PTC Unveils Pro/ENGINEER 2001, MCAD Software Engineered for Innovation
PTC Substantiates MCAD Technological Leadership with More Than 400
Enhancements and Revolutionary Interoperability
CHICAGO and PARIS, March 6 /PRNewswire/ -- In a pivotal announcement for the engineering, design and manufacturing industries, PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC), the product development company(TM), today announced Pro/ENGINEER 2001 at the National Design Engineering Show (NDES) and at MiCAD. Pro/ENGINEER is used by more than a quarter of a million engineers and designers worldwide for mechanical computer aided design (MCAD). This new release of PTC's market- leading product design software features more than 400 enhancements. Most notably, Pro/ENGINEER 2001 offers a new streamlined user experience, including direct modeling and additionally provides integrated surfacing capabilities, new modules and numerous enhancements specifically designed to make the product development process faster and easier.
(Photo: newscom.com )
In addition to vast functional enhancements, Pro/ENGINEER 2001 is built on the foundation of PTC's Granite One platform, also announced today (See related release, "PTC Offers Rock-Solid Interoperability Kernel with the Introduction of Granite One.") Granite One includes a set of technologies designed to create and represent feature-based models, associatively transferring native files between disparate CAD tools, providing easy access to content. Granite One supercedes the first generation of simple geometric kernel components to define a new kernel for interoperability. Under development for more than three years, Granite One is a licensable software development environment based on the unmatched geometry, feature, graphics and data exchange capabilities at the core of Pro/ENGINEER. Granite One will allow users to freely exchange native files among CAD systems built on Granite, including Pro/ENGINEER 2001.
"Product conception and design is a mission critical function within every manufacturing company," said Jon Stevenson, executive vice president and general manager. "The best, most efficient product development process is at the heart of every business and the place where a company's competitive advantage is determined. The use of Pro/ENGINEER can have an immediate and positive result on a company's bottom line by assisting companies to bring high-quality, innovative products to market faster than the competition. This becomes increasingly important during slower economic periods when competition is stiff and manufacturing companies are looking to simultaneously cut costs and maintain market share."
Pro/ENGINEER 2001 delivers breakthrough innovation, including direct modeling, the ability to engage with geometry, intuitively creating and modifying features interactively onscreen. The direct modeling concept is simple-to-learn and further speeds the product development process. With direct modeling, Pro/ENGINEER users create features with the click of the mouse, grab and drag product features into place, and instantly change or edit models onscreen. This intuitive workflow reduces mouse travel and menu navigation for common activities by as much as 40%.
"PTC's new Direct Modeling interface for Pro/ENGINEER 2001 delivers the underlying power of parametric, constrained solids while allowing users to focus their attention on important design tasks within the CAD geometric viewing window," said Dr. Ken Versprille, Research Director, D.H. Brown Associates, Inc. "Casual users of Pro/ENGINEER will be especially pleased with the easy, intuitive interaction when working with their product models."
Another important addition to Pro/ENGINEER 2001 is interactive surface design. This seamless blend of parametric solid modeling and freeform aesthetic design, underpinned with Pro/ENGINEER's well known associativity capabilities, provides a high performance design environment unmatched by loosely integrated disparate applications. Pro/ENGINEER's new surfacing capability offers the ultimate integration of engineering and design. With the increased prominence of highly stylized, organic shapes in product design, CAD systems must marry design and engineering to allow product designers to effectively compete in today's markets.
Pro/ENGINEER 2001 also provides important speed-of-innovation capabilities such as the ability to persistently lock-in design goals with features that "behave" to user-specified requirements. Further, this release brings significant advances in production applications, including high speed milling support for tool and die machining, and productivity improvements in specialized milling processes.
Other enhancements in Pro/ENGINEER 2001 that benefit the product improvement process include:
--Inheritance feature technology that enables users to quickly and easily
create, and associatively update on-demand, process and design variants
of their products
--Part comparison technology, building on PTC's patent-pending shape
indexing capability, to provide instant graphical feedback on geometric
differences between two similar parts.
--Sketched 2D entities that can be associated with geometry of models in
drawing views, updating accordingly to modifications in the design,
extending the power of associativity to 2D drafting in drawings.
--Specification-driven piping that persistently adheres to predefined
standards during routing and offers automatic fitting selection and
pipeline change propagation.
"Speeding new designs to market is very important to our company," said Thomas R. D'Amico, vice president of manufacturing, Diebold Incorporated, a $1.7 billion manufacturer of self-service systems and a Pro/ENGINEER customer. "Our continued success is a direct reflection of the impact of Pro/ENGINEER on our bottom line. It meets our demands for speed, quality and creativity -- all in a single product suite."
Stephane Lepage, President of Lepage Design, an industrial design and 3D modeling shop for the automotive/transportation industries, represents the smaller business owner who has standardized on Pro/ENGINEER as an important part of his product design process. "We work with several large manufacturers as well as other suppliers and vendors and we find that our use of Pro/ENGINEER as our standard serves us well. The vast majority of the companies we interact with also use Pro/ENGINEER or have compatible systems. This enables us to easily share files with our customers and other suppliers." |
