PTC’s Windchill Essentials is Made for SMBs
One of the greatest barriers to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) adoption has been complexity. Not just complexity in how to best leverage the software for real business advantage, but also in how to address the challenging IT support aspects related to the platform, including how to effectively deploy and configure the software to work within a specific technology infrastructure.
While large enterprises have had their fair share of well-publicized bouts trying to tame the PLM beast, small and mid-sized companies (SMBs) have mostly shied away, reluctant to take on a technology many larger companies couldn’t swallow. At the same time, however, smaller manufacturers face a lot of the same product development and engineering challenges as their bigger brethren. Time-to-market pressures, increasingly dispersed and sometimes global engineering teams, and the need for more cost-effective and repeatable design processes have many SMBs hungry for a solution that can help them better coordinate product development strategies, optimize design cycles, and institute better planning. Continue reading
PTC’s SLM Vision Gets A Boost From Eurocopter Win
PTC’s vision for branching beyond its product development roots to a concept it’s been calling Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) got a recent boost with Eurocopter, one of its major customers, announcing plans to leverage PTC technology to make its service operations a more significant contributor to corporate profits. Continue reading
10,000 Year Clock Serves As A Crash Course In Materials Science
Choosing the optimal materials mix has long been a vexing challenge for engineers, particularly when trying to zero in on a composition that can withstand the wear and tear of a product’s full lifecycle. But what about when the plans for that product call for it to be housed inside a mountainous cavern with a lifespan of 10,000 years? Continue reading
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PTC Mathcad Express: Free for Life
For ordinary folks, there’s Excel; for engineers, there are technical calculation programs like MathWorks MATLAB or PTC Mathcad. The latter are designed specifically for handling equations, formulas, and for importing these numbers into design programs. And they’re usually not cheap.
But this week, PTC is releasing a limited version of its Mathcad as Mathcad Express, a free-for-life software (PTC’s words). You can download it at the product page here.(“It’s a soft-ish launch,” wrote Lindsey Christensen, PTC’s marketing program manager.) Continue reading
ANSYS Plans to Expand into Application Lifecycle
Last May, PTC acquired MKS, a company that specializes in software lifecycle management. Last week, ANSYS made a similar move with an announcement to acquire Esterel Technologies S. A., which develops software for embedded software simulation. The two purchases are more than six months apart, but both point to the same thing. Many of the functions once performed by mechanical components — knobs, dials, and gears — have been replaced with software-driven functions. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) has found its companion. It’s called Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). Continue reading
