DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

I picked up on this news through Franco’s Novedge Pulse news aggragation thing-a-me-bob, but it made for interesting reading so I thought I’d share it. PTC just announced (although its not dated) details that Microsoft has moved up to the Pro/Engineer Wildfire 4.0 release – while at first you think, “hmmmm,” you soon remember that Microsoft do a pretty bang on job of producing their own hardware using an in house design team (and with some consultancies – anyone else got one of those terrible Philipe Starck mice?).

And the very short details provides some interesting insight into the design process and how they compress development. According to the brief details, the challenge Microsoft faced was “initiating rapid change in a worldwide development process. Microsoft needed to improve a design process limited by 6+ weeks of surfacing, 2 weeks of shelling, and a substantial restriction on last-second changes.”

To solve this, the team upgraded to Wildfire 4.0 (from a mix of 2 and 3) so they could take advantage of the surfacing improvements. Going further, this satisfies Microsoft’s desire “for a CAD solution that handles Class-A surfacing to engineering detailing in a rapid change environment.” Using the new version, the team also revised its design process, which now retains “4 weeks for both surfacing and shelling and very few appreciable restrictions on last-second changes, delivering higher quality surfaces on a shorter timeline.”

The final tidbit is that a key driver for the move was the new Direct Surface Edit (DSE) functionality, which allows “users to manipulate existing surfaces, including regular surfacing, style, solids, and even imports. It also creates new surface with revised geometry (except in style super-feature case).” Many industry pundits tend to write off Pro/E these days for some reason. I think this shows that while its not the easiest, fresh looking system, once you dig into it, its got some incredibly powerful tools – which is why people hang on to it for dear life, particularly in sectors such as high-tech and consumer electronics.