In a bid to boost revenues from its data management software, Autodesk Inc. later this year will introduce a new series of turnkey products that will incorporate workflows designed for specific vertical manufacturing market segments.
The planned new data management products and Inventor features were revealed at a recent Manufacturing Summit hosted by Autodesk and attended by Managing Automation.
The new data management applications will essentially consist of repackaged workflows and other functionality currently available in other Autodesk data management products such as ProductStream, which helps manufacturers manage data-centric processes such as engineering change orders, revision management, and bill-of-material management. But ProductStream can be complex to deploy, often requiring consulting support. As a result, ProductStream deployments and revenue "have taken longer than expected" to realize, said Bob Merlo, Autodesk's vice president for data management.
The new, as-yet-unnamed, industry-specific data management products will be designed to be more easily deployed. The new packages will include pre-defined workflows designed for specific industries, Merlo says. Autodesk is planning versions for automotive, medical devices, high tech, and industrial machinery manufacturing verticals. The industrial machinery vertical version will likely be launched first, by the end of the year, Merlo says.
The data management applications will be designed to be easily implemented by manufacturers that have licensed between 25 and 50 seats of Autodesk's design software, Merlo says.
Separately, Autodesk officials say the company has been working on enhancements to its 3D Inventor product that will allow the tool to work natively with design files created by Autodesk's AutoCAD 2D products. Currently, says Inventor Product Line Manager Amy Bunszel, Inventor can work with AutoCAD DWG files, but only after the DWG files have gone through a translation process that sometimes creates errors.
The planned Inventor enhancements, Bunszel says, will not require a translation process. Moreover, she says, they will allow revisions on DWG files made by Inventor to be automatically accessed by AutoCAD users.
Not all AutoCAD functionality will be supported by Inventor when working with DWG files, however. AutoCAD's system for creating detailed annotations, for example, won't be accessible from Inventor, Bunszel says.
The ability for Inventor users to natively use DWG files, she says, will make it easier for manufacturers to migrate to 3D design software by eliminating the need to translate existing 2D files. A recent Gartner survey of design software users indicated that 13% consider translating 2D files as a barrier to moving to 3D applications.
Customers agreed. Don Gradin, a mechanical designer at KONE Elevators (Moline, IL), says his company has spent considerable time and money translating DWG files to native Inventor files.
"I wish we had known about this," Gradin says. I would have held off on the translation. Once this comes out, DWG will become a standard file format for a lot of companies." Bunszel says Autodesk has been working on the Inventor file enhancements for two years. Autodesk declined to say when the new Inventor file enhancements will be available. -
This article originally appeared in the October issue of Managing Automation