“If you look at the history of the marketplace, the focus has been on the design side of the equation, and it will continue to be important,” Todd noted. “If you design properly, we all know the math, you save a lot of money. But now as that mar- ket matures, our belief is the focus is moving into manufactur- ing and utilizing all the optimization that’s occurred in design.” The goal, he added, is to “improve processes and reduce manufacturing cycle times, not necessarily time to market, but manufacturing cycle times, which is a subset of the other, in order to increase capacity in areas like aerospace and wind design, for the fan blades used in large wind farms that are made out of composite materials.” Improving operations intelligence is key, Todd said, and
Dassault is making investments in this area with acquisitions such as ExaLead, a search firm, to combine its technologies with those of its Simulia simulation brand. “There’s a real inter- esting convergence. Why do companies want better analytics in general? If you can move into operational intelligence, you re- duce scrap, reduce rework, and improve operational intelligence,” he added, noting the company has four patents pending in the pattern-matching technol- ogy used in this area. He said the main interest of manufacturing process engi- neers, quality specialists and production managers is to reduce manufacturing cycle times, increase overall capacity and reduction of scrap and rework.
Going to the Cloud Some newer cloud-based initiatives,
like Autodesk Inc.’s (San Rafael, CA) PLM 360 system announced earlier this year, potentially could shake up the PLM market, offering substantially lower-cost alternatives to the more established PLM developers. Other lower-cost PLM sys- tems primarily are PDM-based systems that do not offer engineering elements, such as the cloud-based system from Arena Solutions (Foster City, CA). The cloud in manufacturing holds
much potential, notes Patrick Fetter- man, vice president, marketing and product management for Plex Systems
Cloud-based Autodesk PLM 360 solution offers low up-front costs and attractive monthly pricing models to users com- pared to traditional PLM implementations.
(Auburn Hills, MI), developer of the cloud-based Plex Online ERP solution. “For the first time, manufacturing is adopting a technology faster than other sectors,” Fetterman noted re- cently in an IMTS presentation on how cloud-based solutions support PLM and manufacturing execution.
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