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September 2008 |
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| What is affecting the way people use your software? A key trend affecting how people use software today is the need to know design feasibility earlier. This demands a faster turnaround time between design and simulation. Our software brings simulation inline with design so that two engineers can work on one project in parallel. Today more simulation happens during design. This shortens the time needed and ensures the design is right. We continue to provide easier-to-use simulation tools so that the design engineer can perform first-pass analyses ahead of the simulation specialist. The increasing importance of mechatronics means engineers must be able to integrate electrical and mechanical systems in one tool. Other trends include design for manufacturing feasibility, for green and for global collaboration. With today’s distributed design teams, the software must provide a global infrastructure to allow global collaboration. In addition, Integrating design to digital manufacturing for shop floor automation is becoming critical. How is this affecting the way you'll design the next generation of your software? We are providing tighter integration between CAD and CAE. Our latest release, NX 6, provides a suite of robust multi-disciplinary simulation solutions that enables simulation to be more pervasive throughout products’ lifecycle. With this comes the need to manage simulation, so we also provide tools to do this. With mechatronics, we provide tighter integration for design, analysis and manufacturing through a data management backbone. To design for green, we provide a tighter bill of materials integration with design, analysis and manufacturing. For digital manufacturing, we focus on eliminating the translation between the virtual world of CAD/CAM and the physical world of the factory. We ensure NX geometry is available for integration with automation operations on the shop floor. Do you see any any simple ways for engineers to improve the intelligence of their development processes? Integrating simulation early into the full design process is key. Engineers must now consider beyond mechanical and structural simulation to areas like green design. Reusing knowledge is another simple way to improve intelligence, NX Knowledge Fusion enables users to capture and reuse the knowledge of expert users. What’s holding your software’s ability back? Knowledge and application of the full capabilities of the software can be a hurdle. What are you doing to make the software more useful to engineers? NX 6 continues to improve user experience by providing users with greater flexibility through enhancements to its role-based user interface. Siemens PLM Software first defines the roles throughout engineering and then designs NX to fit those roles. This enables a role-based user interface that exposes users to just the capabilities they need. This dramatically improves usability. Also, NX 6 has a full screen mode for maximum graphics and customisable on-screen pop ups to speed up interaction. What is the next big step for your software? Our next big step is “Synchronous Technology”, a history-free, feature-based modeling technology. It can recognise current geometry conditions and localise dependencies in real time, allows synchronous technology to solve for model changes without the typical replay of the full construction history from the point of edit. Depending on model complexity and how far back in the history that edit occurs, users will see dramatic performance gains. A 100 times speed improvement could be a conservative estimate.” Synchronous Technology provides users with up to 100 times faster design experience than ever before. It accelerates innovation in four key areas: f ast idea capture , f ast design changes,: improved multi-CAD reuse and a n ew user experience. How do you see the software industry evolving in the next five years? We do see modularity of software and the drive to Service-oriented architecture (SOA) as key parts of the evolution. We also see continued role-based systems/applications for the automotive engineering community. SOA is a software architecture where functionality is grouped around business processes and packaged as interoperable services . There will also be increased web influence for increased collaboration with the supply chain, such as integrated social media functionality like wikis. The effect for the car industry is better design decisions enabled by a more usable, global design environment. |
Siemens PLM software is in use at around a third of OEMs with single BIW/Powertrain CAD systems in Europe. The split between tier one and two is quite even. The main uses include BIW, Powertrain Design, Simulation/CAE and Manufacturing/CAM. NX provides a niche application called Knowledge Fusion that enables knowledge automation. Automotive companies can use it to capture knowledge from their best and brightest engineers and drive that knowledge into the software so all engineers have the benefit of that expertise. LINKS Ansys: multi-physics analysis pays off. Read more...
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