Continuing its quest to make Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Computer-Aided Design (CAD) more digestible to smaller manufacturers, Autodesk Inc. (San Raphael, CA) has completely overhauled its 3-D design and PLM software porfolio, touting new usability features and improved tools for communicating with users beyond the engineering world.
The updated lineup, available immediately, is all about helping smaller companies add 3-D design at their own pace while leveraging design data and promoting reuse throughout their organizations and manufacturing processes. Another critical element of the upgrade is to present smaller manufacturers with a practical and approachable way to implement PLM.
"We're building out a complete solution to solve all aspects of the process problems our customers are having," said Andrew Anagnost, Autodesk's senior director of product management in an interview with Managing Automation. "With the upgrade, we now manage the release process between engineering and manufacturing. We provide a scalable path that's moved from managing data in the engineering organization to managing business processes with manufacturing teams."
Headlining the rollout is Inventor 10, also available in a Professional version, which has more specialized design functionality. Both versions of Inventor 10 showcase capabilities around functional design, a new product development concept that lets engineers design products based on how they function (using elements like speed, power, and material properties) rather than creating designs from the viewpoint of modeling and CAD geometry.
The upgrade also features Inventor Studio, a module that enables photorealistic rendering and animation. Other design tools in the series, AutoCAD Mechanical and AutoCAD Electrical, are now available with a variety of new workflow, integration, and sophisticated design capabilities.
On the PLM side, Autodesk released Version 4.0 of Autodesk Vault, its data management solution integrated into all of its design tools. The new release makes sharing design data easier by automatically creating Design Web Format (DWF) files for each file checked into the system and with integration with Microsoft Office. The latter lets users access files stored in Autodesk Vault directly from Microsoft Office, a feature targeted at spreading design data to non-engineering team members.
A variety of enhancements have also been added to Autodesk's Productstream program for managing bills of materials (BOMs) and doing automated engineering change orders (ECOs); Autodesk Streamline, an online project collaboration service; and Autodesk DWF, its file format for sharing design data electronically.
Autodesk's move to broaden its product line beyond CAD to PLM should resonate with its legions of devoted design users, analysts said. Yet they believe there are still questions about whether Autodesk's data-management capabilities will prove to be as robust as some higher-end PLM offerings.
Nevertheless, for small and mid-size manufacturers, many already users of AutoCAD and Inventor, Autodesk's strategy of providing a full suite of practical tools will be compelling. "If they can get you into that sports car that you wanted for a lot less than you thought you could get it, that's a pretty sound strategy," says Tim Hickey, an analyst at Daratech Inc., a market research firm in Cambridge, Mass.