Tag Archives: Solidedge

Solid Edge for Manufacturing, Old Insulator Stack

Posted on September 10, 2013 | Leave a comment

Here is an obsolete Westinghouse part that still is in service with electric utilities that needs to be replaced. As is typical with many of these obsolete parts there is no blueprint or file provided so I have to have a physical sample to measure from. This one had a lot of small variances as you can imagine both from manufacturing tolerances which were generous and spark erosion on the inside from use. I use a Gold Faroarm to reverse engineer things like this. In general you can tell what the intent was with the old parts and keeping in mind that simple numbers like fractions were used in many cases on old parts you can interpolate from your collected data and arrive at an accurate and useful part.
Westinghouse Insulator Stack

In this case there were ten different parts in the stack and I will be able to use one jig to cut nine of them.
Westinghouse exploded

Once you have the parts created what is the problem to be solved for machining these is how to hold them for cutting. In past versions of SE it has been a multi-step rigamarole thing to get this done. In ST6 much to my delight this is no longer true. Now it is a simple thing to create an assembly and drag a part into place on a block and create a perfect workholding device for cutting. What I will be showing is the setup for one type of part and how to hold it in place while machining. Being able to do this for a family of parts quickly and easily is key to how much money you are going to make on short run items. I will have twelve sets of these to cut and more than likely will not have any again for a year. Please note that I will not be machining the jig block itself for the sake of time here. It is what happens elsewhere that is interesting. So follow me as I demonstrate how the combination of ST6 and Camworks makes more money with less hassle in my shop.

Later this month by the way CW4SE will have assemblies capabilities in it if you care to use it. With this method that I am going to demonstrate however you pull your xyz zero off of the corner of the block for the cut plan and when you clamp your part in you are good to go. Subsequent parts in this family of parts can be brought into the assembly and positioned with their common hole center patterns and each of them can be saved out as separate parts just like the first one was and cut plans derived for them using the common xyz zero. It is not necessary to have a separate assembly file you have to bring in for every single variation here. In reality it is not necessary to have an assembly file at all in your CAM plans to still be able to benefit from assemblies. Obviously the holes in the rectangular blank stock are the first step in a separate operation with a different clamp method working off of stock xyz zero. Two vice-grips and a strip of metal on another 6″ x 6″ plate will do for blasting the holes out.

Folks, bear with me on the occasional hiccup here. It is time out of a workday to do this and you would not believe how many times you have to go through these things before they are perfect. Try making a video yourself and see. I spent enough time on this one to get close and that is good enough. And yes I know after reviewing the video that I moved the block .09 and not .10 for the zero point but you understand the intent here and can duplicate the correct result on your own parts with the directions here.

Join me as I create the jig and part and then cut with SE ST6 and CW4SE

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CAMWorks 4 Solid Edge SP1 for ST6 Released.

Posted on August 23, 2013 | 1 comment

OK here is the latest from CW4SE. Today 8-23-13 I received the following announcement for CW4SE SP1

” We are excited to provide you with the release of SP1 for CAMWorks® for Solid Edge® 2013. With this release, you will be able to run CAMWorks for Solid Edge within Solid Edge ST6. In this service pack, we have focused on improving the user experience with regards to interaction with the solid model geometry. In addition, we have addressed a number display related issues that had been reported.”

I have not had a chance to look yet but I was also told that September will bring assemblies into CW4SE for tool path creation.Hopefully this is there but in any case you ST6 early adopters can now run CW4SE. Check with your VAR for download info if you are a current subscriber. If you are interested in a demo version http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/velocity/solidedge/ will take you to a page that will get you going.

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CAMWorks 4 Solid Edge Comments and Thoughts

Posted on August 16, 2013 | 6 comments

In a bit of a holding pattern for now until September for posts on actual CW4SE parts I will be working on. However there is a bit of news and a bit of reflection and comments upon CW4SE.

As of right now there is no forum for CW4SE. The official Geometric forum has a section for SW users only and this should be changing soon and will include a section for SE users. Even though the basic program is the same it has been Geometrics decision that SE users should not have access to the SW users forum. Since both are closed forums I guess that you must have a seat of one or the other to access them. I have no idea what will be there and it is a shame that years of experience as cam users on the SW side of things will be roped off to SE users but with the politics that could result I guess I can understand why the two will be kept separate.

I don’t think SE at the official BBS site has any intention of having a forum either and the one time I mentioned a need for one it was met with a rather curt reply from a Siemens guy that this was Geometrics job and not Siemens. Sometimes I wonder about who talks to who and who plans these things as I would have thought that a forum would have been planned and who was responsible for what would have been picked and resources dedicated. Support for CW4SE is important and unless the VAR’s are slated to fill this area I am not sure how smooth the initial support for CW4SE will be. I think this gets back to the Dart Board idea I promulgated some time back where planning is chaotic and meetings are had to decide what to talk about in the next meeting and then another one to determine if the first two meetings were effective and on and on they go. People, time passes and this is a roll-out of a new product and an important addition to SE’s ecosphere. It is important to get this right and we are months after SEU2013 and this forum is still not established. But beyond the forums there is another category and it is who does your potential VAR have as a trained support guy? CW4SE is a new integration with SE but it is not a new program. I am hoping all the major VAR’s intend to have a veteran of CAMWorks for SW on staff to answer questions on the CAM side. The program is the program and if your VAR is intending to provide support based on freshly trained guys who have not themselves cut chips with this program it could be a problem. Make sure you ask your VAR of choice what he intends to do in this area. I have no idea what Siemens official policy is towards mandatory minimum support required of VAR’s to sell CW4SE and so it is left up to the buyer to be aware of this. Make sure your VAR can support you before you buy would be my suggestion.

There is a book out there, “The CAMWorks Handbook 2013” that is for the SW integration that looks interesting. Obviously the CAD side of it is for “Brand X” and includes nothing for direct editing 😉 but from what I have read and seen with the CW4SE manual given out with the program (I assume it will be the same one I was given during beta testing) it may be a decent alternative learning method for the bits and pieces of CAM needed to decide what features are needed to do differing CAM plans. Disregard the constant references to the class B modeler and you should be alright. If I order the book I will report on what I find.

There have been webinars from various VAR’s out there. I don’t know what all of them are doing but I do know that Saratech has a veteran CW user running theirs. Now is the time by the way to tell your VAR’s that you expect at least one guy in the organization that has actually cut chips with CW4SE to be there for support for CW4SE. Remember that the only time you have to get your wishes across to these guys is going in so push for all you can before signing with one.

On the program front as planned and announced some time ago September is rapidly approaching and working with assemblies will be an additional function to be released then. I don’t know what else is coming out and as I have reminded people if they want it talked about they have to release information. Hopefully this will happen soon.

In any case I expect to have my seat soon and then it will be on to some real parts. One thing I will be interested in is how CW4SE will work for a small shop like mine where automation and the Tech Data Base setup is not so beneficial. I want to just recognize features I want to pick and go from there and also avoid populating the TDB with my own tools so I can just pick them as I go. For instance, the TDB has a lot of tools in it but not one three flute endmill. This is the preferred endmill for cutting aluminum and as it is recommended by Volumill for just this I am surprised that Geometric did not have any of these in the tools for milling section. The TDB is an area where there could be improvements made and from what I gather in talking to some SW users of CAMWorks they agree. Now the TDB is a powerful tool for automation and I think is particularly beneficial for larger shops with a system set up for tool and machine management but this is a little complicated for those who just want to pick a tool, or input the cutter data individually for each tool path and go from there. In My old program for instance I can scroll through a list of tools and just pick it and edit it right there if I need to and save the new tool to the library. Far easier than this TDB thing is. Of course I am quite familiar with the old program and not CW4SE yet so my opinions here could change as get used to using it. It would be nice if Geometric would allow for the importing of tool libraries into their TDB from manufacturers but as of right now you have a tedious excel like chart to fiddle with and you have to add these things in one by one. It would also be nice to be able to do away with having a tool library required to create a cam plan and just pick and assign tools to the cam plan and have it be remembered as tool whatever in spot whatever and then just save it. Automation is really cool for those shops that want or need it but some greater consideration for those shops that don’t want this would be nice.

One of the things I really liked during beta testing was the constant step-over tool path. I was over at the HSMWorks forum the other day and they were complaining about how tough it is to get a constant scallop heighth there. Kind of like I use to have to do with ZW3D you have to create different tool path stepovers at differing places in the part to get a really consistent finish on the part. So you end up with four or more toolpaths to do almost as good as the single toolpath in CW4SE will get you quickly and easily. Just a word here by the way. I find some of the CW4SE GUI to be clunky and some of the nomenclature to be worded in such a fashion that it is hard to remember what it means. So welcome to the real world where no program is perfect and they all expect you to learn according to the idiosyncracies of each different set of programmers. Many of which I believe don’t really grasp what actual users want because they have never cut chips and don’t understand our work flows and the reason for how we choose our work flows. The programmer liked it and it made sense to him so it must be right, right? But don’t mistake my grumbling about these things to be really serious objections to the program as a whole. I know enough about it to state that the improvements to my bottom line for cutting efficiencies will be large over time compared to programs I have used in the past. And of course the fact we now have true integration between CAD and CAM.

The insanity of allowing programmers who have not cut chips to be the final determiners of how a program is set up to work for users is a topic for another day and I am of the opinion far greater heed to user wishes should be made. I am afraid that with Geometric, like most other software authoring companies, once the program gets out the door the silliness is programmed in and it will take an act of God to get programmers to understand that just because what they did can be made to work does not make it the right way or the best way to work and to then fix it. Kind of like how dumb is it that SE still after all these years does not yield accurate manufacturing data for threads but someone in Programville decided it was OK so every user subsequently has to struggle with this. I bet this comes back to haunt them as how can they recognize accurate manufacturing data on holes imported from say SW if they can’t do it for their own program? You use software to design or cut I am sure you have pet peeves based on programmers choices too and this problem is everywhere.

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Twenty Three Years of Institutionalised Culture of Failure

Posted on August 7, 2013 | 1 comment

This will be my last post on this topic for a while. I don’t think it can be flogged to death because the very serious nature of this problem needs to be hammered upon until these people either get it right or get run off but I am going to give it a break for a bit after this post. Sorry if the idea of PR and marketing as twenty-four year old failures offends some but when the very nature of the survival and prosperity of the Solid Edge division of Siemens is still threatened by the incompetence of these people it needs to be said.

So what got me fired up today? I was looking for articles on CW4SE (CAMWorks for Solid Edge) and ran across Evan Yares fine article on ST5 from last year.
http://www.3dcadworld.com/why-solid-edge-matters-part-1-a-little-history/

I remembered it well and took a minute to re-read it. What leapt out at me this time was the following and I quote,

“The SolidWorks versus Solid Edge competition was shaping up to be a major brawl. Both were clean-sheet products that promised to challenge the hegemony of PTC’s seemingly unassailable Pro/Engineer CAD program.

Unfortunately, Intergraph made a number of missteps with Solid Edge:

“They built Jupiter to be a universal CAD platform. This added a lot of program overhead that made Solid Edge fatter and slower than it would have been were it to be fine-tuned for MCAD.
In the middle of development, they went back and re-worked the core program code to use the (newly available) Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) object model, instead of their internally developed object model. This caused a year’s delay. As a result, Solid Edge didn’t ship until about 6 months after SolidWorks.
They used the ACIS geometric modeling kernel, which, at the time, was not a match for Parasolid.
They didn’t have their sales channel strategy together.”

They didn’t have their sales channel strategy together! And I remember from SE V20 comments to the same effect from Roopinder which became known as the basis for the famous phrase “The best software you’ve never heard of”. This is a problem that evidently goes back to 1990, the very beginning of SE and according to Evan was one of the large contributors to SW taking off before SE. Evan is a smart guy and I trust his judgement and as far as I am concerned looking at where we are today with SE/Siemens what has changed?

Lets be honest here for a moment. Would many prospective customers buy software they don’t hear all that much about compared to the media blitzkrieg of SW? What have been the ramifications of this? I think it is easy to state beyond a doubt that failure to market well has starved SE of cash for development. Development which would have kept it equal to the best that SW had after adoption of parasolids and placed it on an equal technical footing. And they would have been much closer in market share from that point on. If marketing had done it’s job the launch of the whole ST program could have been with a much better product rather than one that had to stumble for two years as more generous funding brings better things to life more quickly. If marketing had done their jobs a well-funded launch of ST as a robust product in ST1 with a large advertising budget that could have been in place because of prior sales profits would have put SE perhaps even with SW in sales by now and ready to pull ahead. Is it unreasonable to say that this has cost SE well over a billion dollars over the years?

THIS is the true cost of this marketing and PR Culture Of Failure. Year after year and sad to say now decade after decade.

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We will TELL them what to Like

Posted on August 1, 2013 | 2 comments

Well this time off did not last long did it. I received an email from Autodesk that fired me up and so here we go.

This is another true O’Charley’s restaurants story that has a direct bearing in what is happening with Marketing, PR and the community website. This is sadly another true story I watched in person as a company self destructed from really dumb things. This particular event materialy contributed to the downfall of the whole chain.

Some years ago the vice president of the commissary operations for O’Charleys discovered that his division could make more money by reducing the quality of the ingredients but not the price in the products they made for the restaurants. So he sallies forth one day with his revised Honey Mustard dressing and arrives in the lunchroom to ask employee opinions on his latest creation. What he did was take almost all the Honey out leaving it to be just around 5% of content with the rest now being corn syrup. Up to this point in time Honey was the sweetener. As most employees are known to do when their boss asks them for an opinion they give him what they think he wants to hear. Especially if the boss has a propensity to be irate with those who would doubt his divine guidance in all things. Sonny was one of these and so everyone told him how wonderful his sorely degraded product was. Up until he ran into Gerald.

Gerald is a friend of mine and I was up there later that day only to see him with a strange look upon his face. “So, what’s up Gerald”? He then tells me the following story. As noted above every other employee who was asked about Sonny’s brainstorm all told him how good it was. Gerald however no matter what the risks of truth were with this megalomaniacal boss would give him an honest answer. So he tells Sonny that it stinks compared to what it was. Sonny’s response was what floored Gerald. Sonny stated to Gerald that basically customers were ignorant and that they would be educated as to what they would like. Gerald could not believe the disconnect from reality with this and thus the look of bemusement on his face that day. This began the deterioration of all the products produced by the commissary until it got so bad that the commissary was sold off when the chain ran into severe financial problems. It all happened because one individual decided on his own that he knew better than anyone and did not need to ask anyone, most particularly ignorant customers, about the validity and consequences of his actions and decisions. So when the food went downhill the customer counts went downhill and so did profits at the stores. But Sonny could stand in front of a mirror and argue with the best of them about why his decisions were good ones.

This brings me to the Siemens publicity in general and SE Community websites in particular as this story resonates in my mind’s eye. I don’t know who is asked to provide input and feedback for these things. Maybe it has happened but did you have to be there for that 24 hour window of opportunity to give feedback? I don’t remember being asked about any of this stuff so I have a vision of the same people who only talk to each other talking to each other about web site layout and content and agreeing with each other how good it all is. They are really smart people you know and much better at this than viewers would ever be. In the mean time I bet the viewers are staying away.

You know here is the bad thing about metrics and how do you determine if you are succeeding or not. Remember the https://solidedging.wordpress.com/2013/07/10/the-parable-of-ocharleys-restaurants-and-solid-edge/ post recently here? The numbers looked OK to this guy but he failed to see the truth of it all until remedial action was taken. So here we have a website that may actually have an increase in numbers of views but can these PR wonks bask in the glory of this? Or is the truth of it all that they have no way of comparing what they are doing to what a well done website designed around customer inputs and asked for content would do. I choose to believe that somewhere Sonny or Sonny’s equivalents in Siemens/SE exist that have no desire to do the legwork necessary to find out the truth of it all and use the ask the guy in the mirror method of management and decision-making.

What started me thinking about all this was an invitation recently from Autodesk to go to one of their websites. http://www.autodesk.com/products/autodesk-inventor-family/overview is a link to it. I go there and shortly after arriving this pops up.
Autodesk

Can you imagine actually asking what a reader wants to see and thinks about the site? Well if I was interested in getting more customers and viewers I sure can. But then I like things to grow and thrive and I care what potential users think about SE and Siemens. Apparently customer desires, inputs and requests are things that frequent only the technical side of Siemens SE.

Oh, and by the way, did you notice how Autodesk did not take up the top right half of the initial page with corporate Bios and gobs and gobs of just blank nothing? Which one of you marketing PR paragons figured this was something that should be there anyway is what I want to know. Every time I see this my eyes roll back in my head. Remember the admonishment for parents some years ago that said “It’s 9:00, do you know where your children are?”. Well I think a byline to my posts from now on just might be “It’s 8:00 AM, do you know where your PR and marketing staff is?”

There is even a book that I think Sonny would have endorsed before he went bankrupt that sounds like it might be tailor made for these guys 🙂

marketing

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Wasting Away in PRitaville

Posted on July 19, 2013 | 9 comments

My mind works in funny ways sometimes and one thing can lead to another. I was and still am completely disgusted with how the powers that be took Matt’s “On The Edge” blog and basically killed it. It should have been left exactly as is with cross links to the official site. It was probably one of the leading sources of reads to the Petri Dish culture site and they have no viable replacement for this. Sorry guys, it is not the same when the pseudopods  of corporate sterility pull it in.

Then I have this guy from Faro show up who does not know anything about SE. Now I kid you not this is how it went with him. I asked him about direct editing and he was not sure what that was. He is an SW CAD user only. We continue to speak and when he mentions Space Claim that’s when I can finally make a bit of headway with him by saying SE has direct editing  like Space Claim does  but actually better. He knew about Space Claim. Now you PR types don’t have to put up with the things I do. You hide in your little offices and talk to each other. I have to stand here and suffer under things like this Faro guy looking at me like I am a little strange. Just like the Mastercam and Surfcam VAR’s I speak to I am reduced to saying “Oh yes, SE has direct editing just like Space Claim does”. Last time I checked Space Claim was a little bitty company compared to SE and just how is it that they are known with these dealers and people and SE is not? Hint for those of you in Rio Lindo, no worthwhile cohesive aggressive marketing or PR plans or execution might be the reason hmmmm?

Let me put this in perspective for you. We also talked about workstations. I mentioned that even though Dell was all I ever see for workstations I remember reading stuff about what a big percentage of the market HP had in this area. He and I both agreed that all we ever see is Dell and could not figure out how these claims could be substantiated based upon our personal observations. So here I am trying to convince this guy that there are many hundreds of SE users in TN  and that SE has the best direct editing and is better than SW or Space Claim. I can see in his face and comments he is thinking another HP.  And based upon his personal experience why shouldn’t he?  This is also what I get from the Surfcam and Mastercam officials I speak to because some companies make a point of promoting their well planned and executed  messages to markets they actually have plans to and then do  target. So now Space Claim is being pushed by Faro, Mastercam and Surfcam dealers in my area but not “SE who?”.

I believe there is an entrenched almost government like bureaucracy with SE that is the legacy of years gone by that has as of yet not been fixed. I figure these people band together to protect the way it has been over they way it should be.  Void of creativity they plod on  spending time with safe things they have done year after year and not one of them ever stops to think of the idea that doing things the same way does not bring about growth. It is a damning indictment of these individuals who are stifling the growth of SE to protect their paychecks. That they have so little vision for the future that they would be willing to sacrifice the future of the company to remain on familiar and comfortable ground. Technically brilliant the guys in Huntsville who code SE  must wonder what is in the water over in PR and Marketing. I hope they never step over there to drink any of this.

I believe that if this problem is not fixed the fate of SE to be also ran will be sealed because these people will prevent SE from ever knocking SW off their throne if things are not changed. Again I say that expecting different results from  the same tired failed methods and people is not the paradigm a hungry for success company would employ. If I was in charge when these sorry Petri Dish guys come in offering the same old tired excuses for why they can’t do things right or won’t do things right and not providing good results it would result in severe discomfort. These people forget that their sole reason to be employed is to deliver results and they are supposed to FIX the problems stopping dynamic growth not offer reasons why this can’t be done. I don’t care what the problems are. You guys have had how many years now to figure this out and plan for growth and you can’t do this?  I don’t get it. Rather than being excited about being with a company that is experiencing  tremendous growth these clowns want to stay where they have been turf protecting themselves and their paychecks and relegate SE in the mean time to also ran status.

So as I stewed over this for the next few days thinking about how I personally had over three lost income and unpaid weeks of my time in hurry up last-minute beta training, testing and parts cutting for SEU13 and time spent blogging to promote it all plus money out-of-pocket to attend because I care and want things to work out right inspiration strikes. Don’t know how wasting time morphed into wasting away in Margaritaville but then inspiration needs no logical explanation does it.  So for the marketing and PR sides of Siemens/SE a theme song.

Hats off  to the PR and marketing guys at Solid Works who prove it can be done and dedicated to those with SE who prove how it can’t be done.
Wasting Away in PRitaville

Been here for five years
Watching the things here
It is the best soft ware never seen
Rarely been heard of
Nary a sight of
Some things don’t change sad as that seems

Refrain
Wasting away again in PRitaville
Searching hard for something to find
Some people claim that it’s still the same
But I know, it’s not PR’s fault

I don’t know the reason
I searched for all season
Not much to show but this internet bill
But it’s a real beauty
A big monthly cutie
Why I still search it I haven’t a clue

Refrain

I blew out my Laptop
Cleaned out my desktop
plugged the cable back in at home
but no website contenders
the drought never ends here
It’s just blind hope that keeps me around

Final refrain
Wasting away again in PRitaville
Searching hard for something to find
Some people claim that it’s still the same
But I know it’s not PR’s fault
Yes some people claim that it’s still the same
And I know it’s not PR’s fault

 

UPDATE

OK folks I go to the    http://community.plm.automation.siemens.com/t5/Solid-Edge-Community-Blog/SEU13-Presentations-Available-for-Download/ba-p/2351    web site today and we have a perfect case in point. I want you to go there. The first half of this long scroll down page is one third content and the rest is just stuff. Who really cares about company officials taking up one half of one third of the whole page and being placed at the top right section of this page? Top right is one of the two most important placement areas when you wish to convey a message and these marketing PR whizbangs fill it with company rosters. 😦 😦 😦 Right where we should have relevant community and user information or links or articles or SOMETHING of value we have instead space just filled to be filled. Scroll down and tell me how much more of this is the same. Can you believe this is what PR and Marketing think is an attractive selling and information tool for SE? It is a perfect example of crank a mindless cookie cutter fill in the blanks page out like we always have and get a paycheck stuff. They do these things and think they are of worth in PRitaville.

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The Parable of “O’Charleys” Restaurants and Solid Edge

Posted on July 10, 2013 | 4 comments

O’Charleys is a restaurant chain based out of Nashville TN that I used to do a lot of work for. In years gone by they had franchise holders and one of them owned a store on University Drive in Huntsville not far from SE’s headquarters. And it is this store where this story began.

My wife had been a server at O’C’s for a while and I had worked on probably over a hundred of their stores by then. We were very familiar with the standards that were supposed  to be in place for service and hygiene. At that time they had the best Prime Rib you could buy and so we decided to go to this store for a meal.

Well we get in there and sit and wait. For quite a long time actually before the waitress could be bothered to approach us. In the mean time I go to the restroom and come back out with a bit of disgust as I tell my wife what a foul smelly cheap bar place it was. Still no yeast rolls and these were supposed to be quickly presented according to corporate policy. None was ready it seems and so the waitress could not bring them out until after we had our salads. Big no-no and the server attitude was lackadaisical at best as she was more interested in talking to friends than customers.

I came back to the Commissary operations for O’Charleys which was in Nashville and my biggest customer at that time and told some of the people there how awful the meal was. Their comments to me were “did you tell Wayne (franchise holder who also had an office there) about this? I was a little hesitant to do so but they prevailed upon me and I did so. Talked to Wayne about it and described from beginning to end what I saw and experienced there. Wayne did not have much of a response and I left his office.

A few weeks later I ran across him and asked him about the store and this is what he said. He went down there and walked in unannounced for a surprise little visit and it was every bit as bad as I said it was. He spent some days there getting things fixed up again and firing the managers that had allowed this to happen. I asked him how this situation had occured when the store was just a two-hour drive away from the offices in Nashville and easily checked on.

Wayne went on to tell me that the numbers from the store were decent and based solely upon this there was no reason for him to go there. He had six other stores  so I guess he would concentrate on the worst one only. I don’t remember asking him about this so I can only conjecture.

Some time  later I asked Wayne about that stores numbers  and he said that after his surprise visit and  ensuing cleanup and management purge there was a pronounced uptick in sales.

The moral to this story is that numbers only do not tell the complete story. Here we have Solid Edge whose numbers are decent and sales are going up in spite of how the help is presenting the “food”. They should be and could be much better is my belief.

It is not just the basic quality of the food you sell but it’s appearance and presentation too. You can have great food and spend lots of time sending out select aged prime rib from the commissary but if the people “selling” it in the store don’t do their job it will never matter how good the commissary’s beef is.

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Does A Solid Edge Publicity Department Really Exist?

Posted on July 9, 2013 | 8 comments

I have been thinking about this at great length and I conclude that in spite of what I was told about publicity and my commitment not to talk about it for a while I have to now comment. The reason for the original decision is I think still valid but there is another problem that is systemic with UGS/SE and now Siemens and it is a different one.  It is a publicity department that does not have a clue about the passing of time and what to do. 3D has asked me questions for instance about the rent SE by the month announced at SEU2013. And here we are a week after and just nothing.

Lets look at this particular problem. I believe this was one of the major vehicles being offered to entice potential full-time new customers. So here we are heading into SEU2013 and we know it exists. Karsten talks about it and speaks of it in the keynote address. So you publicity wonks, I now have a few questions for you. Why was there not a cohesive plan to promote this with details worked out and on the shelf ready to go on day one in Cincy? Why do I have to sit here two weeks later and tell people I don’t know because you either don’t know or can’t make a decision to tell the public about it? I thought the days of Bruce Boes advertising paralysis were over but by golly I find myself wanting to look behind closed doors to see if he is still here. Do you people understand that you only have one major event/product release a year and you have to utilize it to benefit from it? The buzz never burst upon the scene in my opinion because it is the same old same old long time employee total lack of vision and do it the way we have always done it because my head might hurt if I do something radical. And apparently profuse timely publicity and the free flow of information is a radical concept to these publicity people.

Here is another one. There is to be some sort of ST only version of SE that  I believe was created for two reasons at around $2,000.00 I think if I remember this right. My belief is that it was meant to be a competitor to things like SpaceClaim as a direct editing reduced function program for CAM users to use and also as a cheap way of getting the power of ST into more hands. I don’t hear anything about this and I thought this was a big deal. Evidently the PR department thought it was not as they can’t be bothered to talk much about it or provide many details about it that I have seen.

Where are the ready to go videos showing the power of ST in assemblies this year? Why were these not done well in advance of SEU2013 and posted on YouTube on 6-25-13? Now that I think about it why were there not videos on every important aspect of ST6 posted on YouTube no later than the first day of SEU2013? You knew what you had to work with six months ahead of time and I just have this vision of people standing in a room with a dart board in front of them. It has various PR categories around the bullseye and after the darts are thrown the arguments ensue and the whole process starts over again and again. I can just see it. A dart misses the board and now we have to debate if this means there was a category that should have been on there but wasn’t and nothing is ever decided or done.

I was forbidden to talk about some of the things I knew about CAMWorks because, well because someone somewhere decided that the perfect and anointed time to do so had not arrived. A totally farcical situation considering the fact that this whole integration and the company it was to be done with had been publicly announced A YEAR AGO! Do you people understand that if you talk about it and have a vendor there showing it in SEU2012 it is not secret to be hidden knowledge? Alright let me see if I can put it in terms you all might understand. When PT Barnum comes to town they make a big deal out of it and they have (shocking I know, the very thought scares me) a PARADE to entice the public to be their customers. So as I remember, you PR guys can help out here if you wish, the only mention for the next ten months about this came from a blogger that does not reach all that many people. But for months I did more to promote CAMWorks for SE than Siemens did and I just don’t get this disconnect. Is there something wrong here or am I just an idiot for thinking that if you want people to buy your product your better promote the bejeebers out of it?

Which leads me to my next topic. Where the heck is all the info, the Powerpoints and videos from SEU2013? Do you ever intend to release these? You do know the time to have done so was 6-25-13 don’t you? It should have been canned and upped on the site of choice and ready to go with links active the night before SEU started. You do want to create buzz don’t you? You do want to compel people to consider SE don’t you? Then here is a suggestion from Remedial Marketing 101. I say remedial for a reason because evidently some individuals have to be taught first that marketing has value before they are taught how to do it. Tell you what. I don’t have to sit in a room and argue with people or worry about perfect timing or whatever you guys do that stops worthwhile plans and efforts dead in its tracks. I was given a flash drive as were HUNDREDS of other attendees and it has the SEU2013 Powerpoints on it. (You know, the ones you have not released yet. But they are public and this is what bothers me so much. WHY oh WHY is this stuff not out there yet that I can find) I am going to help you guys get off the dime and give you a week to stop prevaricating. Then I will figure out how to post the whole thing to my blog.  Who do I send the bill to by the way for doing your job for you?

Heaven help me and I know JB will have a field day with this but the day Jon Banquer makes more advertising sense than what I am seeing from the PR wonks at Siemens or SE or whoever it is responsible for this mess I just cringe. Can you imagine that even he is getting this right but none of the paid advertising people are? I have to admit that I find defending inaction is not a task I am up to and so I am not going to. I guess the idea of “The Best Software You’ve Never Heard Of” has legitimacy as advertising genius to “The Best Publicity Department We Never Hear From”.

I think hands down SE in its combination with CAMWorks is the single most powerful mid range MCAD program for manufacturing out there. I believe in it enough to spend my own time promoting it and I don’t get compensated to do so. As a matter of fact it costs me some money and time out of my life I can’t replace because I do believe in it. It makes me furious to watch this neglect from those who are paid to promote SE not do so and not do so for year after year. I can’t conceive that once again we are heading down the path of anonymity and the opportunity provided for PR with SEU2013 is being squandered for reasons I don’t know and can’t begin to fathom.

Why don’t you people get off of your dead rear ends and start earning your money? I am at the point where I don’t care if people in the PR department are offended because I darned sure am offended. What do you people do with your time? What can you possibly be thinking to let this precious time go by? Dassault and Autodesk are doing everything they can to destroy their businesses and all the plans that Karsten and his team come up with for the future are just shot down by your incompetence. This is your last year to get it right. I don’t believe this hiatus of coherent planning at Autodesk or Dassault will last more than another year. When they get whipsawed by declining on-maintenance and new customers they will reconsider their ways and your free ride will be OVER. These guys know what they are doing in PR and they will eat your lunch.

The question is do you even care?

Update 7-9-13

Had a Faroarm rep here today at the shop. While talking I of course mention SE. I mention SE because he was talking about Faroarms being integrated through Dezignworks to work with Solid Works, ProE and Inventor. We continue talking and he is familiar with SpaceClaim because some of the machine shops that have Faroarms are using it with the new Spark program. He has heard of SE just a few times over the last five years.  WAY TO GO MARKETING AND PR!! I know very well there are a number of SE users in Tennessee which is this guys district but he does not and this is the result of a total failure to effectively communicate the SE message here.  I hate it when people look at me like I am delusional when I say this software they have rarely or never heard of is better than SW. I just wish I could send these people straight to the publicity/marketing departments of SE so they could see what dismal failures they have been at getting the word out.

The primary reason he had not dealt with SE is because nothing has been set up with Faro to work natively inside of SE. And of course the lack of any publicity for SE reaching him through the internet or other media.

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Solid Edge for Manufacturing, CAMWorks for Solid Edge Constant Stepover

Posted on July 1, 2013 | 13 comments

One of the family of parts I design and manufacture is extrusion dies for Polin Depositors. One of the recent designs is one you have seen in other posts as the Guitar Die. Soon if you go to the Music City Arena in Nashville  you may just find a guitar crouton next to your salad or maybe a chocolate chip cookie made with this die for the Polin Depositor.guitar die top

Now this part has presented problems before with finishing where the corner round goes into the cavity. The way I have had to deal with this to prevent stair stepping in the past has been to basically create three or four cut paths to accommodate varying degrees of slope.

Besides the Volumill routine in CAMWorks for Solid Edge (CWFSE) my second favorite tool path is constant step over. This gives me a constant step over based upon the distance across a face and not just in “Z” or “X-Y” as was my previous fate in life. Now a word of warning here. This tool path follows contours it assigns across your part for maintaining this constant step over. This can result in gouging if you are using this path to cut down to a face. The way to avoid this is to create a contain or avoid feature and this will stop the tool path from gouging the floor of the part.

Guitar Die closeup

Is this not a beautiful thing? It did not matter where I looked in these cavities all the tool marks were completely concentric. I used a sketch  profile around the cavities for containing and picked tool on the profile and I have a perfect blend going into the hole and then completely down to the bottom. Now keep in mind the finish can be as fine as you want it to be if you are willing to spend the cutting time to get there. This quality of finish is good for this type of application and requires nothing finer.

I can see that many of my 3D parts will require two tool paths only. Volumill with intermediary step cuts at sufficiently small cut amounts to allow for going directly into the constant step over finish tool paths.

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CAMWorks for Solid Edge Beta Team

Posted on July 1, 2013 | Leave a comment

Beta Team

Wanted to take a bit of time to thank the BETA testing team for CAMWorks for Solid Edge. Some of these guys flew in and spent four days of time in Huntsville and we all spent time there and afterwards fiddling with stuff new to us. So from left to right we have Solid Edge users and testers Tim Hoeing, Dave Ault, Joe Hourihan and Larry King. Jim Wright from Siemens, Marc Bissell from Geometric and Mark Burhop from Siemens.  This was a small team because what we were really testing was the interface between Solid Edge and CWFSE. The CAM program is robust and proven but the integration with SE was new. I have been particularly impressed with how quickly and dramatically this integration has improved from the first beta version we had to this last one from 6-19. I look forward to using again a completely integrated CAD and CAM program and not having to look for another CAM program again in my working career.

A special tip of the hat to those with Siemens who knew that things the way they have been were not good enough and they determined to change this to the way things should be.  This lack of CAM integration was perhaps the single largest remaining vestige of the Venture Capital types who are so good at buying up companies and then saddling them with new debt, starving them of funds, direction and R&D while writing themselves grossly out of line benefits packages.  It appalls me to think of both the damage to the companies and then to this head below the radar cookie cutter mentality that has become so pervasive here they are having to work on as a result of these guys. Who knows where Solid Edge could have been if someone like Siemens who understands what CAD and CAM and PLM etal software really is about had bought them before the loot and plunder venture guys did.  I am sure that the competitors of UGS/Solid Edge have really enjoyed watching them being shackled but those days are over.

Just as a reflection upon the CAD and CAM community with any software here. It takes people who are willing to spend some of their time they can’t replace to help things move forward to the benefit of all concerned. From a local user group you participate in or help to run up to beta testing software so what is released can be better your involvement is important. Have you considered getting involved in your software of choice to make it better?

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