Technology Update
ENOVIA Corp. Publishes White Paper on Virtual Product Development Modeling
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and decision support solutions provider ENOVIA Corp., a Dassault Systèmes company announced today the availability of a new white paper identifying how Virtual Product Development Modeling (VPDM) can assist companies to lower the cost of the new product development.
The paper, titled “A New Paradigm for Digital Design,” studies how VPDM leverages the power of computers and integrated 3D development, analysis, simulation, and data management tools to develop products and processes without costly physical prototypes, and without capital investment in manufacturing equipment, tooling, and facilities.
In addition to VPDM, the white paper addresses how product lifecycle management solutions must provide both in-depth support for the product development process and enable communication and collaboration across the extended enterprise. The paper details how ENOVIA's PLM solutions help organizations leverage their intellectual assets to maximize their value in the marketplace.
This white paper is available in PDF format free-of-charge and can be downloaded at http://plm.3ds.com/38.0.html.
About ENOVIA Corp.
ENOVIA Corp. provides integrated solutions for product data and lifecycle management, collaboration, and decision support. ENOVIA® solutions enable companies to simulate the entire product lifecycle from initial concept to after-market support. ENOVIA transforms the customer’s product development organization into a source of competitive advantage with increased support for complex product design, and a practical Web environment to bring marketing, sales and customers earlier into the product development cycle. ENOVIA Corp. is a Dassault Systemes company. ENOVIA is integrated with Dassault Systemes’ PLM solutions (CATIA®, DELMIA®, and SMARTEAM®) and is sold and supported by IBM. For more information, visit http://www.enovia.com.
Design Changes During ‘Work in Progress’ Phase Cited by CAD Survey as Roadblock to Product Schedules
Responses from Engineers Underscore Need for More Sophisticated Tools
While tremendous advances in CAD software have helped engineers accelerate product development schedules, significant technical obstacles remain during the highly iterative “work in progress” phase. New and emerging 3D design tools are needed to help engineers and product managers more quickly and efficiently understand a design, make design changes, and communicate design changes across a globally distributed product development team.
These opinions were reflected in survey responses from CAD and design engineers attending National Manufacturing Week’s NDES Show where thousands of industry professionals gathered to meet with suppliers, view product demonstrations and have access to all of the latest products available. Conducted by ImpactXoft, the survey found that for many CAD engineers even moderate design changes are still taking a longer time than they should and that despite significant technology improvements over the past several years, 3D models remain very difficult to interpret.
Results highlights include (percentages are percent of respondents):
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52 percent stated it can still take weeks and months to make extensive changes to a design |
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72 percent had significant issues interpreting design changes |
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70 percent had significant issues incorporating suggested changes to their designs |
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42 percent said that overlapping design changes continue to hamper, and often delay, design efforts |
"The engineers we surveyed are clear on this point – the tremendous pressure on manufacturers to continue cutting development time and costs is creating a demand for more advanced yet user-friendly and intuitive tools that enable engineers to make design changes with the click of a button and then communicate those changes as simply as sending an email,” said Attilio Rimoldi, ImpactXoft’s co-founder, president and CEO. “Once these tools are accepted throughout the design industry, the speed at which products are developed will increase dramatically.”
CAD design tools that enable “order independence” – meaning that a user can create designs based on a behavior driven approach as opposed to the order dependant design tree model – exemplify the capabilities design engineers need to take product development to the next level of efficiency. Collaboration and communication problems are being addressed by new capabilities enabling design engineers to work in parallel on the same design and share and merge design changes with the simplicity of an email exchange.
For more detailed information about the survey, the survey results, and these emerging approaches for solving design problems for engineers, please visit
http://www.impactxoft.com/NDES2004/survey.asp.
About ImpactXoft
ImpactXoft is a private, venture-funded software company providing a suite of products that enable Simultaneous Product Development. The IX SPeeD Suite for collaborative 3D design delivers a new way to manage engineering design changes that fosters innovation, accelerates the product development cycle, and reduces design costs. It is based on two key technologies unique to ImpactXoft: IX Instant Participation enables real-time or on-demand parallel product development, while IX Functional Modeling enables a flexible, behavior-driven design approach. ImpactXoft has formed strategic partnerships with Dassault Systèmes and Toyota Caelum Inc. More information about ImpactXoft is available at www.impactxoft.com.
ImpactXoft, IX, IX SPeeD, IX Design, IX Functional Modeling, and Simultaneous Product Development are trademarks or registered trademarks of ImpactXoft. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.
Contacts
Why is it so Hard to Automate Conceptual Design?
Dr. Joel Orr, KollabNet
My Jewish Polish dad loved to tell stories of Hershele of Ostropol. One day Hershele went to visit relatives in the distant city of Minsk. He arrived tired and hungry, and was welcomed by his aunt and uncle. The aunt immediately filled a table with good things to eat, while the uncle asked all about the relatives.
“So, how is your mother, my sister?” asked the uncle.
“Dead,” replies Hershele, continuing to eat at a prodigious pace.
“Dead! Oy vey iz mir!” moaned the uncle. “That’s terrible! How is your father, the poor man?’
“Dead,” says Hershele, eating away.
“Givalt!” cries the aunt, moaning and rocking.
“Who is taking care of your brothers and sister, then?” cries the distraught uncle.
“They’re all dead,” says Hershel, continuing to eat, but slowing down some.
The aunt and uncle are still crying and moaning, when Hershele is finally full.
“What’s the matter?” asks Hershele.
“What’s the matter? What’s the matter? You tell us that your mother, your father, and all your brothers and sisters are dead, and you ask, ‘What’s the matter?’?”
“Oh, they’re all fine,” says Hershele. “It’s just that when I’m eating, everyone is dead.”
And that’s why the details of conceptual design are seldom captured: The creative right brain is dominant during design, like Hershele when he is eating. Asking the designer to record anything, to describe what he or she is doing while in the midst of designing, is like asking Hershele about his family while he is eating.
Consequently, when regulatory or other requirements arise for creating an audit trail to track the design process from the very first steps of requirements capture, compliance is rare. Instead, engineers create a record after the fact—which cannot possibly be accurate, except in the case of very simple designs.
Design is, in fact, a very messy process—so much so that some engineers are embarrassed by it. But why shouldn’t it be messy? Requirements come from varied, unreconciled sources. The designer is seldom given leisure to actually collate them all, and must generally begin to create a design before absorbing all available inputs.
More importantly, design—especially mechanical design—is non-deterministic: We do not have formulas for fashioning shapes and mechanisms out of requirements.
So the designer must go through an iterative process of trial and error, refining as she goes, until the design gets within shouting distance of the requirements, or time runs out.
The result is that the “how” of designing is poorly documented. It is in the head of an engineer who can do it, but can’t describe it very well. When that engineer leaves the company, if the knowledge has not been passed along to apprentices or colleagues, it leaves with him.
And yet, so much valuable research is done in the early stages of design. Choices and alternatives are explored and ultimately rejected for one reason or another; but not because the research was flawed. Perhaps cost, delivery time, or other factors entered in. The considerations that resulted in the research leading up to the rejected alternative might obtain on a later project, and if that research were accessible, it could save the later designer a great deal of time and effort.
Another aspect of early design is that the documents from which the design requirements are gleaned retain their authority for an indeterminate period—but have no connection to derivative documents. So when a marketing professional makes a change in a product specification after the design process has begun, there is no simple way for that change to be propagated into the design process, to inform the current stage. Or an early-phase document might mistakenly fall into the hands of a manufacturing engineer, and cause a wrong process to be designed.
There are no checks and balances in the design process to prevent this sort of thing.
And it’s not just a matter of preserving design knowledge and experience for posterity. The designer himself will forget what he did in a given project. If his boss asks him to take on a similar problem just a few months later, he is not likely to recall the steps he went through or the decisions he made, and will probably have to do much of it all over again.
So there is a clear need to capture design rationale, including rejected alternatives, throughout the early design process. Why was this bearing selected, rather than that one? Such a piece of information could prove crucial to a subsequent project; but there is no place to keep it.
In practical terms, the tenure of requirements is all too brief. They get converted to specifications and product features, and their origins are lost. So when manufacturing makes a few changes to the design, to accommodate the needs of production, they no longer have any way to know if in fact they have modified the design out of compliance with the original requirements.
All these issues have to do with project and design integrity and consistency. Today, these factors are simply not tested.
If a conceptual-design automation and knowledge-capture system is to succeed, it must have the following qualities:
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It must provide a way for the engineer to capture her own creative process, without requiring activities—such as typing—that would necessitate hopping between neocortical literalities. |
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It must create a “living” record, a symbolic simulation of the design and its process that both supports the “story of the design,” and guards its consistency. |
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It must not alter the fundamental design process of the engineer. |
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It must preserve a full audit trail of the design process, in a form that is searchable and accessible. |
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It must engage the engineer and be more pleasant to use than current manual tools. |
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While it is clear how such a system will benefit the organization, through knowledge capture and reuse, the user must also feel it is worth their while to use. |
The founders of KollabNet searched the market for such a system, and found nothing that satisfies these requirements. The system we have constructed does so.
Have we produced an accurate definition of the true needs of the market? Clearly, we think so; but “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” In the coming months, the rate of adoption of our software will give us our “report card.”
Visit our website: www.kollabnet.com
Custom PLM
PLM is being touted as one of the major enablers for creating mass customization of products. In this age of “commoditized” products, sold at Kmart at the lowest cost, product customization has become one of the key ways to add value in the customer’s view. As a result there has been a proliferation of assemble-to-order and design-and-build-to-order products brought to the market place facilitated by PLM systems. PLM can serve to create allowable configurations in an assemble-to-order environment and speed the modification of typical designs in a design-and-build-to-order environment. Still, few products benefit more than PLM from customization. Although CATIA V5 is a highly productive tool in its own right, when customized to meet the requirements of specific company processes, CATIA productivity can be increased by an order of magnitude. AppXL recognized this opportunity to provide additional power for CATIA V5 users and is developing a set of applications to work with CATIA V5 that make it very simple to customize a specific company process. The applications allow companies to leverage in-house software, licenses and expertise to extract extra performance out of CATIA V5. The first two applications developed by AppXL are AppXL Clipper and AppXL xNotes.
AppXL Clipper
AppXL’s Clipper addresses the need to have a simple way to integrate CATIA V5 with other Windows-based applications in engineering and manufacturing processes. It is not at all uncommon for CATIA V5 input data to be generated by an Excel spread sheet or some other Windows-based analysis program. Data for reports is commonly fed from CATIA V5 to Microsoft Word or from CATIA V5 to various downstream applications.
AppXL Clipper provides two-way integration for applications that adhere to MS programming standards. It uses the Microsoft clipboard to make the transfer of data as easy as cut and paste. The Clipper is architected so that AppXL can easily customize it for company-specific processes. This allows for integration and automation beyond the standard Clipper offering. A demo of AppXL Clipper can be downloaded from: http://appxl.com/CatClip/DemoIt.aspx
AppXL xNotes
AppXL xNotes is an application that helps to insure the accuracy and completeness of standard notes that are placed on a drawing or otherwise associated with a CATIA V5 model. It increases the productivity of the set of people who have to create standard notes in a company’s product design process. AppXL xNotes provides organization and automation for the standard notes process. It is very easy for designers and detailers to use.
At the heart of xNotes is a database that is populated with a company’s standard notes. The database is organized so entries for a common category (i.e. surface finish) are grouped together. A standard note is assembled from these entries. There are pull downs for fill-ins and associativity with features on a model or drawing. The composed note is then formatted and placed on the drawing, model, or associated document. A demo of xNotes can be downloaded from: http://www.appxl.com/xNotes/DemoIt.aspx
About AppXL
AppXL has been in operation since 2001, with the charter to increase the productivity of engineering automation tools. Information about AppXL products can be found at www.AppXL.com. Please call David Albert at 831-464-1627 regarding any questions about AppXL products.
IBM PLM Express Expands to Electronics Manufacturers for Improved Time to Market
Enables midsize electronics companies to speed product development and release, enhance their product innovation and improve collaboration.
IBM today announced an extension of its PLM Express offerings to address the key business challenges facing many small and medium-sized electronics manufacturers. This latest PLM Express offering includes bundled solutions based on CATIA V5, for collaborative, virtual product development and SMARTEAM, for collaborative lifecycle management from Dassault Systèmes that specifically target racks and enclosures, electronic components and electronic products that feature stylized packaging and plastic products.
Today’s small and medium-sized electronics manufacturers are challenged with fickle customers, product commoditization and intense global competition. While these dynamics become increasingly complex, customer needs require careful management as products become obsolete within shorter time frame. To solve this, PLM Express offers three packaged solutions focused on releasing products to market faster, including:
· Component design - a generative design configuration to shorten time-to-market for derivative products. The bundle will give designers the ability to create template-based designs, use product-morphing capabilities and develop rules-driven product compliance checking and workflow-driven component release processes. The easy-to-use interactive design rule assistance also facilitates design and helps ensure quality. Engineers can consolidate and simplify with a reduced number of non-standard components needed, while at the same time lowering manufacturing and maintenance costs.
· Styled packaging and plastic products - covers the full range of typical styling and plastic products processes, including the ability to create, control and modify free-form surfaces for plastic products, consumer goods and packaging. Users can speed-up design generation and reduce risks by applying reverse engineering, rapid prototyping and embedded user guide capabilities. Capabilities also include supply chain collaboration and data integration for increased project visualization.
· Racks and enclosures - optimized for electronic system assemblies, this PLM Express application bundle provides sheet metal design for manufacturing, cabling and wiring harness design and spatial management using digital mock-up for clash review and analysis. It also works with an integrated set of product data management tools for workflow, collaboration, design reuse and compliance checking.
The IBM PLM Express family consists of customizable solutions packages, including IBM WebSphere Application Server Express middleware for a secure and robust Web services delivery platform; and IBM hardware for enhanced graphics performance, secure storage of product designs and shared application access. Additional options include systems management tools, enhanced user support, application training and flexible low-rate financing. Priced as low as $14,240 in the U.S., the PLM Express for Electronics Solution is available immediately.
Christopher P. Sciacca
Strategic Communications, Manager
IBM Product Lifecycle Management
http://plm.3ds.com/38.0.html
http://www.enovia.com
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