Big Block Dirt Modified #‘777’ car in Creo

PTC’s Creo, in conjunction with reselling partner Boundary Systems, sponsor Kevin Bolland and Bol-Tech Motorsports.

Of all the racecars that Creo has a hand in, dirt track racing is the single most common form of auto racing in the United States (it’s popular in Australia and Canada too). Local and regional racetracks throughout the nation number in the hundreds – maybe even as high as 1500.

Currently, Boundary Systems uses Creo software to create working models of Bolland’s car. Design, analysis, and simulation help optimize the car’s racing performance.

Ian Kimbrell, Founder and President of Boundary Systems, says, “Our team was very excited the first time we saw the car running inside the software and the folks at Bol-Tech have been a great team to work with.”

The 2012 racing year has only been open a couple of months, and the 52-year-old dirt racing champ has carved his twentieth win at Sharon Speedway (near Hartford, Ohio). On May 19, Kevin set the New Track Record at Sharon Speedway with a time of 15.919 seconds. In the same heat race, he broke his own record twice. He also has a victory at Lernerville Speedway (Sarver, Pennsylvania) this season. Sounds like a “Go Kevin!” is in order?

In talking about his car’s performance at Sharon Speedway, Kevin said, “The car was awesome up top. I’m thankful to be here. I couldn’t do it without Boundary, Creo, all my sponsors and Bolland Machine for the good horsepower.”

We agree – it’s fun being part of a winning team.  Check out their video below:

Last week, representatives from NASA Tech Briefs, including Editorial Director Linda Bell, came to PTC headquarters in Needham, MA to officially present Creo with the award – NASA Tech Briefs’ Product of the Year.  Bell met with a group from PTC R&D and Marketing that included Executive Vice President of Product Development and Corporate Marketing, Rob Gremley.

NASA Tech Briefs Presents PTC’s Creo – Product of the Year 2011

In the video below Bell explains the significance of Creo winning the Product of the Year award in a poll of over 190,000 NASA Tech Briefs readers.

“The NASA Tech Briefs Product of the Year is selected solely by the readers — the buyers and users of these products. The winners are the best of the best — the products that design engineers feel were the most important new products introduced in 2011 that will help them do their jobs better and more efficiently.”  Linda Bell, Editorial Director, NASA Tech Briefs.

CADPlace interviews John Buchowski at PTC about Creo 2.0, improvements in quality and stability, the benefits of the new features, and how good engineering tools support sustainable development.

Filmed on location at PTC Live TechForum Paris, 2012.

Published on May 14, 2012 by CADplaceFrance

http://www.cadplace.co.uk

Not only does the Section tool let you define how and where you want to section your model, but it’s the numerous, real-time enhancements for 2.0 that make this tool so much more useful in making a cross section.

In this two-minute video, Paul Sagar, Product Management Director for Creo Parametric at PTC, shows us the key additions for using cross section in Creo Parametric 2.0:

• Dynamic definition of cross sections via draggers to dynamically control and view cross sections
• On-the-fly selection of planes for a cross section
• Automatic detection and visualization of interference in cross sections
• Separate 2D window that shows the 2D profile of the section
• Simple selection of geometry to create a cross section (edit by dragging the mouse)
• Easy-to-locate cross sections directly from the model tree

Using cross sections is just another reason why it’s time to upgrade to Creo Parametric 2.0. Creo Parametric provides the broadest range of powerful yet flexible 3D CAD capabilities to help you address your most pressing design challenges including accommodating late stage changes, working with multi-CAD data and electromechanical design. Creo Parametric is part of PTC’s Creo suite of design software.

Olaf recently updated the OCUS benchmark for Creo Parametric 2.0, 1.0, and Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0, so now users can compare the latest PTC CAD releases for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows operating systems. To test and contrast performance across releases, OCUS opens a generic part and assembly consisting of many instances of a part and does many repeated actions on both parts and on a created drawing of the assembly. Many users have already submitted their results to Olaf’s site.

The results? Creo Parametric 2.0 delivers 20-30% performance improvements on latest graphics hardware compared to Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 with the same hardware.

According to Olaf’s site, you don’t want to take the OCUS benchmark results for granted. You can use the benchmark to compare and troubleshoot potential bottlenecks on your system where the software may by running abnormally slow (see Olaf’s FAQ). Olaf notes that you can make a lot of adjustments on every machine to make Creo Parametric run faster or slower.

Interested in browsing the performance results? You can view the actual results here.

Want to try to OCUS benchmark yourself? Download it here and follow the directions in the README.txt file and run the trail file on your own computer with Creo Parametric. You can even submit your result using the OCUS web-based count tool.

Social media outlets provide consumers with a venue on which to vent about the things they dislike about current products in addition to lauding those products they like. More and more, companies are finely tuned to these social media outlets—Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.—to tap into the public for help in solving design problems as well as steering the future direction of new products.

Some “old-school” managers may cringe at the idea of their customers publicly ranting and sharing negative feedback about their company’s products online. Those managers, however, are shortsighted. For one, if one customer is speaking out about a problem with a product, chances are there are many others experiencing the same issues. Also, if they take the time to share their opinions about your product, they likely care about the success of your product and/or the company.

Social media in a corporate sense is about bringing companies together with their public. As such, it can become a treasure chest of insight to identify issues in existing products and what features and functionality customers would like to see in the future. Organizations shouldn’t waste time addressing individual complaints, but instead show their customers they are listening by incorporating their feedback into the planning stages of new products.

Taking the pulse of customers

By using social media monitoring tools, product managers and designers can learn what problems customers are having with their current products as well as those of their competitors. This information begs the questions that can ultimately result in better-designed products. How can a design change fix that problem? Or how can we improve upon a future design to prevent our product from failing as our competitor’s product did?

Let’s take a look at a few of these social media monitoring tools to see how they can help organizations stay on top of what’s being said—the good, bad and ugly—about their products.

Google Alerts. This free tool enables you to monitor the web for searches based on key words. By signing up, you can request to be emailed when Google finds mentions of your company name, URL, product name, etc.

Topsy. This free web tool will let you search the web to see what people are saying online about your product. Topsy will also send you email notifications to monitor a competitor or keep track of what’s happening with a targeting campaign on a specific product.

Twilert. Specific to Twitter, Twilert is a free Web app that will alert you anytime a mention of a word (product or company name) or a link is mentioned on Twitter. You will also receive a digest of all the times it finds your keyword(s) each day, a great way to follow hash tags or trends that are important to your company.

Sprout Social. This web tool not only monitors most social media sites, but also provides contact management, competitive insight analysis, lead generation, and analytics. Give the free 30-day trial version a whirl. Download it here.

Sendible. Similar to Sprout Social, this tool monitors what’s being said about your brand on blogs, news, and social networks and also provides analysis highlights that suggest which mentions your company should respond to. Also offers a free, 30-day trail you can download here.

Insight leads to innovation

The global innovation consulting firm, Kalypso, surveyed over 90 manufacturing companies to find out how companies are benefitting from social product innovation, the practice of leveraging social computing to support the product development process, innovation, and business goals. The results of their study are illustrated in the whitepaper, “Social Media and Product Innovation.”

The study found that over half of the companies surveyed are using social media in product innovation to some extent, though most are still in the pilot phases of usage. Despite a lack of best practices or established strategies, most of the companies are gaining significant business benefits, including more (and better) product ideas and requirements (46%), faster time to market (18%), faster product adoption (15%), lower product costs (15%), and lower product development costs (15%).

The study also found that while social product innovation is still in the early adoption phase, 90% of the companies surveyed plan to increase their use of social media for product innovation, development and management over the next year.

The bottom line is that social product innovation is yet another method by which companies can better address problems with existing problems and generate innovative ideas that can lead to better products in the future. After all, information is power and when designers are empowered they can improve, innovate and create better products.

The original post includes an embedded video. Can’t see it? You can also find it here.

How do you deal with late stage design changes? Have they ever kept YOU from a vacation? We’d love to hear your stories in the comments.

You can also find more resources related to late stage design changes, and other times that you need to be agile in your designs, here.

“We help companies transform the ways they create and service products,’’ said Jim Heppelmann, chief executive officer of PTC.

Last year, PTC’s revenues jumped 20 percent to $1.2 billion, and its market value grew 25 percent to $3.3 billion, making it fifth on the Globe 100 this year, and the top technology company on the list.

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Creo Options Modeler  contributes to the company’s AnyBOM Assembly technology vision, a strategy that is intended to give teams the power and scalability needed to create, validate, and reuse information for modular product architectures. By combining Creo Options Modeler with Windchill Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software, explains PTC, manufacturers can generate and validate precise 3D representations of product configurations defined by an individual bill of materials (BOM).

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