PLANO, Tex. – Siemens PLM Software, a business unit of the Siemens Industry Automation Division and a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services, recently announced the latest enhancements added to NX software, the company’s integrated computer-aided design, manufacturing and engineering analysis (CAD/CAM/CAE) solution.
Presented at The World Exposition Shanghai China 2010 (Expo 2010), the latest enhancements to NX 7 include significant new functionality throughout all aspects of the software. In addition, NX, together with Teamcenter software, Siemens PLM Software’s digital lifecycle management system, are the first products to support Siemens PLM Software’s new High Definition PLM (HD-PLM) technology framework, unveiled in a separate announcement.
“Our new HD-PLM technology framework, delivers a visually intuitive environment in NX to enhance the decision making process throughout product development and create significant value for our customers and our industry,” said Joan Hirsch, vice president of Product Design Solutions, Siemens PLM Software. “The value of this release is further magnified not only by the strength of its many enhancements, but also for the balanced level of new functionality added throughout the software’s various product design, analysis, and part manufacturing modules, which can produce end user productivity gains of as much as 80 percent.”
High definition decision making in product development
With the launch of the high definition 3D (HD3D) environment announced last year and enhanced in the latest release of NX, Siemens PLM Software begins to execute on its vision to instill HD-PLM technology into all of its enterprise solutions. HD3D unites the powers of NX and Teamcenter under the HD-PLM technology framework to visually and intuitively deliver the information necessary to understand, collaborate, and make decisions in a globally distributed product development environment.
HD3D delivers on the four tenets of HD-PLM with a product development decision support and analytics solution that personalizes the user’s experience by placing them in the proper context, assists proactively with task accomplishment to help make collaborative decisions, clarifies the user’s experience by presenting information intuitively, and validates user decisions against established rationale. An efficient alternative to navigating and processing lists of attribute data and manually correlating them to 3D product models, HD3D enables the user to visually comprehend PLM data with interactive navigation, and to drill down to details as needed. Viewing a product’s 3D representation, users can easily get into the right context to instantly answer questions about project status, design changes, team responsibilities, issues, problems, cost, suppliers, and other attributes. Color-coding, on-screen tagging, and legends enable fast visual assessment and interpretation of product development issues and decision criteria.
HD3D also works with NX validation checking tools, providing direct visual interaction that accelerates the validation of product designs against requirements. Visually rich feedback allows the user to monitor critical functional requirements throughout development, supporting rapid decision making with a high level of confidence to ensure and maximize product quality.
“Siemens PLM Software has shifted up a gear with this release and is extending the HD-PLM concept with integration of HD3D across a wider spread of its product range,” said Al Dean, Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder, DEVELOP3D Magazine. “The ability to use NX and Teamcenter to visualize data often hidden inside a database in a graphically and contextually rich manner enables rapid assessment of a wide variety of product development issues and potential bottlenecks. That, in turn, allows everyone involved in the process to make informed decisions with a higher degree of confidence and much greater efficiency. This should result in a big productivity boost for their customers.”
