DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

A bright start as today’s presentations got underway

Today saw PTC wheel out a few of the big guns from its customer base as sportswear giant Adidas presented the well received keynote.

Elsewhere in the cavernous Rosen Shingle Creek conference centre DEVELOP3D got a couple of chances for exclusive interviews with the incredible multi-million dollar design challenge of the America’s Cup winning sailboat team BMW Oracle, and at the other scale of things, how a small 7-man design bureau Teknovtion are producing consumer electrics.

The latter came at the unholy time of interrupting breakfast, but in order to find out just how the previous day’s PLM attributes of Product Point were actually benefitting small to medium enterprises I reluctantly put down my scrambled egg quesadillas to meet Teknovation’s president Kelly Bryant.

An all round PTC success story, last year he showed up to the User event to get some more information on the Product Point system and 12 months on is utilising it fully amongst its small team. But even at this small scale it gave the impression that organising what everyone was doing on a higher level than just shared folders on a network drive was much more productive (saving roughly 10 hours a week in locating part folders) and efficient (no more duplicate folders).

The Adidas keynote was a PLM story that managed to keep everyone interested for the duration despite drifting into the intricacies of the product plan. Having sports to fall back on always helps, I suppose, when trying to keep your powerpoint presentation entertaining.

The speaker, CIO Emeritus Peter Burrows, gave an in depth look at a company worth more than $10 billion each year, and how a strong PLM system was key to its bringing new products to market, to the extent of making sure they had the right team names for the back of its World Cup jerseys, to bringing a new bum-toning trainer to market in 18 months, or being able to find the Pro/Engineer files for the component parts of the latest TaylorMade R9 SuperTri driver.

Having kept Pro/E relatively quiet for the entire weekend, and with all the CAD talk being based around the hush hush Project Lightning, it was somewhat refreshing for us to meet structual engineer Thiha Win from the BMW Oracle Americas Cup team, the man credited with designing “Winny’s System”: the ability to adjust the colossal wing sail at the centre of the 90 foot long Trimaran’s speed; a structure bigger than an Airbus A380’s wing.

As you’d expect, money was no object for what is not only the world’s oldest active sporting trophy in sport, but it is one of the most legally complicated and it’s ‘challenge’ system of ruling meant that boat specifications, plus the time and location of the race, were under wraps till the last minute, meaning that Thiha and the rest of the team were designing almost blind for one of the toughest challenges in sport.

Having found that their 90’ x 90’ Trimaran was going to be too slow they set about designing the wing sail as their ‘turbo boost’, and in the end became the first challengers to win a ‘Deed of Gift’ race in the trophy’s history. Stay tuned for more on the BMW Oracle team’s achievements later this month.

As we sailed off into the sunset it’s a fair reflection to say that PTC were using this year’s event to show its strengthened position in the world of PLM, and that other than a updated CoCreate release and the whisperings of Project Lightning it will be not until October that we hear of any further CAD developments from the new CEO. 

Jim Heppelmann probably won’t be getting a Christmas card from Dassault this year

It’s been a long day here in the humid climate of Florida, but the constant chill of air-conditioning has kept the majority of visitors indoors and at the presentations on the first day.

The big speeches were made early on, with the keynote showing a rather unemotional leadership changeover from Dick Harrison to Jim Heppelmann with nothing more than a handshake and a quick ‘exit stage right’ for the former CEO.

Heppelmann was quick to launch into a taster of what he was storing up for later, the new project from PTC of ‘Project Lightning’. Describing the current CAD market as a ‘mature industry’, he added that it’s become “less exciting”. Project Lightning, he later added in a meeting with the media, would be PTC’s “offensive on the CAD market”, although how it would plan out was still unsure.

Rumours were abound that it would see a merger of Pro/Engineer and Co-Create, while others were adamant that it was still in its design stages and would be a long way off a prototype version, but just in time for the scheduled October 28 launch that will outline PTC’s CAD plan for the next 20 years.

Keen to promote the PLM side of business, Windchill and the Microsoft SharePoint based Product Point were both at the centre of attention, although apart from the addition of several new big name clients, very little seemed to have changed since DEVELOP3D spoke to them in February at the Media Analyst day.

Back then we described it as PTC taking off the gloves in the PLM market, although the heaviest blows were today fired at Dassault Systemes. The broadside from Heppelmann was aimed directly at the V6 platform. “I think their future’s not so promising as their past has been. We look at V6 - I think it’s V5 plus one,” he said, adding that it lacked ‘innovation’.

A few other little things stood out, like a brief look at Windchill version 10: 27 months in the making and with a much cleaner look than its predecessor. Collaborative design “inside the firewall” looked like a social collaborative tool that could actually work, like a Facebook for engineers, micro blogging was encouraged, image posting for solving design problems/stealing someone else’s’ solutions, to the extent that you can even ‘like’ a colleague’s post.

Hopefully day two will bring more design-based software revelations.

Last night I went along to the very exclusive and plush Halcyon Gallery in London’s Mayfair - not to look at the art I may add (although it was lovely) but that was where British Airways chose to hold its VIP press reception and launch its new first class cabin. With a glass of Taittinger champagne in hand (the same champagne that first class passengers get to enjoy onboard) guests and journalists were invited to have a nose around the new cabin, which had been installed in its entirety as it would be in the aircraft.

Willie Walsh, BA’s CEO, then took to the stage looking a great deal more relaxed than what he has in the press recently and introduced the key design features of the cabin, which include a fully flat bed that is 60 per cent wider at the shoulders than the previous version, a 15-inch TV screen with each suite offering a USB charging point and RCA jack, personal electronic blinds, noise-cancelling headsets and personal wardrobe complete with shoe stowage. “When the team showed me the mock-up of this cabin for the first time I can say that I was genuinely impressed and I am a difficult person to impress,” smiled Walsh. “I think it’s a beautiful design.”

However, this wasn’t a cheap endeavour and was a rather substantial investment on the part of BA. “It’s a £100 million pound investment demonstrating yet again not just our commitment to investing in our products and in our service but our confidence in our products and service that we offer,” said Walsh. “It builds on a rich heritage in British Airways - I think it can best be described as understated British luxury and there are no gimmicks, you won’t find those at BA. It has really surpassed our expectations and we believe that it will be yet another great winner of British Airways.”

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Now that David Cameron is officially in the hot seat after we were all hung out to dry (mind the pun) whilst the conservative and liberal democrat parties were negotiating the ins and outs of our new parliament, it remains to be seen whether he will take onboard any of the recommendations laid out in the ‘Ingenious Britain’ report.

The conservative party commissioned Sir James Dyson last October to produce a report setting out proposals to make Britain the leading high tech exporter in Europe. For Dyson, who published his report in March, action couldn’t come soon enough: “Now, more than at any time over the past twenty years, I sense there is a real opportunity to set a new vision for our economy. To do this, a new government must take immediate action to put science and engineering at the centre of its thinking - in business, industry, education and, crucially, in public culture.”

Dyson realises, however, that there are no magic bullets but he has set out five key challenges that the Conservative government must tackle if Britain is to generate and export more technology:

• Culture: Developing high esteem for science and engineering
• Education: Getting young people excited about science and engineering
• Expoliting knowledge: Collaboration, not competition, between universities, companies and not-for-profits
• Financing high tech start-ups: Turning good ideas into world beating products
• Supporting high tech companies: Creating the right conditions for R&D investment.

He sums this up by saying: “We need more entrepreneurs. We need more innovators. We need more scientists, engineers and designers who can turn ideas into working products. We need to be better at supporting the ecosystems that transfer new ideas from universities and which incubate new firms. We need an education system that equips young people and germinates the seeds of industrial ambition in them. And we need government to support innovating firms, especially smaller ones, both through the tax system and the power that comes from being Britain’s single largest customer.”

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Robert McNeel and Associates has just launched iRhino 3D,  a cool $3.99 app on the Apple App store which allows Rhino models to be loaded up on Apple’s touch-screen products, the iPad, iTouch and iPhone.

The product supports Rhino 3DM files from v1 to 5. The software displays surfaces and meshes, while at the moment curves, text and dimensions are omitted.

Once loaded from a web server, iTunes or Google docs, they can be quickly rotated, also with zoom and pan functions. It even supports 3D, so long as you have a handy 3D pair of glasses. It’s possible to markup,  annotate and email. For the iPad, files can be opened from email

Models need to be shaded in Rhino before being saved. Currently file size is limited to 50Mb or 1 million polygons.

I will be trying this out later today!