PTC announced Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0, the next major release of its integrated 3D CAD/CAM/CAE software and a key component of the PTC Product Development System (PDS). Pro/ENGINEER, the world’s first parametric CAD solution, delivers new capabilities to help customers eliminate traditional design barriers to achieve faster, more efficient and more innovative product development. Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 is scheduled to be available during calendar Q4 FY2009.
“Global competition, environmental sustainability, and demographic change are the major factors affecting manufacturers today. These translate into multidisciplinary design, design for lifecycle, and social networking for innovation as top priorities for manufacturers to deliver winning products,” said Marc Halpern, research director at information technology research firm Gartner.
In today’s complex environment, product development teams often face a number of barriers that can impact productivity. These include the difficulty of making design changes, the length of time to productivity, dealing with heterogeneous CAD data, working with a multitude of disconnected point solutions, and identifying resources and leveraging collective knowledge when needed. Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 will offer new capabilities and over 330 enhancements that improve productivity, enrich the user experience and provide the freedom to design without barriers.
Highlights of the new release include:
- The ability to make design changes faster and easier. Real-time, dynamic editing and disruption-free design will help users overcome the traditional barriers to design modification.
- Accelerate productivity by up to 10X.
- User Experience enhancements such as graphical browsing, intuitive UI enhancements, streamlined tasks and faster performance improve design efficiency and reduce time-to-market from concept through production. Create simplified sub-assemblies, place forms and create molded parts up to 80% faster. You can also analyze weldments up to 10x faster and create facing toolpaths 5X faster.
- The Pro/ENGINEER Advanced Rendering Extension will now include high performance rendering technology from mental images. This new integration provides ease of use through quality material presets and real-world illumination models.
- Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 sets the standard for CAD interoperability. With increased native support for other CAD systems and non-geometric data exchange designers can address the time-consuming and error-prone challenges of working with CAD data from multiple systems.
- Leverage new, seamlessly integrated Pro/ENGINEER applications. Pro/ENGINEER continues to redefine how we work in today’s highly coupled, multi-disciplinary design environment. New with Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0, Pro/ENGINEER Spark Analysis Extension is the only commercially available product that helps analyze and optimize the electromechanical clearance and creepage properties of designs.
- Continued technology leadership and enhancements to industry leading modules such as digital rights management, ECAD-MCAD collaboration, and the newly introduced digital human modeling solution will enable users to save significant time and costs associated with wasteful physical prototyping, production rework and field failures.
- Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0, the first CAD solution enabled for social product development, will help users remove the communication barriers preventing them from finding the right people and resources at the right time. The seamless integration between Pro/ENGINEER and Windchill ProductPoint, which is built on Microsoft SharePoint social computing technologies, will help users find and reuse their design community’s collective knowledge and improve process productivity.
“Particularly during challenging economic times, customers demand and expect technology leaders like PTC to provide solutions that will help them to address barriers to productivity that can inhibit them from efficiently creating great products,” said Brian Shepherd, executive vice president, product development, PTC. “Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 demonstrates PTC’s ongoing emphasis on quality and commitment to deliver capabilities that enable our customers to develop winning products and bring them to market faster and at lower costs.”
Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 is scheduled to be available during calendar Q4 FY2009.
Commentary By Jeffrey Rowe, Editor
I just returned from the 20th annual PTC/USER conference in Orlando, Florida as a sponsored guest of PTC. I was impressed with a number of the presentations on the company’s new products and its evolving philosophy where social computing meets product development for what the company has termed Social Product Development. (See my new blog at www.MCADCafe.com for a discussion of PTC’s Social Product Development initiative).
We’ll cover what’s new with the various product lines (including Windchill, Mathcad, and Arbortext) over the next few weeks, but this time around I want to focus on what we learned about Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0. I actually learned quite a bit about what’s coming in general conference sessions, a brief hands-on workshop, and a chat with Mike Campbell, PTC’s senior vice president of product management of desktop products.
I had my first exposure to Pro/ENGINEER in 1994. On the one hand, I was impressed with what it could do, but on the other, I felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of options and the strict rules that you had to follow when designing anything. At that time, you were forced to adapt to the design tool, and not the other way around. I wondered if Pro/ENGINEER would ever become a truly usable design tool to the “common man.” Now known as Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire, it certainly has had its ups and downs over the years. Though far from perfect, it has come a long way in terms of approachability and usability.
The newest version of PTC's flagship design application, Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0, is a refreshing continuation of 4.0 Instead of again just piling on an additional zillion new features and capabilities that relatively few designers use, PTC (like some of its competitors) chose to improve Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 in other ways that matter to most customers, namely, software stability, better consistency across modeling functions, and promotion of more efficient workflows. Although these areas of enhancement may not exactly contribute to a so-called “blockbuster” release, they will definitely prove beneficial to most users in terms of ease of use and productivity. For Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0, probably the takeaway theme for the release is productivity gains.
Although there are, indeed, several new features and capabilities, with Wildfire 5.0 PTC continues to listen to its customers and has focused on the core product. The user interface, for example, continues to get more consistent and Windows-compliant than it's ever been across functions, making these tasks easier and more efficient to accomplish. Many of these tasks are admittedly routine, but tasks that are performed by the vast majority of users. Doing it this way, however, provides a higher return on investment for everybody - customers are more satisfied so vendors feel their development dollars are better spent. PTC says its R&D budget has actually increased 5% in the past year, even as new Pro/E license revenue dropped, and Windchill drove the company’s growth.
In the past one of the most daunting aspects of learning and using Pro/ENGINEER was its multiple layers of cascading menus. In addition, one of the biggest obstacles that confronts users new to a CAD product is, "Where do I begin?" These issues continue to be been addressed and resolved through Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire’s user interface, which continues to improve with each release. Users will notice that Pro/E Wildfire 5.0’s biggest UI change will be in the drawing/detailing environment. In the drawing UI, there is now a ribbon that has reorganized commands that promotes a context sensitive workflow. Campbell said the ribbon interface will definitely extend into other environments, such as sketching, etc. in future releases.
The new feature failure mode is interesting because with it the often-frustrating “resolve mode” is no longer an issue. It allows you to deal with failures as/when they occur or later. Failed features not regenerated, and neither are child of failed and topology children. Failed features are highlighted in the model tree and can be edited, redefined, suppressed, deleted, or you can ignore and continue modeling – addressing the feature failure later. Feature failure also works when dealing with assemblies, because if you choose to, it lets you ignore missing components on assembly retrieval.
A new dynamic feature edit is accessible via Pro/E’s RMB in the model tree or graphics window. With it you see real time feature updating and regeneration. You can also use it to modify sketch and feature dimensions by select sketch entities or drag handles. By using dynamic change and not manual iterations, you can tweak features for purposes of aesthetics or function.
Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 is the first release that really shows significant sharing of features and capabilities from CoCreate. This is only the beginning, so expect to see this trend continue going forward. Campbell said that the Wildfire and CoCreate development teams report to the same people, so there is cooperation and each product team is able to leverage features of both products. How this works exactly is still a mystery, but it seems to be working, at least for now.
As I said at the outset, Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 doesn’t appear to be a “blockbuster” release bloated with new features, capabilities, and bells and whistles. It does, however, seem to offer many things that will make users and their workflows more efficient. It's also more adaptable and this is important because even within an organization with design rules and methods, no two users are the same. Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 demonstrates that PTC is committed to releasing its products with a release strategy and schedule that should benefit its customers going forward.
In this regard, PTC is saying that Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 will be shipping in late July or early August. Campbell said that while that is a realistic and expected timeframe target, the software will be released when it fully meets the company’s quality criteria.
Once the software ships, we are hoping to take a close and detailed look at the new release and see how it stacks up with PTC’s claims, previous releases, and the competition.
The Week’s Top 5
At MCADCafé we track many things, including the stories that have attracted the most interest from our subscribers. Below are the five news items that were the most viewed during last week.
Volvo Group Selects PTC as Strategic Partner for Future PLM Solutions
PTC announced that Volvo Group, has, in a directional decision, selected PTC as a strategic partner for the Volvo Group PLM solution. “Our Windchill solution is a key strategic enabler for product development and manufacturing processes. By creating an environment that fosters internal, external and group-wide collaboration, PTC can help companies to drive competitive advantage,” said C. Richard Harrison, chairman and CEO, PTC. “We know that the selection of a single strategic partner for such an important PLM solution is not an easy decision. Volvo Group has performed a comprehensive and extensive selection process and benchmark of leading PLM vendors and solutions. We are very satisfied that PTC in the end came up with the most convincing solution that best serves Volvo Group’s business needs. This selection underscores PTC’s strength in the product development industry and we look forward to continuing a long-term strategic partnership with the Volvo Group,” said James Heppelmann, president and chief operating officer, PTC.
Aras Announces Latest Release of Advanced PLM Software Solution Suite
Aras announced download availability of the latest release of the Aras Innovator suite of PLM software solutions. The download with complete access for unlimited users is available at: http://aras.com/plm/001004. According to the company, with the new Aras release customers have more usable functionality from the initial installation than with PTC’s Windchill, Oracle’s Agile PLM, or any other PLM system on the market. New features and enhancements include:
- ECO / MCO online change workflows for fast & easy engineering and supply chain changes
- New Redline revision compare for BOMs, suppliers, documents, and more for easy, visual identification of changes
- Modular process planner for reuse of groups of manufacturing operations or workcells in Process Flow Definition, FMEAs, and inspection and test Control Plans
- Updated Web browser screens
- Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 [MOSS] standard integration
- Graphical Web services “builder” in Solution Studio for even easier integrations
- Single system, multi-language internationalization for global collaboration
Siemens PLM Software announced that Kunming Shipbuilding Equipment Co. (KSEC) selected Solid Edge and Teamcenter to upgrade its digital design and product data management solutions, respectively. KSEC, a major machinery and automated logistic systems manufacturer and exporter, expects end-to-end PLM solutions to add value to its business by automating the design, engineering and customization of its innovative products. KSEC also expects to reduce its product time to market cycle and enhance its competitive strength in today’s challenging economic conditions. KSEC’s quest for a PLM solution was driven by the company’s need to enhance efficiency while boosting its capability to design machinery. Solid Edge allows KSEC to migrate from 2D to a 3D design platform, and Teamcenter helps simplify and accelerate implementations, enhance productivity, streamline collaboration, and expand control of the entire product lifecycle process.
Ulysse Nardin Gains Time for Design With Autodesk Inventor Software
It used to take Ulysse Nardin, one of the world's premier makers of fine mechanical watches, four years to develop the complex insides of a new watch that can contain as many as 400 moving parts. According to the company, the process has been cut in half using Autodesk Inventor. Autodesk named Ulysse Nardin as its Inventor of the Month for May 2009 for bringing its innovative and artistic watches to market. Few products pack so much mechanical complexity into such a small area as fine watches. Working with a 3D model in Inventor, Ulysse Nardin designers can visualize how the gears and springs fit with other components as they design. This capability makes it much easier to identify and fix interferences early in the design process. Designers can also optimize the position of mechanical parts that integrate with external portions of the watch, such as the case or the watchband, which are initially drawn in 2D by a conceptual designer. To help refine its watch cases, Ulysse Nardin designers also use Autodesk Showcase to create accurate, photorealistic images of digital prototypes created in Inventor, enabling more efficient decision making. For example, design teams can visually explore a wide range of decorative and watchband options without having to produce a single physical prototype.
DS SolidWorks Education Edition 2009 Expands Access To Advanced CAD Functionality and Performance
Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks announced a new version of its SolidWorks Education Edition 3D CAD software that features a 65 percent performance boost and new resources that help educators use the software as an effective tool for teaching math, science, and technical concepts. SolidWorks Education Edition 2009 also streamlines licensing procedures to give learning institutions easy access to the software and supporting materials. A Web-based licensing system, the Student Access Module, enables schools to more easily acquire and manage large numbers of SolidWorks software licenses to meet their students’ needs. Once they have the software, new training and curriculum help educators teach academic subjects and engineering skills students need in the professional world. In addition to the performance boost, Education Edition 2009 includes 260 technical improvements. Among the most significant are:
- Support for Windows Vista 32 and 64-bit applications.
- The PhotoView 360 rendering tool, based on SolidWorks Intelligent Feature Technology (SWIFT), which lets students render a photorealistic scene while they’re working on it. Most software forces users to wait until scenes are complete.
- A Simulation Advisor for finding hidden flaws by guiding users through every stage of analysis.
- Simulation Sensors that alert users when parts and assemblies deviate from user-defined limits. Users set goals such as allowable stress, displacement, part weight, measurement, and interference, and the sensors react when users exceed the limits, providing a competitive advantage for FSAE, Formula Student, and robot teams.
This Week
Lead Story
PTC Targets Key Barriers to Productivity with Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0
Product and Company News
MCAD Industry View – A May 2009 Update
According to CIMdata Dassault Systèmes Expands PLM Leadership
Sanjel Corp. Slashes Development Time with SolidWorks 3D CAD and Simulation Software
PTC Pro/ENGINEER Helps Penske Racing Team Claim Victory at Indianapolis 500
Dysart Unified School District Receives In-Kind Software Grant from Siemens PLM Software
Keeping a Lock on Industrial Vault Design
PTC Closes the Loop Between Product Requirements and Design with Windchill RequirementsLink
Knovel Introduces Knovel Math for PTC Mathcad
Alioscopy Autostereoscopic (No-Glasses) 3D Displays Join Autodesk Gallery and Showrooms in San Francisco
Megayachts Designed Using ANSYS Software
Hexagon Metrology Launches PC-DMIS Reshaper
PTC Expands Product Analytics Strategy with Acquisition of Relex Software Corporation
Trace Software Becomes SolidWorks Solution Partner and Announces Release of elecworks
Objet Geometries Releases Software Enhancement for Pro/ENGINEER
Siemens PLM Software, Planview Sign OEM Partnership Agreement
ETRAGE and TWeatherford Announce Plot Service for Windchill Integration with TransMagic
ESI Group and École Polytechnique de Montréal Collaborate to Assist Further Development of PAM-RTM
Social Computing Meets Product Development
3DVIA Empowers Students to Design and Share 3D Models as Part of the Mobi3 Competition Program
Tokai Riki Mfg. Streamlines Design Process with CATIA
NKK Switches Expands 3D CAD Library for Toggle Switches and Pushbuttons
Endeca Announces the Endeca Manufacturing Suite to Improve Quality and Cut Costs Across the Value Chain
PTC Expands Technology Leadership with Enhanced Product Development System Capabilities
NovaQuest Signs V6 Reseller Agreement with Dassault Systèmes
Delcam adds 30,000th customer
Right Hemisphere Unveils Deep Exploration 6 Client Software to Enable the Visual Enterprise
Howard University Receives In-Kind Software Grant Valued at $150 Million from Siemens PLM Software
STAR-CCM+ Simulation Drives Energy Efficient Radiator Design
Lattice Technology Releases Parts of its New Lean Manufacturing Book Free of Charge.
SolidCAM and ModuleWorks Celebrate Partnership
Dassault Systèmes and EuropaCorp Announce Strategic Partnership
Beijing Institute of Technology Advances Green Vehicle Design with PTC Pro/ENGINEER
German Research Institute Fraunhofer IAO to Improve Processes and Workflow with Dassault Systèmes’ DELMIA
Kubotek KeyCreator Version 8.5 Delivers Translation and Performance Enhancements
The Healey Werks builds classic cars better than new, with the help of VX CAD/CAM
Exigen Services Acquires Chinese Software Outsourcer
Schott Systeme Streamlines Technical Illustration With Pictures by PC
PTC Gold Loyalty Program Passes Savings on to Maintenance Customers
DesignLink Enables Electronic Design Engineers to Find and Specify Parts Directly
Anark Corporation Announces OpenFlight Support
UK Wind Energy Firm quietrevolution Deploys Dassault Systèmes PLM Solutions
Patents Issued for iSEEK Corporation CADSEEK Search Engine Technology
CHEMKIN-CFD Now Available at No Cost to ANSYS FLUENT Users
Sescoi helps compress the development time for the T.25 City Car
Lattice Technology Releases XVL Studio Version 8.1.
IronCAD Signs New Reseller in the United Kingdom
Delcam PartMaker and TAJMAC-ZPS join forces
WorkNC 6-Axis Machining Tech Days at Kegelmann
Solido Signs Business Partnership Agreement With Inneo Solutions of Germany
Factory and Process Plant Layout and Visualization with Pro/ENGINEER® Models
Concepts NREC Wins Best Technical Paper Award from the ASME and International Gas Turbine Institute
Utsunomiya University Chooses Dassault Systèmes’CATIA for Post-graduate Engineering Course
Delcam to launch new releases to boost productivity and quality
Avoid Failures by Doing Drop Test Simulation of Empty and Filled Containers
Related MCAD News
MFGWatch Survey Takes Pulse of North American Sourcing Community
Visteon Corporation Files for Chapter 11 Reorganization in U.S.
ANSYS Software Enhances Design to Keep Flood Waters at Bay
HP Helps Small and Midsize Businesses Save Time and Money
Sun Microsystems Announces Special Stockholder Meeting Date
Petrofac Adopts Intergraph SmartPlant Enterprise Solutions Globally
COADE Publishes Company’s First Corporate Overview in Conjunction With Company’s 25th Anniversary
Machinists Seek Second Stimulus for Manufacturing Sector
N-trig Teams Up With ISVs to Highlight New Multi-Touch Application Development
AMD Triples the Performance of ATI Embedded Graphics Chips
Dassault Systèmes Helps Bring First Ever World Expo Online to Life
HP Calls on Communities for Environmental Change
IBM Helps Clients Manage Information Throughout Its Lifecycle
Thales Aerospace Division Selects GNAT Pro for Airbus A350 XWB
Nanometrics Receives Multi-System Atlas OCD Order from Leading Memory Manufacturer
HP Enables New Field of Flexible Electronics with Reflective Display Technology
Mentor Graphics Delivers PADS 9.0 Flow Release Featuring the World’s Most Advanced Design Technologies
Adura Systems Adopts Freescale’s FlexRay Automotive Microcontroller Technology
IBM Helps Clients Reduce Costs Associated with Paper Consumption
Corporate Moves
Dr. Edward M. Bennett of Mechanical Solutions, Inc. to Receive Gopalakrishnan-Flowserve Pump Technology Award
The IntelliCAD Technology Consortium Announces New Leadership
Verisurf Software, Inc. Appoints David Olson Director of Sales and Marketing
Industry Events
Qualis Corporation’s, Roger Herdy, to Keynote at PLM Road Map 2009
NEi Software To Show Advanced Simulation Tools for Pro/E Users at PTC World Event Conference 2009
PTC to Host Investor Day in Orlando, FL On Monday, June 8, 2009
Ansoft to Introduce High-Performance Computing Capability for HFSS at International Microwave Symposium
Autodesk to Webcast Its Annual Meeting of Stockholders
Concepts NREC Hosts Annual CAE User Conference
Autodesk Imagine Tour Visits San Jose
GibbsCAM Highlighted at Matsuura/Nakamura-Tome Open House in Italy
ANSYS To Showcase Recent Advances in Turbomachinery Simulation at Turbomachinery Conference
ModernTech Mechanical Announces “Advanced Topics in 3D” Event
ESPRIT 2009 at 20th Design Engineering & Manufacturing Solutions Expo (DMS), Tokyo, Japan, June 24-26
Delcam to present inspection developments at NPE/MoldMaking Expo
46th Design Automation Conference to Offer Nine Workshops
PTC to Speak at the UBS Global Tech and Services Conference
Stratasys to Present at the William Blair & Company Annual Growth Stock Conference
Delcam to show latest machining and inspection developments in Paris
Advanced machining technology at ‘WorkNC Lab2’ seminars
Concepts NREC Team to Deliver Three Papers and Exhibit at ASME Turbo Expo 2009
Delcam Reseller SEACAM Reports Interest at FEIMAFE
Corporate Newsletters
PTC Express – May 2009
MecSoft Quarterly - May 27, 2009
IMFlash Newsletter [InnovMetric Software] - June 2009
Delcam Newsletter - June 2009 - Issue 43c