intersection Solve Block

The important question is this: Has PTC included enough capability in Mathcad Express to make it worth getting excited about?

It’s a harder question to answer than you might expect. Here are the major differences between Express and Prime:

Mathcad1

Mathcad2

Mathcad3

Mathcad4

In my testing of Mathcad Express, I found that its capabilities are sufficient to make it a practical alternative to Excel for most straightforward math problems. But I really miss some of Mathcad Prime’s most valuable features, including symbolic solving, the block solver, and advanced plots.

Mathcad Express never lets you forget that PTC wants you to upgrade to Mathcad Prime. The “upgrade” button is always there, front and center, as are menus and icons for the non-included features, with tooltips encouraging you to upgrade. Mathcad Express worksheets also include an advertising watermark, pointing to www.mathcad.com.

I can understand the calculus that led PTC to include so much aggressive upgrade promotion in Mathcad Express. But I think they missed something: For a freeware program to be successful, it needs social/viral promotion. It needs to be compelling enough that people like me (and the folks who read this article) want to take the time and energy to tell other people about it. It’d be a lot easier for me to be enthusiastic about Mathcad Express if it didn’t scream so loudly that its primary purpose is to get people to buy Mathcad Prime.

ptc.com/product/Mathcad

 

 

 

A Real World Design Challenge for high school students

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How do you get high school students interested in science, technology, engineering and math? Why not give them a real world design challenge to solve?

In the 2013 Real World Design Challenge, students are asked to tackle a couple of serious engineering design problems. And, thanks to the generosity of a couple of engineering software industry companies, they’ll have real world tools to do the work: PTC Creo Elements/Pro, Mathcad, and Windchill, and Mentor FloEFD concurrent CFD.

The press release below tells you more, but here’s the important part: You can register a team, or sign up as a mentor.

PTC Sponsors 2013 Real World Design Challenge®

High School Students to Design Unmanned Aircraft System to Locate Lost Children and an Ultra Fuel-Efficient Commercial Truck to Protect Fuel and Energy Reserves

 NEEDHAM, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC) today joined more than 70 partners on Capitol Hill to kick off the 2012-2013 Real World Design Challenge and announce the themes for this year’s challenges: Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Next Generation Truck Design. Today’s event was hosted by Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and the students from last year’s national champion teams, the Kansas Tornadoes from Baldwin City, KS and Team Xavier from Middletown, CT.

Students that participate in the 2012-2013 Aviation Challenge will work to design an unmanned aircraft system that can locate lost children. Additionally, the students will need to submit a business plan that makes the system financially viable for 50 rescue missions. Students who participate in the Surface Challenge will be tasked with designing a next-generation truck with highly-enhanced fuel efficiency in order to protect fuel and energy reserves in the United States.

The Real World Design Challenge is a national design competition with more than 7,800 high school students run by a public-private partnership with the goal of inspiring interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and careers. PTC and its partners, including Cessna Aircraft Company and the Federal Aviation Administration, are focused on transforming and enhancing STEM education in the American educational system by providing science, engineering and learning resources that allow students and teachers to address actual challenges confronting the nation’s most important industries.

“The Real World Design Challenge offers students the chance to experience the pride and passion of designing something that could be used in a commercial environment for the benefit of others,” said John Stuart, senior vice president education, PTC. “PTC is proud to be working with our partners to get students across the country interested in careers in engineering.”

The winning teams from the participating states will be notified in February 2013 and will receive an all-expense paid trip to Washington, D.C. to compete at the National Challenge Event in April 2013.

“Being the coach for the Baldwin High Tornadoes in the Real World Design Challenge competition has been the high point of my educational career,” said Pam Davis, Coach of the Kansas Tornadoes. “The chance to use engineering software and the opportunity to work with professional mentors has helped my students secure scholarships as well as get accepted into our nation’s best engineering schools.”

PTC provides technology that transforms how customers create and service products, including PTC Creo® CAD product design software, PTC Windchill® PLM software and PTC Mathcad® engineering calculation software, to teams participating in the Real World Design Challenge. PTC also provides connections and access to mentors from its partner organizations across America who are participants in the competition or program management for the competition.

For additional information contact Anthony Coppola at acoppola@ptc.com. To register a team or to sign up as a mentor go to the Real World Design Challenge website www.realworlddesignchallenge.org. The deadline for teams to register for the Real World Design Challenge is November 18, 2012. The solution submissions are due February 6, 2013.

Additional Resources:

About PTC
PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC) enables manufacturers to achieve sustained product and service advantage. The company’s technology solutions transform the way products are created and serviced across the entire product lifecycle – from conception and design to sourcing and service. Founded in 1985, PTC employs over 6,000 professionals serving more than 27,000 businesses in rapidly-evolving, globally distributed manufacturing industries worldwide. Get more information at www.ptc.com.

 

WEBINAR: What’s New in Creo Parametric 2.0? Up to Double Your Design Productivity compared to Pro/ENGINEER

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callaway final 02bThe latest version of PTC’s Creo family of design software is here! Come see what’s new inside Creo Parametric 2.0 and how you can double your design productivity! In this webcast, we introduce, demonstrate, compare, and contrast all the major new Creo Parametric capabilities against Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0.

If you’re an existing Pro/ENGINEER or Creo 1.0 user, see for yourself all these new capabilities, including the new modern user experience, streamlined workflows, new surfacing capabilities called Freestyle, improved sketching, working with large assemblies, sheet metal design and much more available in Creo Parametric.

In this webinar you will learn:

    • Creo 2.0’s new functionalities and benefits
    • Head-to head comparisons of Pro/Engineer, Wildfire 5.0 and Creo Parametric
    • Question and answer session with Creo product expert, Todd Kraft



PTC: The importance of design agility

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Here’s an interesting term: Design agility.

PTC defines it, generally, as “the power to make late-stage design changes quickly and easily .”

They define it more specifically as “the ability to rapidly recognize features and patterns in imported models, enabling seamless modifications; design intelligence for dumb models.”

You might expect that more specific definition from PTC, being that they have software that fits it rather exactly.

Still, I have to give PTC credit: This is a company that was willing to reinvent (and rebrand) its main product line, specifically to enable design agility. Their Creo Parametric software supports a rather interesting form of direct editing (they call it flexible modeling.) It’s quite a good tool when you need to  make late-stage design changes.

PTC just sent me an interesting infographic that reports the results of a study they did on design agility. It’s kind of big, so here is a little image of it. If you click on it, you can download a PDF version that’s actually possible to read.

PTC Creo Design Agility

 

Here’s my summary of the infographic:

  • Projects usually have a lot of unexpected changes, often in late stages.
  • It’s difficult to use CAD models from other systems, or created by other people.

How do you get “design agility?” PTC is happy to tell you their answer, at www.ptc.com/go/agility. As for my answer: It’s complicated. I will tell you what I think a good first step would be:

Use tools that can take advantage of the knowledge and data that you have.

If that’s too obscure, let me put it in the context of CAD:

  • It’s important that your CAD software is able to open and edit the data you have, no matter the source of that data. If you’re fortunate enough to be in a situation where everyone associated with a project is using exactly the same suite of software, of the same version, then you probably don’t need to sweat this too much. But for those of us who live in the real world—where people use a lot of different tools, and interoperability is still a challenge—it can be a big deal.
  • It’s important that you are able to meaningfully edit the CAD data you have, even if you don’t know how it was constructed. To put a finer point on it: what you know is what it looks like, and what you want it to look like; what you often don’t know is how it is structured (e.g., the hidden relationships built into the feature tree.) It’s important that you CAD software allow you to edit the that data, without you needing to take the time to discover and make sense out of its structure.

 

How Whirlpool uses PTC CAD and PLM technology

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Whirlpool Corp's Maytag Maxima seriesHome appliances aren’t what they used to be. Consider, for example, washers and dryers. At this week’s PlanetPTC conference, Fred Bellio, CIO of Whirlpool’s Global Product Organization, and Jeff Burk, Director of Whirlpool’s Constellation Program Management Office, described some of the complexities of his company’s Maytag Maxima line of washers and dryers. Washers and dryers from 50 years ago (when my mother was doing the family’s laundry) were mostly mechanical, with an electric drive motor, a timer, and a few switches, solenoids and relays. The Maxima line are about one-third mechanical, one-third electrical/electronic, and one-third software.

Who would have guessed that a clothes washer could have a million lines of software source code, and use WI-fi for remote diagnostics (and even electrical load shedding?)

Whirlpool is the world’s #1 major appliance company, with $19 billion in revenue, and around 70,000 employees. Its products are developed globally, and sold in over 170 countries. While it may not face the same challenges as large automotive or aerospace companies, that doesn’t mean that it’s got things easy when it comes to product development.

Whirlpool’s PLM strategy

To continue to be competitive in the appliance business, Whirlpool needs to implement a top-notch product development process. The Whirlpool program chartered to deliver that process is code named Constellation.

Constellation’s goals are to:

  • Leverage Whirlpool’s global footprint and scale,
  • Enable end‐to‐end lean product development,
  • Enhance collaboration across functions, geographies, & supply chain, and,
  • Provide a real time single source of product information.

Whirlpool PLMThe Constellation program provides Whirlpool with a year-by road-map for implementing PLM technology. This year there are projects related to CAD, core PLM, design quality, cost management, product & portfolio management, service, strategic sourcing, and product quality. It’s not a trivial amount of work. (You can look at Whirpool’s PlanetPTC presentation on Constellation here.)

Ultimately, the benefits Whirlpool hopes to gain include:

  • Shorter product development cycles,
  • More consumer relevant innovation,
  • More product variants from fewer platforms, and,
  • Best cost and best quality position.

Whirlpool and PTC

Whirlpool has been a long-term PTC customer, first using Pro/E in 1986, and standardizing on it in 1990. The company entered into a strategic relationship with PTC in 2010, and currently uses a wide variety of PTC products, including ProE/Creo, Windchill ProjectLink, Windchill PDMLink, WQS, MathCAD, Integrity, PPMLink, Arbortext, Isodraw, and Product View.

My sense is that Whirlpool is a very good example of an ideal PTC customer. Their particular combination of needs are a great match for PTC’s technology. (That may be because PTC pays attention to their customers’ needs when planning their technologies.) Two PTC technologies of special note for Whirlpool are likely to be application lifecycle management (ALM), and service lifecycle management (SLM.)  I’ll be writing more about those two technologies in the near future.

While you could make an argument that Whirlpool could be as well-served by any number of other CAD programs (including SolidWorks, Inventor, and Solid Edge) as they are by ProE/Creo, I think there’s an equally strong (or  stronger) counter-argument. Creo 2.0 includes some capabilities of great value to a company such as Whirlpool. The thing that comes to my mind first is integrated parametric, direct, and organic subdivision surface shape modeling. But the hot ticket is the new Creo 2.0 Options Modeler, which, when coupled with Windchill, is the no-brainer choice for building multiple product variants on a single platform.

Even good examples have flaws

Listening to Jeff Burk describe Whirlpool’s Constellation strategy at the PlanetPTC conference, it occurred to me that the company does seem to have a solid grasp on where it’s going with PLM. I’d expect this: Bellio was the PLM Practice Director at Mercury Marine’s PLM Services group (a company that Siemens PLM highlighted at their recent customer conference.) He also worked in PLM strategy and deployment at Bombardier—and aerospace is where the rubber meets the road for PLM (to strain a metaphor.) Burk has 25 years at Whirlpool, and knows what makes the company tick.

Still, I was curious: Whirlpool has been using Pro/E for 26 years. Do they have the CAD portion of their PLM strategy down? I asked Bellio and Burk about three product design-centric best practices that are generally thought to make a big difference in time to market, cost, and quality: systems engineering, model-based development (e.g., no drawings), and up-front CAE.

Bellio and Burk agreed that each of these are of real value, and that Whirlpool is very interested in them. But, Whirlpool isn’t doing any of them yet.

Why? Start with model-based development: (MBD): It’s simply difficult to change from a drawing-centric to a model-centric culture. Even if good software tools for doing 3D GD&T are available (and they are available for ProE/Creo, both from PTC, and from third-parties such as Sigmetrix), engineers are comfortable with drawings, and aren’t inclined to change, if they can help it. The only industries in which there is widespread adoption of MBD are aerospace and, to a lesser degree, automotive. (This will change over time: MBD is a hot industry trend.)

Similarly, implementing systems engineering and up-front CAE require cultural and process changes that are not natural for CAD users (and particularly ProE users) who’ve invested a lot of time and effort in learning how to do it the way they’re doing it now. You can’t just “install” these practices in a product development process, and expect everyone to jump into using them.

This stuff takes time, and commitment

Looking at Whirlpool’s example, I wonder: do any of PTC’s customers take “full advantage” of all (or even most) of the technology that PTC has to offer? I suspect the answer is “no.”

As a start, PTC offers a lot of technology. A lot of it overlaps with technology offered by competitive companies—and many customers use a mix of tools from a number of suppliers.

Yet, beyond issues of scale, the process of implementing PLM in a company, whether small or large, takes time and commitment, no matter which technology suppliers you use.   There is no magic bullet that will make the process easy.  My sense is that the folks at PTC are focused on doing what they can to make the process easier.  While I still think PTC has a long way to go in making their technology more accessible for non-experts, I’ve seen enough progress that I’m encouraged.

PTC announces Creo 2.0, Windchill 10.1, and shake-and-break 1.0

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This week, PRC announced Creo 2.0 and Windchill 10.1. These aren’t big releases in the grand scheme of things, but they are important releases, and show that PTC is working hard to deliver on what it’s promised.

Creo 2.0

This release includes fresh and updated releases of the 9 existing Creo apps, and adds a 10th new app called Options Modeler, which supports design-to-order and assemble-to-order. Picture, if you will, the kind of capabilities that major PTC customers such as Caterpillar and Deere might need, and you’ll get an idea of what Options Modeler is about. It integrates with Windchill, and can handle arbitrarily large and complex assemblies. It’s available today an extension to Creo Parametric and will be available as a stand-alone app in June.

With the new release, PTC is offering the free Creo Sketch app for Apple devices, and Creo Layout for doing 2D layouts as a front-end to 3D design.

Overall, PTC has added more than 490 enhancements througought the Creo like. PTC says that the quality, performance and usability of version 2.0 of the entire Creo family is dramatically improved from version 1.0.

Windchill 10.1

PTC has integrated Integrity with Windchill, and are leveraging it for comprehensive requirements management. Integrity is the tool PTC customers will use to capture and, ultimately, trace customer requirements across the product development lifecycle to ensure the product delivered most perfectly matches the product desired. Of particular note: PTC is using Integrity to manage requirements in its own development processes.

PTC has enhanced Windchill in several key areas, adding capabilities to help users ensure compliance with government relations and with industry quality standards. One important enhancement is the ability to monitor for the use of “conflict minerals” in a given product. They’ve also improved how reliability analysis is communicated, to ensure faster resolution of issues stemming from customer complaints.

With the introduction of Windchill Mobile, PTC is now supporting the iPad and iPhone. The software includes the “shake and break” feature demonstrated at last year’s PlanetPTC Live, in which users can “explode” the diagram of a product assembly by simply shaking their mobile device to see the internal parts in greater detail. I suggested an Etch-a-Sketch function, where turning it upside down and shaking it would erase your project files—but the PTC people told me that Microsoft already had a patent on that function, back from the days of Windows ME.

The official press releases follow:

 

 

PTC Advances MCAD Strategy with Release of Creo 2.0

Latest Release Introduces New App for Modular Product Design, Enhances Apps for Concept Design, and Improves User Productivity Across Creo Family

NEEDHAM, MA. – April 9, 2012 – PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC) today announced Creo® 2.0, the latest release of its revolutionary new generation of product design software.  Last June, PTC challenged the industry paradigm with the introduction of the first nine “apps” in its Creo family – conceived, in part, to enable a much wider range of roles to contribute to the design process with a set of integrated, purpose-built tools.  With Creo 2.0, PTC introduces a new role-specific app supporting modular product design that extends how organizations can approach concept design, and delivers significant productivity enhancements to its existing Creo apps.

“The release of Creo 2.0 demonstrates PTC’s unwavering commitment to deliver against our Creo strategy and solve the chronic challenges customers face with traditional CAD tools,” said Michael Campbell, divisional general manager MCAD segment, PTC.  “Built on PTC’s heritage of innovation, Creo rethinks the very nature of product design, increasing collaboration and protecting data fidelity across any user role, any design mode, or any data source.  Today, PTC is also delivering the first technology component in its vision for managing modular product designs driven by the bill of materials.”

Modular Product Design

With Creo 2.0, PTC introduces a 10th app to the Creo family – Creo Options Modeler™ – a new role-specific app built for designers who need to create or validate modular product designs in 3D early in a design cycle.  The new app, available this summer, delivers a dedicated, easy-to-use, powerful set of capabilities to build accurate, up-to-date, precise 3D-based product assemblies, irrespective of size or complexity. When used with Creo Parametric™, Creo Options Modeler enables teams to validate precise mass, center of gravity, and even check and resolve critical issues like interference for modular designs.

Creo Options Modeler contributes to PTC’s AnyBOM™ Assembly technology vision, which promises to give teams the power and scalability needed to create, validate and reuse information for modular product architectures.  By combining Creo Options Modeler with PTC’s Windchill® product lifecycle management software, manufacturers can generate and validate precise 3D representations of product configurations defined by an individual bill of materials.

By enabling easier reuse of existing 3D models and through innovative interface tagging, the new app can reduce process errors and engineering rework.  As a member of the Creo product family, Creo Options Modeler also seamlessly leverages and shares data between other Creo apps, and with other people involved in the design process and beyond, further increasing detailed design and downstream process productivity.  

Rethinking Concept Design

Many companies prefer to start concept designs in 2D to quickly explore multiple options before moving to build more complex 3D models.  With Creo 2.0, PTC delivers on its vision for enabling companies to make the most of this early stage of their product development process.  The new releases of Creo Parametric, Creo Direct™, the free Creo Sketch™ (now available on Mac OS X with this release), and Creo Layout™ combine to greatly enhance collaboration, innovation and design exploration during concept design.  Since all Creo apps share a common data model, 2D geometry and design data can be easily shared by all users and apps and can be re-used later in the design process to accelerate the transition to the detailed design phase.

In Creo Layout 2.0, PTC is helping to solve the specific problem of transitioning from 2D to 3D, allowing users to easily create a layout of complex assemblies, quickly explore design alternatives, import a variety of 2D CAD file types, sketch and modify 2D geometry, organize information with groups, tags and structure as well as dimensions, notes and tables.  Once created, a 2D design in Creo Layout can serve as the basis for 3D models, allowing users to create assemblies in 2D or reference 2D geometry to create part features, and any changes made in 2D are reflected in 3D upon regeneration.

Productivity Enhancements

In the new release, PTC delivers more than 490 enhancements to the Creo app family, all designed to optimize the user experience and increase design productivity. 

Creo Parametric enables increased productivity and streamlining of the overall product design process with:

·        Freeform Surfaces – With the enhanced freestyle capabilities, designers can quickly and easily create more refined surfaces with higher levels of detail while still maintaining top level control over the general freeform shape. This significantly reduces the time to move concepts to precise, highly-detailed aesthetic product designs.

·        Cross-sections – Designers working in 3D cross-sections gain complete product insight with new, intuitive, and fast ways to create and dynamically re-position the sections, including instant access directly from the model tree.  Real-time interference detection within a section together with 2D visualization helps designers fully visualize the design, design changes, and detect and address potential issues early.  The new tools significantly enhance productivity when working in cross-sections and provide a rich design environment that accelerates the overall design process.

·       Measure – The new streamlined measure tool offers significant performance and usability improvements.  Designers can quickly gain detailed insight into key dimensions and measurements of any selected surface.  By controlling how and where measured results are displayed on-screen, and allowing for simple re-use of the displayed values into other applications, such as a Word document, designers can improve the efficiency and accuracy of leveraging precise measurements during the design process.

·        Track Changes – The new track changes capability in Creo Parametric allows designers to view, accept or reject model changes made by others using Creo Direct.  Designers can now work with a broader range of roles across the company while still maintaining full control of how changes are reflected in the parametric model.  This ensures design intent is fully maintained. Irrespective of modeling approach or Creo app, teams can now truly work together.

Overall, Creo Parametric delivers state-of-the-art user experience, new capabilities, automates common tasks, improves performance with streamlined workflows and enables dramatically improved overall design productivity.

Beyond Creo Parametric, PTC delivers significant enhancements to other Creo apps.  New capabilities in Creo Direct help accelerate bid-proposals and early concept design.  Casual users can now quickly and easily create new compelling 3D designs.  They also can easily modify models by reference to existing geometry of available parts and assemblies or quickly, but precisely place multiple parts and assemblies into position with the new intelligent snapping capabilities.

And as Creo Direct seamlessly works with Creo Parametric and other Creo apps, any 3D design can be shared by users across the enterprise design process.

In addition, this latest release greatly simplifies the installation process for Creo, only downloading and installing the Creo apps specific to a customer’s environment and license entitlement. This speeds download and significantly simplifies installation and configuration enabling teams to get up and running with Creo more quickly than ever before.

More information will be shared at PTC’s upcoming annual user event, PlanetPTC Live.

Additional Resources:

·        Creo Product Page  (website)

·        Creo Options Modeler  (website)

·        Creo Parametric  (datasheet)

·        Creo Layout  (datasheet)

·        Creo 2.0 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

·        Creo 2.0 Top Ten Reasons to Upgrade (datasheet)

·        Introduction to Creo Layout  (video)

·        Images & Captions

·         Creo Ready Software and Hardware Partners

Availability

Creo Options Modeler is available for purchase today as an extension of Creo Parametric.  It is expected to be available as a stand-alone app in June 2012.  All other Creo 2.0 apps are available now.

About PTC

PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC) enables manufacturers to achieve maximum value from their product strategies with software and services designed to optimize key business processes throughout the entire product lifecycle – from conception and design to sourcing and service. PTC’s integral solution portfolio enables customers to unleash product innovation, improve collaboration and ensure product data integrity within engineering and across the enterprise, supply chain and service partner networks. Founded in 1985, PTC employs over 6,000 professionals serving more than 27,000 customers worldwide. More information can be found at www.ptc.com.

PTC Extends Windchill Capabilities, Integrates with Integrity

Company Leverages Integrity for Comprehensive Requirements Management

NEEDHAM, MA. – April 9, 2012 – PTC® (Nasdaq: PMTC) today announced the latest version of its Windchill® product lifecycle management (PLM) software, which is now also integrated with PTC’s recently acquired Integrity™ software system lifecycle management technology.  Windchill 10.1 introduces sweeping enhancements to the product’s capabilities in a wide range of areas, while integrating Windchill with Integrity raises the bar for how manufacturers gather and manage requirements and trace related changes.  In addition, Windchill Mobile™ is now available from the Apple iTunes store for the iPad and iPhone.

“At PTC, our goal is to help manufacturers find new ways to compete in their markets, and to make their success repeatable over time,” said Brian Shepherd, executive vice president, PLM Segment, PTC.  “With this new version of Windchill, we’ve not only enhanced a number of critical functional areas, but we’ve also made major improvements to the user experience and serviceability of the product across-the-board.  We believe that PTC is continuing to set the pace for the value companies can generate when they deploy enterprise-class PLM technology.”

Do More: Comprehensive Requirements Management from Integrity

Less than a year after being acquired by PTC Integrity is dramatically expanding PTC’s footprint of capabilities.  Specifically, PTC has integrated Windchill and Integrity to combine the rich, collaborative requirements authoring and management capabilities of Integrity with the powerful “flow-down” traceability offered in Windchill.  This combination delivers powerful, comprehensive requirements management capabilities and enables manufacturers to improve product quality, reduce rework and improve time to market.

In addition, Windchill now integrates with the software change and configuration management capabilities of Integrity – and other leading tools – to manage defects and issues, as well as enable software releases to be synchronized with product configurations.

Requirements gathering and management is one of the most critical aspects of a product’s lifecycle.  According to industry analyst firm CIMdata, “Requirements management is all about balance—preventing one class of requirements from overriding another is critical. Effective requirements management ensures that the voice of the customer is captured and managed throughout the lifecycle of the product. This enables a company to design, build, and deliver products and services that meet or exceed their customers’ needs and expectations.”[1]

In addition, Windchill’s core configuration management capabilities have been further enhanced to provide advanced support for configurable products.  Together with new digital mock-up capabilities in Creo® 2.0, these enhancements in Windchill contribute to PTC’s AnyBOM™ Assembly technology vision; promising to give teams the power and scalability needed to create, validate and reuse information for modular product architectures. 

PTC is also extending the breadth of product-related content that can be managed in Windchill for retail and consumer product companies.  With a new version of its FlexPLM technology, companies can now reference CAD models managed in a Windchill environment – giving retail product designers much greater visibility and understanding of how to work with products that have both hard and soft goods (e.g. a chair’s frame and fabric).

Know More: Track Compliance, Quality, Cost

In the critical area of compliance, PTC has extended Windchill’s capabilities for tracking and monitoring regulated materials use.  For example, the recent Conflict Minerals legislation passed by the US Government drove the introduction of new management and reporting capabilities to help manufacturers identify and assess the compliance status of products containing the regulated minerals of tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold and their many derivatives. This allows companies to effectively protect their corporate brands, mitigate risk of non-compliance with government regulations and customer requirements, and avoid possible fines and penalties.

To further assist manufacturers with their quality initiatives, PTC has enhanced how Windchill analyzes the latest product structure information to provide early and accurate insight into product reliability.  For example, critical-to-quality characteristics identified in Creo are automatically communicated to Windchill Quality™ offerings for risk and reliability analysis, associating these characteristics with the test plans and manufacturing controls designed to ensure their quality.  A new Windchill Customer Experience Management™ module provides a highly-structured and automated process flow to trace and respond to customer complaints about product quality.  This enables a company to consistently resolve quality issues in a manner compliant with government regulations or quality management standards.

PTC has also enhanced how companies can accurately track product cost estimates and maintain related historical information by managing and displaying product cost information in multiple currencies.

Get More: Windchill Goes Mobile

With the new release, PTC is introducing a new Windchill Mobile app, giving users instant “anytime, anywhere” access to current product and process information.  Windchill Mobile includes an innovative “shake and break” capability that allows users to explode a product assembly by simply shaking their mobile device to see the internal parts in greater detail.  This helps companies improve worker productivity, regardless of whether they’re on the road, the manufacturing floor, or visiting a customer.  Windchill Mobile is available today to download from the Apple iTunes store for both the iPad and iPhone.  Windchill also now supports Apple users even if they aren’t on a mobile device with support for Mac OS X.

PTC has also simplified the Windchill system administration tools to improve reliability and lower overhead associated with running a Windchill installation.  For example, the new PTC System Monitor continuously checks the Windchill production environment to give administrators greater visibility into system performance, allowing proactive detection of potential bottlenecks before they impact end users, and reducing time to repair.

Finally, Windchill continues to build on the dramatic improvements PTC introduced in its user experience, making great use of graphical information and further simplifying workflows to accelerate tasks.  For example, the new Relationship Explorer allows users to visually navigate between related parts, documents, CAD designs, requirements, and change objects.  This allows users to quickly navigate across product structures to find the information they need.

More information will be shared at PTC’s upcoming annual user event, PlanetPTC Live.

Additional Resources:

·        What’s New in Windchill  (web site)

·        Windchill Interactive Experience(web site)

·        Windchill product page  (web site)

·        PTC’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Resource Center (web site)

·        PTC’s Quality Lifecycle Management Resource Center (web site)

·        PTC’s Product Analytics Resource Center (web site)

·        Windchill 10.1 Frequently Asked Questions ( FAQ)

·        Images & Captions

·        What’s new in Windchill 10.1 (video) 

·        Requirements Management (video)

·        Windchill Mobile (video)

Availability

The Windchill capabilities described above are available now, with the exception of integration with Integrity (available in early May 2012), FlexPLM (available in May 2012) and Windchill Quality offerings (available in July 2012).  The timing of any of these remaining product releases, and any features or functionality thereof, are subject to change at PTC’s discretion.

About PTC

PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC) enables manufacturers to achieve maximum value from their product strategies with software and services designed to optimize key business processes throughout the entire product lifecycle – from conception and design to sourcing and service.  PTC’s integral solution portfolio enables customers to unleash product innovation, improve collaboration and ensure product data integrity within engineering and across the enterprise, supply chain and service partner networks.  Founded in 1985, PTC employs over 6,000 professionals serving more than 27,000 customers worldwide.  More information can be found at www.ptc.com.

PTC, Windchill, Windchill Quality, Windchill Mobile, Windchill Customer Experience Management, Creo, Creo Options Modeler, FlexPLM, and Integrity are trademarks or registered trademarks of Parametric Technology Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Creo 2.0 is near

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PTC will soon be releasing Creo 2.0, and, in anticipation of this, invited me (along with three other blogger/editors) to their corporate headquarters for a preview. Unlike a formal release presentation, which would be heavily scripted, our experience was much more extemporaneous. We got to see a good chunk of what’s new, hear about PTC’s underlying goals, and even talk about things we thought they should be doing better.

What is Creo?

Creo was rolled out in the Fall of 2010. It was, at the highest level of abstraction, a bet-the-company rethink of PTC’s CAD strategy, based on a recognition that not all users (or enterprises) have the same needs.

While I can’t say, with certainty, what brought on this revelation, I can speculate that PTC’s 2007 acquisition of CoCreate was a big eye opener. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that PTC’s legion of salespeople would have swarmed into CoCreate’s 5,000 customer accounts, seeking to convert those people to Pro/E users. Like that was ever going to work.

The reason people (and companies) used CoCreate software was precisely because it was not Pro/E (or any other history-based solid modeler.) CoCreate’s dynamic modeling (more commonly called direct modeling these days) was comparatively easy to use, especially for people who weren’t CAD gurus. Companies with product lines that fit within the capabilities that CoCreate offered had no motivation to change at all. CoCreate customers that needed history and parametrics in their CAD software had long since moved on to other tools (including Pro/E).

I imagine that a number of CoCreate customers took the time to explain to PTC management why dynamic modeling fit their needs so well. At the same time, PTC management was likely watching the former CoCreate marketing people (who now worked for them) telling a compelling story that didn’t exactly jibe with the PTC’s historical “parametrics will solve all your problems” message.

What to do? How to rationalize these seemingly irreconcilable things? The only reasonable answer is to offer customers what they want. For PTC, this required a new strategy: Offer a range of products sharing a common data model and a common user interface design, and allow users to choose whether they want to use history-based, direct, or any other form of modeling that might come along in the future.

It’s a good vision. But getting there is the challenge.

The first phase in the Creo strategy was launched, with quite a bit of fanfare, in the Fall of 2010. The next phase was originally due to launch in the Fall of 2011. It’ll launch next month.

I can’t give PTC any grief about being a few months late in shipping, given the immensity of the task before them. Taking several very disparate and complex products and merging them into a family of interoperable apps is not easy. Truth is, CAD is hard. Developing a professional CAD system is about an order of magnitude harder than, for example, developing a product such as Microsoft Office.

It’s going to take some time for PTC to fully deliver on the Creo vision. No problem with that, if they really deliver what users need.

Creo 2.0

I’m not going to do a review of Creo 2.0, or even tell you in any detail about what’s new in it. What I will say is that it looks like PTC is making solid progress, and is delivering useful capabilities that will help their users to get their jobs done better.

In the pantheon of Creo products, Parametric (formerly known as Pro/E), and Elements/Direct (formerly known as CoCreate) are maturing nicely. Creo Direct—the new product that essentially merges Pro/E and CoCreate capabilities—is taking some time, if only because it’s a much bigger job. Users with a long history (so to speak) with CoCreate should look carefully, to see whether Creo Direct has reached their particular threshold of “good enough.”

The big news in Creo 2.0, beyond maturation, is PTC’s delivery on their AnyBOM strategy. They are shipping the Creo Options Modeler, which works with Windchill to support assemble-to-order processes in a way that PTC’s largest customers (e.g., Caterpillar) will certainly appreciate.

PTC will be talking a lot more about Creo 2.0 in the very near future. For now, what I can say is this: It looks good so far.

PTC www.ptc.com

 

 

 

PTC shipping mobile apps with 10.1 release of Windchill

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It’s a foregone conclusion that mobile computing is changing the way people work. If CAD and PLM vendors want to be relevant in the future, they need to address the mobile market.

PTC has been working on mobile apps for some time now, and is set to deliver its first generation with the 10.1 release of Windchill, in March.

In a phone call today, David Blair, VP of Product Management for PTC, provided some background on PTC’s mobile plans.

The company is delivering first on the iOS platform (iPAD and iPhone), with Android to follow.

Initial use cases will include:

  • Search for products, part numbers, and documents
  • Viewing of metadata, including attributes and lifecycle state
  • 3D viewing of parts and assemblies
  • Viewing of workflow tasks

Here are a couple of screen shots, as a preview:

 

PTC Windchill Mobile screenshot

PTC Windchill Mobile screenshot

There is more to come. These are some of the apps in development at PTC, and headed for the market this spring:

Mobile PLM for the engineer: Being able to log a problem report on a mobile device from the factory floor or in the field. Having access to your access PLM information on iPhone and iPad, such as accessing and approving tasks assigned to you, searching your development database, viewing product info such as meta data, and visualizing objects through a 3D viewer.

Mobile PLM for the administrator: Being able to check the server, and quickly see how everything is running without having to go into the office to fix any issues. In addition, the administrator can provide support for advanced modules, such as project data, advanced reports, or manufacturing process plans – again, without having to be in the office.

Mobile PLM for the service technician: Being able to access, update and implement relevant technical service information from the field to keep crews working.

Mobile Social Product Development: Being able to access all of your social product development communities from your mobile phone. Watch the team feed, see what people are talking about, how they are solving issues while you are in the waiting room at your doctor’s office.

CAD creation mobile sketching tools: Upgrade from back of the napkin drawings. Draw directly on your iPad and have the data automatically be stored in the PDS – or shared your social community.

 

Ice Dream: Towing an iceberg for fresh water

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“With the world’s water resources projected to diminish by one third in the next two decades, providing pure water to an ever- increasing world population is vital,” Mougin explained. To Mougin and Mauviel, one solution would be to transport icebergs to areas that lack fresh water for drinking and even cooling purposes. The scientific challenges are impressive — capturing a large iceberg that can weigh up to 7 million tons, protecting it from melting while transporting it across the ocean, securing and optimizing the trajectory with respect to meteorological and oceanographic conditions, and breaking up the iceberg to turn it into drinking water.

Dassault Systèmes worked with Mougin and his team to simulate the iceberg’s trajectory and its evolution by taking into account data such as variations in ocean temperatures, wind force and direction, sea currents, and boat drag force. They inserted this data into a 3D model of the iceberg to simulate what would happen all along the voyage.

The critical challenge presented to Dassault Systèmes’ engineers was to demonstrate, using virtual technology, the technical feasibility of displacing the iceberg in a controlled manner while reducing its melting. The project, managed by Cédric Simard, Interactive Strategy & Marketing Project Director at Dassault Systèmes, involved a number of steps:

  1. Model the iceberg with CATIA based on a cloud of points obtained by scanning a real iceberg with radar.
  2. Calculate and simulate the way the iceberg would melt using CATIA Systems and SIMULIA.
  3. Simulate the way the iceberg would melt if surrounded by a protective isothermal “skirt” imagined by Mougin to slow the melting process.
  4. Calculate how much fuel the boats would consume depending on the winds and currents encountered along the way

Various scenarios were simulated, such as number of boats needed, different departure dates and climate conditions, and the behavior of the boats and iceberg in the event of a storm or turbulence. In addition to enabling the team to visualize these scenarios, the simulation also allowed the scientists to test how to deploy the isothermal skirt around the iceberg.

Dassault Systemes

www.3ds.com

New software slated to change the workplace

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CAD software vendors have touted product usability for a long time. However, they haven’t really delivered on that promise until recently. There were a few software debuts in 2011 that changed that premise. True user usability could lead to a broader CAD audience and a bigger market share.

The product development team at PTC came up with the idea of a creating single program that does everything versus offering diverse programs with no connectedness. The strategy addresses its customer base and the trend toward solid modeling for the masses. Creo 1.0 is the result of that concept. The software currently has nine applications including Creo Parametric, Direct, Illustrate, Schematics, View MCAD, View ECAD, Sketch, and Layout.

The company focused on a group of traditional user problems and applied a core of technologies against them, specific roles having options for modeling modes with the click of an app. Simplifying a process that has plagued engineers and designers for decades makes using the software and being productive all the difference. The Creo GUI is much cleaner than the Pro/E GUI. According to those who have used the new product, the GUI strategy is most evident in Creo Parametric and Creo Direct. PTC leveraged the best features from CoCreate and made it easier to use. The company added features to Creo Parametric that will make Pro/E seem like ancient technology. Creo proves that a feature can live in a history-based and history-free environment keeping the parametric relation to features within each if needed.

Another 2011 debut was SolidWorks 2012 that also sports new features to help a more diverse audience. The software has improvements in assembly and drawing capabilities, built-in simulation, design costing, routing, image and animation creation, and product data management. Dassault Systemes says SolidWorks 2012 will help automate design functions, change product development processes, and extend support for collaboration and connectivity. This technology could change how the software is marketed and sold. The product helps users streamline design processes by removing traditional steps.

Autodesk’s AutoCAD 2012 and Design Suite 2012 series are available in a range of offerings including web and mobile applications. Thus more users have access to the technology and can stay connected to their work no matter where they are.  In addition, AutoCAD 2012 and Design Suite 201212 are directly connected to the free AutoCAD WS web and mobility application.

With CAD pretty much saturating the engineering and manufacturing arena, CAD vendors are realizing that pumping out a redressed version of what went out the door at the last launch is not going to work much longer. They have to offer tools that appeal to other audiences. We have seen that starting to happen in the retail, hobby, and jewelry industries where non-engineering types are using 3D programs to crank out new products.

PTC
www.ptc.com

Dassault Systemes
www.3ds.com

Autodesk
www.autodesk.com