Wednesday if you followed me on Twitter you were no doubt berated by the hashtag #ADSK2012 which has been the twitter info stream for a lot of Autodesk 2012 goodness over the last week or so. Wednesday was especially eventful because I among others in the press/blogger community had the pleasure of getting some face time with the Product Managers of the new Manufacturing products for the 2012 release year. It was a drink from the fire hose kind of day…
Opening Comments
Buzz Kross, VP of Autodesk Manufacturing welcomed us to the event and laid out some of the day’s activities as well as some current trends in the Manufacturing sector and how Autodesk has fared over the last couple of years with the challenges faced by many of their users in their day to day operations and design obstacles. First we were presented with a chart of the return to Manufacturing growth and how Autodesk Manufacturing has mirrored the market. Here we can see when the dark times occurred, Autodesk MFG was right there with that, but as the market improved, so did Autodesk Manufacturing. A value of 50 or higher in the PMI Index indicates an expanding market as you can see we have been above that for some time now.
Another interesting slide was the information on reported growth of Autodesk and their competitors. What is interesting here is to see the reported growth of Dassault inflated by the aquisiton of IBM and its PLM business where their normal growth has only been 9%. PTC had a respectable 8% despite the death of Pro/E into the Creo line and a mass amount of customer confusion. Autodesk Manufacturing has reported a 21% in their business. This is all done by an industry analyst as not to skew the numbers.
Breakout 1: AutoCAD, ACADe, ACADm, Sketchbook Designer
Obviously the focus here was on Mechanical Design with the software so we got to see Sketchbook Designer taking some vector data and adding some nice visualization to it for proposals as well as design review meetings. If you are starting to get confused with all these Sketchbook products, here is a nice matrix for you on capabilities…
Also highlighted was the AutoCAD’s new import functionality to bring in many different types of CAD files. Oddly enough Inventor was not included in this list. This sent one of my good friends on a tirade of discourse and furious anger as to why Autodesk would put all of these translators in and not the one that is probably most key to the Manufacturing segment within Autodesk.
Well there are two answers to that one. One, you can use Inventor Fusion DWGs to bring in the actual 3D solid into AutoCAD. Yeah, it’s an extra step, but gets the job done. Two, and in my mind is the real reason, most AutoCAD users in the MFG market it they have Inventor do not need to bring it into another modeling tool like AutoCAD. So instead there is just usage of the new Model Documentation tools to document Inventor parts and assemblies without need of bloating the file with the 3D model. In fact, I like this so much, I may never bring in a file into AutoCAD that I cannot take to Inventor first to repair or fix based on where I got it from since AutoCAD doesn’t really have any repair tools associated to it like Inventor’s Repair Environment. Well examine Model Documentation more in a later post.
Also up to bat here was Electrical and Mechanical new features. If you want more details on those see Eric and Carl’s posts from last week Due to time constraints at the event they were not able to show everything for these products.
What’s New in AutoCAD Electrical 2012
What’s New in AutoCAD Mechanical 2012
Breakout 2: Digital Concept
Jamie Gilchrist treated us to some real from the beginning design work with Alias Design 2012 including some ease of use enhancements for users coming from the more prismatic world of Inventor. As you recall from my posts last week, Alias Design 2012 will be in the Product Design Suite Ultimate. This tool is what the serious game players use right now for Industrial Design. We’re talking Apple, HP, and just about every car manufacturer uses a form of Alias right now. This software just beats the pants off the perceived competition that is in SortaWorks. Real serious designers are using this stuff and Autodesk hopes to get more mainstream users interested in its power as well. They will be leveraging a strong online presence with training videos and of course the Alias online community that is already proliferated with talent to help users adopt this glorious piece of technology.
Breakout 3: Digital Factory
Oooooh this is my baby. I am have been loving Factory Design Suite ever since it came out 9 months ago. The inclusion and enhancement of the AutoCAD Factory tools that have been on Autodesk Labs for some time is a welcome addition to the Suite for determining efficient factory layouts based on known user variables.
Perhaps the biggest enhancement for me though and for my clients that have been early adopting it, is the ability to link the 2D blocks in the AutoCAD layout to 3D assets. That’s right, you lay it out in AutoCAD Architecture, then inside Inventor Factory you right click on the layout and choose to AUTOMATCIALLY PLACE ASSETS!!!!! What happens next is nothing short of software celestial alignment of the moons where your Factroy Assets in your library tied to those blocks automatically place themselves in the layout. In 2011 this was a manual do over after the layout was brought in.
To coincide with this new functionality is the enhancements to the Asset Publisher tool to include the 2D block when you create and publish the 3D asset. While we are talking about our assets, the Cloud based delivery tool of new Autodesk assets without having to wait for the next release year is also a fantastic way to stay current with new models without watching the site like a hawk. Again, there is so much here we will dig in deeper when I get my 2012 software up and running for Factory Design Suite. Expect me to spend a fair amount of time on this one. Especially with 3Ds Max Fusion, and Showcase now added to the Suite as well.
Breakout 4: Digital Simulation
ALGOR has been renamed! No more vice-president jokes or lines like “Hey ALGOR is global warming up my processors on this simulation!” The new name is Autodesk Simulation and with a new name comes a revamped interface that looks and feels like everything else Autodesk. Also added to the functionality of is tighter integration with Inventor, Moldflow, Fusion, and Vault.
We also got to see the enhancements to Inventor’s Tooling capabilities such as the graduation of Project Krypton from Autodesk Labs. This graduate has gotten a full time job in Inventor running REAL TIME analysis on plastic part filling and weld lines to give the designer lighting fast return on common design criteria for part design. If you couple that with the partnership with GRANTA & the ECO materials adviser and you got yourself your own personal validation staff to aid you in design.
Lastly we were treated to some CFdesign, only 10 days after the acquisition of Blue Ridge Numerics and already my pal Derreck Cooper is looking presentable. Last year he was an attendee of this event and now the student has become the master. We got to see some real nice integration that is currently available with the CFdesign 2011 line of products. It is no secret Autodesk has been snapping up Simulation companies and creating a rather nice portfolio that when compared to the 300 gorilla competitor in the room, creates a definitive air of change in the years to come about what is the go to Simulation software in the market. Autodesk has already spent ½ billion dollars in simulation enhancements and acquisitions over the past 5 years. Personally as a Mechanical Engineer I need to start showcasing this more on the blog and this seems like a fine year to start doing just that.\
Also be on the lookout at simulation.autodesk.com for the up and coming Sim Squad; a group of users that have and will be pivotal to users adopting simulation by getting experience right from the experts. That initiative will be launching soon.
Breakout 5: Digital Engineering
Something called Inventor and Inventor Publisher was shown by some guy called Rob Cohee…meh. Seriously though, head over here to see some posts I already have up on the blog about the enhancements. Really the performance enhancements here have me really excited for this release. The start up and go with Inventor and the multi-core processing command subsets really do make a HUGE difference from 2011.
What’s New in Inventor 2012
Inventor 2012 Wiki
The Publisher stuff I am really excited about. Our new blogger Paul Harrison chimed in on these updates.
What’s New in Inventor Publisher 2012
Perhaps one of the biggest surprises for me as an uber CAD geek is that Publisher was not included in the Suites. This confused a lot of my other CAD fellows as well. It took me a moment to step back and think about where Inventor Publisher really fits in a company and I started to understand why it wasn’t part of a Suite, but it seems like if there is enough appeal for it, that it is not out of the question Autodesk will revisit that possible addition. Honestly Publisher 2012’s Word integration and ability to create a TON of images and data quickly makes it a valuable tool to any product designer as it gets the sales and marketing guys off your back faster.
Breakout 6: Product Data Management
I love Vault, it is a great tool I use every day to manage my data. But I don’t get excited by it. With 2012 and the integration with so many products I use today. I am starting to feel like the cool kid in the class. The use of Vault to now create Projects (whoa there Inventor folks, we are NOT talking about IV Projects, get that through your head right now) to manage product lines and all the data that goes into it. There is even Outlook integration to check in email collateral to accompany the existing Word and Excel addins. I know what you are thinking…you got that guy that hits Reply All on the email and you don’t want 15 copies of an email in Vault. Well, Vault will decipher that email already exists and ignore the additional copies so they don’t go in my mistake.
Also to note is the integration with Vault Professional with SAP, the partnership with Microsoft Dynamics and the ever increasing functionality of the Vault API to create enterprise solutions for you company based on your procedures. Image that when you check something into Vault, you can be prompted with a task to perform in SAP, or upfront tasks during a check-in. The tools here get more and more robust every release.
Closing Remarks and Q&A
Buzz Kross joined us again to close the day up and offer and insight on questions we had from what we saw during the day including further discussion on the Suites that Autodesk is deploying this year to their customers.
Q: What is the buisness objective for Autodesk, since Suites will be including products that customers may end up buying themselves anyway?
Buzz: Competitive separation. We will see more volume because of the suites.
(My take on this answer: competitive deals become a question between CADx and Autodesk Suites not just Inventor because Autodesk uses Inventor as a platform for other programs such as Alias which is the best Industrial design tool as compared to putting something into Inventor directly that not everyone benefits from.)
Q: Is the more of a plan to take compteitor seats?
Buzz: All seats are competitor seats today.
Q: Is saturation really that full? There are some engineers that use no CAD right now and that market is being marketed by Spaceclaim and ANSYS
Buzz: There are engineers with no CAD. Fusion will aid them in their workflows.
(This was brought up in our Simulation session. Fusion is the answer to SpaceClaim and since Fusion is free and easy to use, especially for the Simulation Engineer with little CAD experience, this will be the focus for those users.)
Q: So why not give Fusion away? Why is it in some product suites and not Inventor LT Suite or AutoCAD LT?
Buzz: Fusion will continue to be a free program and be continually improved through Autodesk Labs. I intend to continue rapid development of Fusion. I got a demo of the new release (not 2012) this week and it looks really promising.
Q: What is the page for Android version of AutoCAD WS?
Buzz: Once live it will be at http://www.autocadws.com/android
It also seemed you couldn’t swing a bat at Autodesk without hitting Fusion. They didn’t want to say a cat, because they are animal friendly. Am I the only one that finds bats just because they are not cute to be excluded as an animal? I will be doing plenty of Fusion topics in the coming weeks to showcase what I find just plain awesome and how these tools really help just about every Autodesk Manufacturing product to complete specific tasks.
Stay tuned this year to the blog for great tips, reviews, workflows with the new Suites and more!
