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Yesterday evening, I spent an hour with Blake Courter, one of the co-founders of SpaceClaim. It was supposed to be a pre-briefing on their upcoming release of SpaceClaim 2010, but the conversation centered mostly around SpaceClaim the company. Blake showed me some of the new stuff in SpaceClaim 2010 but instead of listing them here I will simply point you to a concise review by Al Dean at the DEVELOP3D blog.

Apart from the stuff listed by Al, Blake also showed me a couple of major enhancements to the SpaceClaim API which developers like me will definitely find interesting. Just like how developers can create custom objects in AutoCAD, we can now create custom objects in SpaceClaim as well. These custom objects will reside in a SpaceClaim document and act like native objects. Not only that, developers will now be able to create custom tools as well. I mean I will now be able to write an add-in that adds a new tool to SpaceClaim which works just like the Pull tool but twists the geometry as I pull it. Such a tool may not be very useful but I think you get my point.

Here is a screen shot I took of SpaceClaim 2010 running on Blake’s computer. You can ignore the last six or seven ribbon tabs. That’s just  Blake fooling around writing add-ins using the SpaceClaim API. One of the tabs is called CADville. If you were reading this blog on April Fool’s day you may remember what that stands for. I am told that nothing Blake codes finds it way into the product. I am not sure whether that is a good or a bad thing. I guess one way to find out would be if Blake could write a SpaceClaim add-in that adds the Pull & Twist tool I mentioned above.

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Anyways, I would like to talk a little more about SpaceClaim the company. According to Blake, SpaceClaim has stopped behaving like a startup company. I am not exactly sure what that means. But he mentioned that they are now closing deals worth million of dollars. He mentioned a deal worth 3500 licenses but refused to let me go public with the name of the customer.

Saying that SpaceClaim has had a rocky start is probably putting it too mildly. They started out by doing every possible thing the wrong way. I wrote about that part of the company’s life extensively on this blog years ago. Here I am referring to the company’s business model, not its product which I believe is simply outstanding.

As it stands, today the company has coined a term called “Bid Modeling” which Blake admits was not part of the original plan. Bid Modeling is basically what a sales engineer does to get business for his company. For example, he may need to quickly mock up a part or an assembly to show a prospective client or do a quick analysis on the customers geometry to verify it before he can place his bid. Bid Modeling could also involve creating stunning photorealistic renderings to better illustrate the deliverables.

Blake tells me that he noticed his customers use SpaceClaim for this kind of work but never thought too much of it. But he stopped to think when he saw customer after customer starting using SpaceClaim for what he now calls Bid Modeling. He says, “Bid Modeling has really started to take off now.” He was quick to add, “This is not really a departure from our initial product strategy. Rather it is a refinement of the strategy.”

Blake claims that SpaceClaim has begun to serve some really unique markets. He says, “CAD as an engineering tool is interesting. But that is what the other CAD vendors are all doing. We have found a sweet spot with CAD as a sales tool to win more business. For a while I refused to accept Bid Modeling as a something different. I thought that it was part of Concept Modeling, which was something that we started out doing. But now its quite clear from what our customers are doing that Bid Modeling is something that we really need to pay close attention to, which is precisely what we are doing.”

And speaking of customers, here are a few of the big names. I guess SpaceClaim’s competitors will be more interested in knowing which names are not there on this list as opposed to the ones that are.

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And for those who decided to skip reading Al’s post, here is a slide showing in a nutshell what’s new in SpaceClaim 2010.

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<< Part 4

Solid Edge ST3 boasts of more than 4 times faster graphics performance. We were shown this video of a large assembly. I forget how many triangles are involved. Here is a video I took using my digital camera.

I will end this series with the following slide. Make of it what you will.

Disclosure: Siemens PLM paid for my flight and hotel accommodation in Pune.

<< Part 3

At the present time Siemens has not revealed a great deal in terms of enhancements to Part and Assembly design. So I will skip those and move to enhancement in the Draft environment. You can now generate a fully exploded indented parts list in the same order as the assembly.

Solid Edge ST3 comes with full Unicode support. This means that you can now mix and match languages in a single drawing. For example, you can have English, Arabic and Russian text in various parts of the drawing or even in the same note. This will be very useful for multinational companies that need to share data across different countries and in different languages.

The Solid Edge Free 2D drafting product now comes with a new Smart Measure feature which is based on the Smart Dimension feature of Solid Edge 3D. It does lengths, angles, dimensions, radii and more. Note that these are are just measurements, not dimensions that can be used to drive 3D geometry.

Someone in the audience asked if Siemens would let users drive 3D geometry from the 2D draft environment. The answer was, “No, we will never do it“. Why? Siemens believes that people with a 2D drawing should not be able to push and pull entities around so as to modify the underlying 3D geometry. I decided to rub the presenter, Abis Zaidi, on the wrong side and asked, “But doesn’t Synchronous Technology allow the same thing? I mean anyone who knows how to use a mouse can push and pull faces around and mess up the model, right?” Abis scratched his head a little and replied that it was not the same thing. I decided not to pursue.

Callouts now support tolerances, limits and dual dimensioning.

Printing has been improved as well. You can now print multiple drawings as once. As can be seen in the dialog box below, you can select individual sheets from different drawings that you wish to print and set up a single print job. This will be a huge time saver when a large number of drawings need to be printed.

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You can now configure more than one drawing to be printed on a single sheet. This will be helpful for large format plotters.

Part 5 >>

Someone once said to me that Solid Edge was the best MCAD product that you never knew. That someone was a senior executive of a brand rival to Solid Edge. Hardcore Solid Edge users have been bitching on this blog and other places for years about the lack of marketing attention that Solid Edge has been getting. One reader even asked me if I had something against Siemens since he felt I was always writing about SolidWorks or Inventor. I have even heard Siemens employees say that Solid Edge should be receiving more press than it currently does.

I find this odd because Siemens marketing itself has neglected (if I may use that word) Solid Edge for years. Even now with the new branding, Solid Edge is hidden in something abstract called Velocity Series, which by Siemen’s definition is “a comprehensive family of modular, yet integrated solutions addressing the Product Lifecycle (PLM) in the mid-market.” On the other hand, NX has its own product line. I understand that the capabilities of NX far exceed those of Solid Edge. But this is like sending the message that Solid Edge by itself cannot do much and it needs these other things in the Velocity Series portfolio to make it really useful. Nothing is further from the truth.

My point is that Solid Edge is up against brands like SolidWorks and Inventor, whose owners have left no stones unturned to let these products have their own individuality. I have absolutely nothing against creating a portfolio like Velocity series. But from a pure marketing perspective, I would expect Siemens marketing to push Solid Edge individually a little harder as well.

Imagine someone looking to move from a 2D CAD system or a low range MCAD system to a mid-range MCAD product. What does he see? He sees SolidWorks and Inventor being touted by their respective owners as individual solutions and then he sees something called Velocity Series which has PLM written all over it. Sure he may evaluate each one and test them on their merits. Or he may not. But from a purely marketing perspective, I don’t think branding Solid Edge as part of a bundle helps its image.

What’s even more ironic is that some of the important cutting edge stuff is happening in Solid Edge and not in NX. I mean Synchronous Technology was added to Solid Edge first and then bits of it were taken over to NX. I cannot disclose much about ST3 but the story continues along the same lines. I don’t expect Siemens to make Solid Edge their flag ship product. But at least I would expect them is to portray it as a strong pillar that does not need any support. Note that all this is purely about marketing and not about the capabilities of  Solid Edge.

While attending the Siemens PLM Connection in Pune I brought up this issue with a number of Siemens executives. Every single one of them was of the opinion that “more needs to be done“. I understand that cannibalization of NX is an important factor that cannot be ignored. In fact, I believe that is the only reason why Solid Edge has been given stepchild treatment for all this time. But that’s where the senior leadership should get into the act and take a look at the bigger picture. Even if seats of NX get cannibalized today, tomorrow it will be much easier to convert them from Solid Edge to NX as opposed to converting them from SolidWorks or Inventor to NX.

I am told that certain things have changed at Siemens and that I should expect to see Solid Edge to be featured more prominently. Common sense dictates that if you wanted to showcase a car you would put it in the spotlight and maybe have a couple of glamorous girls pose around it. You most definitely would not put it in a garage along with all the tools and equipment that you need to get the most out of the car and then put the spotlight on the garage building.

<< Part 2

In this part lets look at some of the enhancements in Sheet Metal. Solid Edge ST3 comes with a new Etch feature which can be used to burn part numbers into sheet metal parts on laser cutting machines, among other things. You can etch text and even sketch elements to sheet metal faces. This can be done even in bent state. When flattened the etch is transformed along with the face on which the etch feature lay.

The etch feature can be exported along with the rest of the geometry to a DXF file to enable production engraving.

Solid Edge ST3 comes with four new closed corner types: U-Shaped, V-Shaped, Square and Mitered. Here is a screen shot showing a V-shaped closed corner. Notice the 15 degrees angle.

In case you are wondering, the new etch and closed corner features are available in the synchronous as well as the traditional modeling environment.

Another enhancement is the ability to add tabs to flattened models. These tabs do not appear in the folded state. This is particularly useful for manufacturing and transportation purposes.

You can now add PMI to flattened models and save them to the JT format.

Part 4 >>

<< Part 1

In this part of the series I would like to mention some of the enhancements to Solid Edge with regard to its user interface. For starters, the ribbon interface can now be customized. You can now add or remove elements of the ribbon and show or hide them as well. You can set the button sizes and change their text or remove the text altogether. You can save customizations as themes, distribute them to others as XML files and carry them forward to new versions. Here is a screen shot of the Customize dialog box.

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The third tab called Ribbon is a new one. So is the fourth tab is called Radial Menu which is something new in ST3. Using the radial menu you can put up to 16 of your most commonly used commands at your fingertips. Just like the ribbon the radial menu is completely customizable and can be distributed externally using an XML file.

This image shows the fourth tab of the Customize dialog box.

Another UI enhancement is a transparent display for the PathFinder. This frees up valuable screen real estate.

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Live Rules now gets a heads up display. The visual feedback makes it much easier get an idea of which faces are being automatically selected for you. This was one of the things I mentioned in my review of ST when it first came out. Its good to know that it has finally been addressed.

Part 3 >>

Today I received an email from Spatial’s CEO Keith Mountain that he was retiring and that Jean-Marc Guillard from Dassault Systemes was taking over. I first met Keith at COFES 2010 at Scottsdale, Arizona, in April this year and then again at the Spatial European Forum in Frankfurt, Germany in June. Keith is a great guy. I had the opportunity to spend a great deal of time with him at the European Forum. I remember him mentioning his retirement plans and his wish to visit India among other places. I really hope he takes up my offer of visiting Goa sooner than later.

During one of the sessions at the European Forum I took him aside so that I could talk to him is private and get to know more about him. I had converted most of the conversation from audio to text over the past few weeks but didn’t really finish it. Today when I received the email from him, I took it as a sign that I simply had to finish it.

A word of caution. We spoke for a good hour and a half. Even after trimming a great deal out, this post is still going to be a very long one. In summary Keith talks about his education, serving in Vietnam, working at various companies, starting his consultancy business before joining Spatial, his experiences with working with the “dreaded” Mike Payne and leading Spatial while working closely with sister SolidWorks and parent Dassault Systemes. He gets quite frank at times and if you manage to read all of it, you may get a sense of how things work at the corporate level. So here goes.

Deelip: Tell me your story.

Keith: Well, I was an army brat. My father was in the army and we moved around a lot. I feel that was an important part of my life. I lived in Frankfurt for two years when I was a small boy and then all over the United States. I guess this thing of constantly moving from one thing or place to another reflects perfectly in the high tech world where you work with a company, you enjoy the technology, but you don’t necessarily think of it as a life long thing. I guess that part embedded itself in me. It didn’t hurt that for the most part of my education was in the Boston area which was a hi-tech area where people that I was surrounded by at that time had dreams of what they were going to do. They were all about starting new things, creating new technologies. That was a time when integrated circuits and computers were just becoming a reality. So there was this air of excitement everywhere. It was countered by the fact that there was a war going on and…

Deelip: Which war was this?

Keith: Vietnam. Probably due to my family background it was important for me to be in the army. So I served in Vietnam for a year.

Deelip: What was your position in Vietnam?

Keith: I was a platoon leader, a maintenance platoon. We did our best to fix things. Not sure if our record was all that great (laughs) but I was there in a good time. My job was in a fairly remote area. I was mostly out of harm’s way. We would occasionally get into trouble. But it was a great experience.

Actually, I had a bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from North Eastern in downtown Boston and then went for a Masters at the University of Rhode Island. After that I served in Vietnam. When I came back my first real job was Computervision. I was part of the development team. It was really a small company at that time. I’ll tell you honestly, I was a terrible developer. My attention span wasn’t really good enough. So as soon as I could I moved into something more customer related. That’s when I decided that whatever be my background in the academic world, I really wanted to be on the marketing side. Computervision was a great place to work. I really had a good time there. My last position at Computervision was the regional manager for the north east region.

Deelip: So since then you have always been on the marketing side.

Keith: I guess so.

Deelip: So in those days people made and sold hardware as well as the software that ran on it. Not like now where hardware vendors make the hardware and software vendors made the software.

Keith: Yes, it was a wholly integrated system. Worked some of the time (laughs). But it was exciting, kind of leading edge and dangerous. A lot of people stuck their necks out to buy that kind of equipment. They understood the risks that they were personally taking on behalf of their organization.

Deelip: I guess that kind of situation will come again now with the Cloud. People in organizations may have to stick their necks out and take risks.

Keith: This is always there. I’ll tell you every job I have every had I have had to make those kind of decisions. This is going to sound a bit too much, but the fact is that the reason your job is there and the reason you like your job is because of the people you get the chance to work with. If you are committed to your customers or care about what they are doing then I guess every time you push technology you are in effect putting yourself out there. And also you are putting other people out there with you.

Anyways, after Computervision I moved to Prime Computer. That’s where I met Mike Payne. A lot of stories there (laughs). But we both worked hard to convince Prime, which was basically a computer company, to grow in the CAD business. Mike and I, as well as many others, managed to convince Prime that MEDUSA was a good investment. We also got them involved in partnerships with other CAD suppliers. I was in the business development side and Mike was in the development side. We didn’t actually know each other till we found out that we kind of had the same vision for where Prime might go. So Prime was good. There are a lot of reasons why I decided that I didn’t want to stay at Prime. But Prime was a well driven, well structured, well process-driven company and I learned a lot there.

Deelip: So how far down did Prime actually get into CAD?

Keith: We were distributing MEDUSA but we didn’t own it. We were distributing displays among a lot of things. We were basically packaging a Prime to look a lot like the Computervision stuff, even though Prime didn’t own most of that technology. At that point it became clear to me that CAD was going to end up being a software business because you can integrate things so easily. I left before any of that happened. But shortly after I left they ended up getting involved with Computervision. I think they bought Computervision, changed the name to Prime and changed it back to Computervision or something like that.

Deelip: So where did you head next?

Keith: I decided to get involved in doing something new and got joined a startup called Autographix. The founders had already started developing the software and were looking for a marketing person. Their business was really something like  prelude to PowerPoint. It was a business presentation graphics business based on creating 35 mm slides with a very low cost client. The Apple computer first and then a small PC was used as a client that transmitted information to centralized server that created slides and prints. Basically it was a service business, reminiscent to the Cloud actually (laughs). It was a great business and we did really well. It was venture funded and got to be reasonably profitable in three years. Then we ended up selling part of that company to Agfa, the film company. So then I worked with Agfa for a while as part of the transaction. Boy this is going on, isn’t it?

Deelip: No problem. You keep talking. I don’t need to squeeze this down to a predetermined number of words. Some things are best left as they are.

Keith: So after Agfa I started my own business called Mountain Associates which was a consulting business and was aimed at international companies build or analyze their distribution. I should have called it Plan B Consulting because most of the companies I worked with companies who were having trouble with their US operations or in some cases US companies having trouble with their international operations. I did that for twelve years. For me it was an age of putting kids through college and taking a month off in the summer, which as you know is impossible to do when you are working at a company. It was a really good twelve years which ended when I met Mike Payne at a bar in Concord, MA. He was the CEO of Spatial and was looking for a marketing person. So I joined Spatial and worked under Linda Lokay.

Deelip: When you joined Spatial was the company already bought by Dassault Systemes?

Keith: Yes, it was. And Dassault Systemes was investing very heavily into it as well. When I joined there were some severe problems with the quality of our components, especially the translators and Mike made it his goal to fix that problem.

Deelip: I hear that Mike was a horrible task master. Is that true?

Keith: Yes, he is. You didn’t want to make a foolish mistake and have Mike find it out. You could make the foolish mistake and tell Mike (laughs) and you would end up having a “discussion” with Mike. But the result that discussion would very different from one resulting from Mike finding out the foolish mistake himself. Mike has high expectation of people that work for him.

Anyways, Mike decided to retire in 2005 and I became the CEO of Spatial. He make me COO for a while before I became CEO. When I took over, I was handed what I would call a very favorable situation. We had a strong product line as a result of Mike’s work and the people that made it happen. I had a good distribution system. Also I found myself emotionally attached to this business. Its a great business. You get to leverage in a way that affects so many people.

Deelip: So from 2005 onwards what did you do differently? What did you change? Or did you like the course the ship was taking and sailed straight?

Keith: (Laughs) No, I guess this goes back to my military background. Whenever you take control of a group of people the first thing you want to do it make it known to everybody that you are in charge. So we started something that we started calling the Magnificent Seven projects. There were seven projects that we wanted to get done in six months and everybody in the company was on one of the teams. These projects dealt with some of the administrative problems that we faced, the way we worked with customers, restructuring service and support, etc. The important thing about the projects were not the projects themselves. But people knew I was there, that we had problems that we knew we had to solve in six months. At the end of the six months I would say that we probably didn’t get straight A’s on all the seven projects, but the point was that we all knew that some of those problems were still there.

The second thing I did was started segmenting our customers into groups and analyzing them in that light. Looking at customers individually, especially when they are very diverse is not very helpful. Another thing I realized about the components business is that if you just develop components in reaction to your customer’s demands you are never going to be ready for their next product. I believe in the components business you need to be looking out two to three years and your customers can’t always be the best judge of what that means. So our CAD on the Cloud stuff that you saw this week was a symptom of that kind of thought process.

So basically I thought that the company needed to take a market view of what it was doing and what it was going to be.

Deelip: So in all this time did Dassault Systemes let you run the company independently? What’s the relationship like between Spatial and your parent company?

Keith: When Mike was the CEO we had a lot of technical discussions with Dassault Systemes and some joint projects as well. When I came in… I guess I’ll put it bluntly, I felt that we had a few of those projects that weren’t helping the company financially. I also felt that Dassault Systemes was treating them as research projects and not as development projects and they had other projects that were better staffed and which were already predetermined to be the solutions that they would use. So I looked at each of those, we had meetings. At the end of it all I felt that Spatial would be better off, at least temporarily, as being separate.

Deelip: So in effect you are saying that Dassault Systemes was trying to outsource R&D to Spatial.

Keith: I wouldn’t say outsource. There were some projects linked to modeling, visualization and interoperability that they felt Spatial could add value to. It wasn’t like they said, “We’ll give you one million dollars to do this“. It was more like a team effort. But honestly, at that time I felt that it wasn’t good for Spatial. I guess this speaks more about me that anyone else. You see, to really feel that you are accomplishing something you need to feel like you control it, that you have set your own expectations and goals and those kind of fit within the team. If you lose something like that, like say if you feel like you don’t have an expectation of yourself or if your goal isn’t consistent with the team, its a problem and it really makes it tough to go to work. You know, work becomes work. And I’m not just talking about me here. The whole company felt like that. We needed that individuality. And here is the good part. Dassault said to me, “Hey, just run the company profitably.” And we did just that. You know, the thing about Spatial is that the middle management and director level is just terrific. You could replace me in two minutes. But not these guys.

Anyways, this is not to say that we stayed completely away from Dassault Systemes in all this time. We worked with the Abacus and Simulia guys, We did projects for SolidWorks and worked with the interoperability team from Dassault Systemes.

Deelip: So I guess you got yourself a long leash.

Keith: Yes, you can say that. We gained confidence. I think Dassault gained confidence in us. I’d like to believe that none of this Cloud stuff that we showed would have happened of we were not left along to stand on our own feet. Come on, a two billion dollar company relying on a 20 million dollar company for something that they consider pretty important.

Deelip: Yeah, for Dassault the Cloud is a game changer.

Keith: Sure, you know when I heard what happened at SolidWorks World 2010 I said, “Hey Dassault has bought into this game changing. This is really a significant…”

Deelip: Whoa! Hold on a second. You mean to say that you didn’t know anything about SolidWorks on the Cloud?

Keith: No, I didn’t know anything about it. I read it like everybody else. You know, Dassault doesn’t call us much. Up until now at least. Sometimes I feel that Colarado is some outpost in the middle of nowhere (laughs). But to be fair, we have been running this company independently. So there has not been much to talk about anyways.

Deelip: So what’s the relationship like between Spatial and SolidWorks? I mean, you guys are actually reverse engineering their proprietary file formats and enabling their competitors to read the them.

Keith: Yeah, I know. I guess the thing that people question most is how come we can read and write CATIA V4 ad V5 formats when SolidWorks cannot?

Deelip: Sure, I license the CATIA V4 and V5 libraries from you and create add-ins for SolidWorks. And to make bad matters worse, they license Parasolid. This is like one big mess.

Keith: (Laughs) Yes, it is. The very fact that we have been running independently means that I really don’t have to worry about those kind of things. SolidWorks is our customer on projects that we have worked with them, just like any other customer. Its not like we share strategy together. Jeff Ray is on the board of directors of Spatial. But keep in mind that the only discussions that every take place in the board are financial. We don’t talk about our strategy.

Deelip: OK, so did SolidWorks know anything about Spatial working with Dassault Systemes on the Cloud. Or was this announcement a shock to Jeff Ray. I am trying to get a sense of how you three companies operate.

Keith: No, this will not come as a shock to Jeff Ray.

Deelip: Just wondering. So you don’t think that this Cloud technology that you are developing is some R&D project of Dassault Systemes, like how you thought of some of the projects that Spatial was working on earlier when you took over as CEO?

Keith: No, not at all. Because this is our vision as well.

Deelip: Do you believe that geometry is a solved problem?

Keith: No way. Every time a manufacturing operation is invented, it puts new pressures on the geometry that drives it. Every time you add another axis on your robot it makes the geometry work harder. Every time you go from fiber glass to composites, what does that mean in terms of the manufacturing process and how they are going to be captured in the geometry. When I listen to the mathematicians at Spatial tell me something, frankly, after about two minutes most of it goes over my head. But what I do understand is that they have problems that they are looking to solve. I’m pretty sure mathematicians have a very safe profession.

Deelip: It was really nice talking to you, Keith.

Keith: Nice talking to you as well.

Attendees of the Siemens PLM Connection 2010 event in Pune yesterday were given a sneak preview of Solid Edge ST3 which is due to be released in October. There was some confusion over whether I could write about some of the information that was shown. To me if something is shown to the public in a public forum and nobody is made to sign or agree to an NDA, the information is public. Nevertheless, some Siemens executives were not sure. So I decided to contact Siemens HQ in the US to get it straight from the horses mouth. The information that I am going to disclose in this series has been cleared for public consumption.

However, there is something that I learned about Solid Edge ST3 (through other sources) which I think Siemens would not like to be published at the present time. So I will not do so. But I will say that there is something absolutely fantastic about Solid Edge ST3 and I think at least one CAD vendor will not be too happy after reading the “What’s New” document accompanying Solid Edge ST3.

Please note that the new features mentioned in this series is merely a small subset of the newly added or fixed in the upcoming version. Siemens claims that they “satisfied over 2000 customer requests” in Solid Edge ST3. Here is what the break up looks like.

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And while I am at it I would like to show a slide explaining Synchronous Technology. This is by far the best slide on the technology that I have ever seen.

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Part 2 >>

I am in Pune and just attended the Siemens PLM Connection today. I attended as press, not as a Siemens PLM Solution Partner. I learned a lot of stuff about the company, its products and its customers. I will need some time to synthesize all this information which I hope to do over the next few days.

The Siemens simulation solutions were highlighted a great deal in a number of presentations today. As I watched and listened I began thinking about simulation from a higher level. It dawned on me that the Siemens PLM simulation solutions like Nastran, Femap, etc, are actually not solving users’ problems. The same goes for the simulation solutions from every other CAD and analysis vendor out there today.

Before you think that I’ve lost it, I need to explain myself a little more here. When I say that today’s simulation solutions do not solve users problems I am referring to the fact that these solutions merely report the problem and quantify it, but leave the fixing to be done by the user. For example, take a FEA analysis on a part. A user sets up loads, defines boundary conditions, assigns material properties, etc. and then tells the simulation software to do its thing. The thing that the simulation software actually does is it that it tells the user whether the part will fail or not, where and how it will fail and gives him a host of other data which the user is left to study and decide what to do next. The software does not automatically tweak the geometry of the model for the user and reanalyze for failure and continue to do so till a fail safe design has been reached.

What I am trying to say is that the simulation software merely reports the symptoms of a disease but does not cure it. You still need an experienced analyst to decide which parts of the geometry of the part need to be changed and then start the analysis process over again till a fail safe design is reached. My point here is the the real problem of a user is not to determine where and how a part will fail. His real problem is to come up with a fail safe part, which is something that today’s Simulation software do not do. They merely aid the user in arriving at a fail safe part.

I am actually talking about part optimization here. Imagine a situation wherein you design a part, run an FEA analysis on it and the software actually goes ahead and adds ribs in places where it feels they are required for the part not to fail. The end result of such an operation will be changed geometry and not just a bunch of stress and strain values, factor of safety numbers or a picture showing a part in different colors. Similarly, the software could automatically weaken certain parts of the model where it can so that you save on material and/or manufacturing cost. For example, it could remove ribs or reduce their quantity and/or size.

I understand that analysis takes a lot of time and making it into an iterative process will only take it longer. But I am looking at this with the future in mind. What do you think? Do you think engineers in the future will continue to work like how they work today. If you do FEA analysis do you stop at the point where a part becomes fail safe or do you tweak the geometry where you can to see if you can arrive at a better and more efficient design. Do you think computers will be fast enough and software will be smart enough to start with an initial design from a user and take it forward from there on? Is this already possible to an extent? I’d love to know what you think.

The CAD software industry seems to going nuts. With the release of DraftSight, Dassault Systemes has announced its entry into the 2D market and now Chinese AutoCAD clone developer ZWSoft is going to announce its entry into 3D market. Today I was alerted to a page on the ZWSoft web site dedicated to its Partner Conference for 2010 to be held on September 25-28 in Guangzhou, China. Apparently, at the conference there will be a “First Showing of ZW3D – ZWSOFT’s All-In-One 3D Solution“.

A while ago I got wind of this 3D solution from an external source and asked ZWSoft whether they wanted to divulge any more information about their proposed 3D offering. At that time they declined to say anything more. But now it looks like they are getting ready to go public.