Dora Smith's photos of the event on Flickr
CEO Tony Affuso spoke first. I met him briefly last night at the press reception. He is one of those refresing CEOs who do not act at all arrogant. He will actually walk over and shake your hand. He says a recovery is beginning in the market; in fact, the company is now hiring. Has had a 50% licence growth in Teamcenter over the last quarter. Healthy in engery, lifesciences, and especially ship building. Has added 4,000 new customers in the last month. The company also partners with over 40,000 educational institutions.
Big emphasis on systems engineering with companies such as Ford, which won the Automotive News PACE award. Manages in-vehicle software process. Collaborative product development is very important. NX supports and entire industry workflow, says Affuso. Teamcenter is built on a modern architecture with a lot of new technology and function.
New launch: High Definintion PLM -- solves how to capture terabytes of data and then find it.
David Spade, the next speaker, says complexity should be a catalyst for innovation. "IT and PLM are in the eye of the complexity story." Must integrate instrumentation, software, electronics, and mechanical technologies. Must design products with the right ecosystem of partners and experts. Need to shift to more dynamic processes for building and testing products." The emphasis now is on smart products. PLM must involve the whold lifecycle process, from portfolio planning to retirement and disposal.
More on High Definition PLM as it relates to NX 7. Many CAD users now need to work with multiple formats, says one presenter. In a CAD system, 80% of a designer's time is spent editing and creating geometry. Process should be efficient. Synchronous Technology for simple push-pull capabilities. History-based and push-pull are also woven toghether. Dimension driven changes let users add constraints when they need them.
So many attendees at the conference are trying to tweet about it that the Twitter server has crashed! Talk about the exponential growth of complexity!!
Speaker from Teradyne, which builds testing equipment says the company continued to invest in R&D during the 2009 downturn. Needed to improve engineering efficiency; decrease costs. Had to do a major infrastructure change while not disrupting the process. Developed a Teamcenter Enterprise product development framework. Can manage a 13 day cycle time with assemblies that have over 500 custom electromechanical parts each. Hard savings have been $1 million/ year.
Steve Bashada of Teamcenter spoke next. Big enterrpise customer such as JSF, which builds the F-35, are now moving to integrated architectures. The company uses Teamcenter Enterprise to manage the full product definition in one framework. All of the big Teamcenter customers will be going to version 8.3. Enterprise 9 in 2012 will be last development release; from then on, it will just be maintenance.
8.3 will include EDA integration enhancements such as a feature that lets users compare design revisions. Siemens has a two-way interface with Cadence.
Beginning to add enhancements in the Web client (for the future). Systems engineering requirements management will be completely included in v 9 (logical components are linked to physical components).