PLM software advances announced by Dassault, Siemens, Autodesk, Oracle

Vendors of 'digital manufacturing' tools announce new or substantially upgraded product and process design software.

By Control Engineering Staff June 24, 2009

June could be “digital manufacturing” month with new or substantially upgraded product lifecycle management (PLM) software tools announced by Dassault Systemes, Siemens PLM Software, Autodesk, and Oracle. Machine builders, manufacturing engineers, product designers and others are increasingly realizing the benefits of enterprise-wide integration of product and manufacturing process design data, and these advances extend functionality further into the organization and improve productivity at many levels. Pricing and packaging changes are also making these tools more cost-effective for small- and mid-level companies. Here’s a summary of the announcements, with more detail below and elsewhere:

 

PLM, Please Take 3 Giant Steps Forward Blog posting by Jim Brown, president and founder of Tech-Clarity, an independent research and consulting firm that “specializes in exposing the true business value of software technology and services.”

– Dassault Systemes (DS) launched V6R2010, including 42 new V6 products supporting business processes in all industries, and V6 PLM Express, tailored for mid-market businesses and small teams within large organizations.
– Siemens PLM Software Teamcenter 8 and Tecnomatix 9 advances deliver increased individual, application and IT productivity, as well as planning productivity improvements at the enterprise level.
– Oracle Agile 9.3 is a new enterprise PLM providing advanced risk analysis, and an enterprise PLM backbone that integrates other applications.
– Autodesk announced that its history-free modeling technology, Inventor Fusion, is available as a technology preview on Autodesk Labs.
Dassault Systemes V6 R2010: 42 new products and PLM Express for the mid-market

Odile Desforges, EVP engineering and quality for Renault, comments: “With the objective to transform our engineering processes worldwide, we needed to replace multiple existing solutions with a single, integrated and globally deployable one. We also wanted to concentrate on collaborative engineering for improved efficiency. After about one year of testing, we chose the full V6 portfolio because its integrated PLM environment perfectly responded to our requirements in terms of real-time collaboration and online-enabled design.” Desforges says Renault will deploy Dassault Systemes’ V6 solutions worldwide for the development of future engines and cars from mid-2010. He likes the “scalability and openness of the V6 platform, its out-of-the box configurations and its easy-to-use intuitive V6 interface.”
In recent months Dassault Systemes’ V6 collaborative platform has been adopted in other industries as well, including apparel, consumer goods, and life sciences industries, at energy and construction companies. According to a Dassault spokesman, “V6R2010 opens up key PLM 2.0 values to the mid-market, including real-time seamless collaboration, online-enabled design-anywhere functionality, and one, open scalable platform, in a pre-packaged, ready-to-use environment engineered for rapid deployment.”
V6 Release 2010 functions apply to all PLM tools in the DS portfolio: Catia, for designing the virtual product; SolidWorks, for 3D mechanical design; Delmia, for virtual production; Simulia for virtual testing; Enovia for global collaborative lifecycle management; and 3Dvia for online 3D lifelike experiences. The advances promise to deliver the benefits of PLM to communities of expert and casual users. For example, Catia Live Shape introduces a direct 3D modeling paradigm that allows casual users to quickly create design concepts in a lifelike environment and easily modify existing designs, including those from other CAD solutions. Simulia V6 DesignSight Structure makes advanced non linear finite element analysis technology available to non-experts.
See also:
Free SolidWorks 3D CAD software, training part of ‘Engineering Stimulus Package’
Dassault Systemes Solidworks: Sanjel Corp. Slashes Development Time with SolidWorks 3D CAD and Simulation Software
Siemens PLM Software launches Teamcenter 8, Tecnomatix 9
Siemens PLM Software launched the latest versions of its Teamcenter PLM and Tecnomatix digital manufacturing software. Improvements in each product suite increase individual producitivy and support an engineer’s need to better plan for product and process changes.

For example, the Tecnomatix Part Manufacturing Planner (based on the Teamcenter platform), enables manufacturing engineers, NC programmers, tool designers, and managers to work together to define manufacturing process plans. The process plan specifies the sequence of operations for manufacturing the part, including links to all necessary data and instructions (a roughing setup, for example, could include links to the work piece part file, posted output from NX CAM, tool list, and work instructions). By keeping the plan and related data linked together, you are assured that the right people use the right data at the time it’s needed.
Teamcenter 8 delivers:
– Individual productivity by providing each user with an intuitive way to easily access product information and collaborate from anywhere in the world, inside the tools and processes they use every day without additional software or training.
– Application productivity with an expanding suite of end-to-end PLM applications targeting the product lifecycle, including new applications for Content and Document Management with advanced Microsoft Office 2007 integration, along with Formula, Package and Brand Management.
– New industry solutions for aerospace & defense, consumer packaged goods (CPG), and medical devices along with hundreds of updates in other areas.
-obal enterprises, delivering a lower cost of PLM ownership.
Tecnomatix 9 delivers:
– Improved planning productivity with integrated planning solutions that supply instant access to the latest product data while supporting capture, standardization and re-use of qualified manufacturing best practices.
– Tools to validate planning results and automate time-consuming planning tasks more efficiently. As a result, Tecnomatix can significantly improve manufacturing planning processes while enabling users to maintain the highest level of planning quality despite shorter development cycles.
– Drivers of manufacturing productivity, including optimization and commissioning of robots and automation equipment, manual workplace configuration to achieve output and safety objectives, efficient placement of factory equipment and material flow optimization.
“We are constantly trying to squeeze greater levels efficiency from our manufacturing planning process and Tecnomatix has played a key role in that effort,” said Alexander Schmeh, managing director EBZ SysTec GmbH. “Several of the new features being delivered in Tecnomatix 9 will go a long way to helping us meet our planning productivity improvement objectives.”
See also:

3D Process Simulation Delivers

Siemens PLM adopts S1000D to tackle sharing of technical information

Oracle Agile PLM helps users mitigate risk

Oracle’s Agile PLM 9.3 represents the latest milestone for Oracle’s “Applications Unlimited” program, company says, and equips customers to drive profitable innovations, mitigate risk, lower development and product costs and improve productivity across the entire product lifecycle.
Enhancements and innovations include:
– Product risk management, supplier risk analysis, part risk analysis, product quality risk analysis, and product design volatility analysis functions.
– Analytics enhancements, such as Enterprise PLM Backbone, that allow companies to integrate existing engineering and enterprise systems.
– SOA Enterprise PLM Platform with modularized Web services, event management and extensible scripting for all PLM components including CAD objects.
– Integrated Product Master Data Management to manage data mappings, and improve data quality and data governance across the heterogeneous systems integrated to the Enterprise PLM Backbone.
– User productivity tools leveraging a Web 2.0 user interface. Lab tests of Agile PLM 9.3 using real product data from a large global customer showed a 70% reduction in clicks and improvements to user productivity, according to the company.
– Additional enhancements to processes across all modules, including Product Collaboration, Engineering Collaboration, Product Cost Management, Product Governance and Compliance, Product Quality and Project Portfolio Management.
Autodesk Inventor Fusion modeling tool preview ships
According to Autodesk, the free download, available June 25, 2009, is the first step in delivering technology that unites the power and control of parametric, history-based modeling with the speed and ease of use of direct, history-free modeling. Robert “Buzz” Kross, senior vice president for the Manufacturing Industry Group at Autodesk, said, “Our manufacturing customers have told us that direct modeling is opening up new opportunities to accelerate product development. However, they’ve also told us that they don’t see the need for the power and control of history-based parametric modeling going away. We’re developing Inventor Fusion technology as part of a larger effort to combine the best of both disciplines to further improve the product design process.”
Get the download, see videos of the technology, and learn more about Inventor Fusion .
See also:
Autodesk Inventor Fusion will take modeling to the next level

– Edited by Mark T. Hoske and Renee Robbins
Control Engineering News Desk