Tag Archives: solidworks

The TL-2 Arrives

Posted on September 20, 2014 | 13 comments

Yes this is more of a general interest post rather than a specific CAD CAM related post. But after all I DO have a business that is involved far more in fabricating and machining time wise than CAD CAM ever was. They all tie in together in companies to the best of the abilities of the decision makers to buy both software and production tools that make it all work. And when you are a small one man shop the arrival of a new machine tool IS exciting. Yes all you guys who work for Mr. Big and have gobs of machines sitting around you don’t own can tune out now. But for those of you who make the bills and pay the bills here is my latest toy. Toy moniker borrowed from my wife. Wives seem to think that when you buy a welder or machine tool you are really just buying a cool expensive toy you did not need. Of course they enjoy the income these “toys” represent in time but they have such fun saying things like this and I just grin and ignore her. Or say “Yes Dear”

Unwrapping the Goodies

Unwrapping the Goodies

This one only weighs in at a little over 5,000 LBS so it came in on a tilt bed wrecker with the unloading forklift. pretty slick and quick for lighter pieces of equipment.

TL-2 In Place

TL-2 In Place

This is a compromise between a manual lathe and a full-blown Turning Center. It has the same control cabinet and basic contents as the rest of the Haas machines. Haas standardized these types of things and it allows for fewer assemblies in the system and for buyers the same control so there is familiarity for any Haas user right away no matter what the machine. I do not plan on any production runs so I wanted a big through hole and a long “Z” axis cutting length and the ability to do complex turning capable only with CNC driven equipment even though I will have to manually change the tools each time.

Big Ol 3" Through Hole

Big Ol 3″ Through Hole

Three inch through hole. Most of my parts are 3″ or under and this allows me to cut pieces plural from stock and not just a chunk for one piece and throw the drop away. Now some of this commentary is for those who read this post but are not machinists. I know you guys know this through hole stuff but others don’t. Suffice it to say that to get the overall footprint of part size I can cut and the CNC control I would have had to spend way over $100,000 on a turning center or the $41,000 I did on this.

Mindless Time Occupier

Mindless Time Occupier

There are times where just your presence and two hands is required in the shop and for those moments I recommend something soothing and pleasing to help the time pass. I use a pair of Klipsch La Scalas with an Onkyo two channel receiver for this. These things are unbelievable and if you have never heard a pair you need to do so some day. The Onkyo only has 80 watts output but these Klipsch’s are so efficient that I have only had it up to 65 out of 80 once. They will run you out of the building at that level and sound becomes physical to as it will literally beat on your chest. Just the thing for a half deaf welder machinist eh? And since you don’t get to turn them up like you want in the house you just might find yourself out there listening even when you aren’t working. It is the best music you and your neighbors down the road will ever hear.

Speaking of mindless things by the way and I just can’t help but think about Siemens corporate and the UGS saboteur of Solid Edge employed by them.

Siemens/UGS Management

Siemens/UGS Management

If you are as familiar with Wild Turkeys as I am there are some amusing parallels here. Turkeys gather frequently into groups (meetings) where they literally run in circles and make lots of noise. As soon as the corn (paychecks if you will) is put out they come running. The number that feed at the trough will expand in direct proportion to how much you will put out. All you get in return is noise and piles of crap everywhere.

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CAMWorks for Solid Edge Beta Released

Posted on September 18, 2014 | Leave a comment

OK folks the beta is out. Go to http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=99a7c340667821f4ee55fc3c5&id=fe1926d215&e=1458db190e for more information. This will only work for current customers as login to site is required. I would caution you to try the Beta on a second PC and not your main one. If you are not aware of this you can request a “Home Use” license from Siemens for Solid Edge which will allow you to run a second copy of SE. I have had trouble before with the Tech Data base on my daily user so I wont do that again and recommend you do as I will and try the beta out on my laptop and not my workstation.

You should also find there some info on what you might get if you participate in beta testing AND turn in any problems you find. Along with the download link there is of course information on whats new and install.

Try the beta of the only truly integrated CAM program in the SE ecosphere at this current time.

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Update for CAMWorks for SE and SE ST7

Posted on September 17, 2014 | 4 comments

Pleased to say that progress is being made for CW4SE behind the scenes. The beta for integration with ST7 will be out this week and if typical patterns are followed the official release will be within a month. Also the work continues on the new Tech Data Base that will allow for real world tools and I presume in time the importing of tool libraries from manufacturers. Of course along with this rework the out of the box tool path strategies will be improved so look for great things in the next year.

I know, next year? Why so long? While Geometric is a pretty decent sized software developer there is a limit to how much manpower they have to delegate to stuff like this and sadly real life things like trade shows and work for others like SW has to be done to. Lets face it here, while the population of CW4SE users is growing it is nothing at all like other specific programs in the size of the user base and they can’t drop everything just to make the new kid on the block happy. This is real life here but I can say with confidence that, and this includes the SW users of CAMWorks to, there is continued development of the new way and as far as I can tell they are quite serious and do not intend to stop. They are aware of how dated some aspects of the program are. Indeed with the work and super competitive pricing Autodesk is bringing to the world with the combination of HSMWorks and Inventor and others are also doing with integrating tool management and libraries and cutting strategies they know things have to advance. I find myself going back to ZW3D on occasion for really simple 2D tool paths. Is it not strange that of all cutting that simple 2D seems to be fraught with more problems than 3D? Strange but true and it is so with most CAM programs out there. ZD does these pretty well or I just happen to know it well enough to make it seem easy. But NOTHING beats the combination of Volumill and Constant Stepover with CW4SE as far as I am concerned. Cut some more dough extrusion dies this week and I just love it when customers call up and marvel over how nice the work is. Keep in mind I did not have to do ANY polishing after the fact to get these up to food grade.

Now we have ST7 to play with also and it is a very good release. Nothing remarkable that I have seen but improvements in how easy it is to do daily clicks and picks. Sometimes I would far rather see these things happen. Dimensioning and picking reference points for example are far easier and how many times a day does this kind of stuff affect you? I have not played with 3D points nor have I made much headway with Keyshot in the brief time I have given to it. Really not all that interested in things outside of my little work world and what is specific to my products. I can say without reservation though that if you are a developer or manufacturer of machinery for food products manufacturing this is where you need to be.

The caveat to this and it is a serious one is that there sadly dwells withing the Siemens Ecosystem a particular individual who will remain un-named who has considerable authority to compromise the future of SE. He is an old time UGS guy and he despises SE. Quite frankly he sees SE as a threat to the giant cash cow NX etal represents to Siemens/UGS and while SE was good enough to develop Synchronous Tech which NX had no clue about it is not good enough to be fairly represented and promoted by Siemens in this mans eyes. For years I had heard this was the case but until I was informed by those who truly know I did not believe it. So SE is once again and still the red headed bastard step child that just wont go away and leave the UGS guys alone. Bet that dude and his friends in high places just hate it.

I know it takes just one rotten apple in the right place to destroy more than you can imagine and the efforts of top flight people like Dan Staples and Karsten Newbury. These guys are the best in the industry and are over the best mid range MCAD program in the industry that has not lived up to it’s potential as far as I can find out solely because Siemens has been convinced it is a threat to NX sales. Heaven forbid that! I guess these people figure that losing all the sales they were virtually guaranteed by Dassault idiocies was not worth losing a few NX sales. Penny wise and pound foolish and all to satisfy the ego of Mr NX who just happens to be an SE hater.

I will say this too. I see these NX camp guys pushing CAM Express for SE like it was a fully integrated program. I am telling anyone who wants to listen this is misrepresentation by them and yes there is a nice CE icon on your SE toolbar but then you have to bring it into NX cad and THEN you get to use CE with it. With CW4SE you have true integration and it works inside of SE with native files and updates and you NEVER leave the SE environment. I get so tired of NX people claiming true integration when it is not. But I expect this from that side of the aisle and from the Siemens SE killers.

Apparently all the user summits and roll-outs that usually accompany new SE releases regionally will not happen this year. I suppose this falls under the don’t want to sell too many SE seats category and I would imagine it has been starved deliberately for funds like so many other things that would have ably promoted dramatic sales increases for SE.

Folks, buy SE and CW4SE because they work well. Don’t buy them because you expect Siemens to aggressively acquire market share you can benefit from with the increased work it would represent. Under the current regime there is no interest in this. It is why the crap publicity and promotion happens year after year. And until this is changed at levels above Newbury and Staples where the real power to determine outcomes resides this is SE’s fate in life. It is indeed “The Best Software Siemens Does Not Want You To Hear Of” and not as folklore has it “The Best Software You’ve Never heard Of”.

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Celebrate Fireworks Free July 4TH with Siemens SE Sales Supression Team

Posted on July 4, 2014 | 4 comments

I had a young lad from my church stop by Thursday. Like many he has graduated from a two-year community college with an Autodesk oriented study mainly Revit and architectural stuff. He also claimed to have six months of Inventor and some SW under his belt. He was curious to see SE though and I always make time to show anyone who is interested. He has been working sweating copper for an HVAC company doing installs for Walmarts. He decided that he did not like the boss though and quit. Now in this retarded Obama economy he is finding out that work is hard to come by and he stopped in to see what I am doing and to see SE.

So I run through some SE stuff for a while and listen to the oohs and aahs that you hear from Inventor types and SW types when you start in on the direct editing goodies. And I get to sit there and grin when he says how long it would take to do these things in SW or Inventor. But then we get into the serious life questions that revolve around this kid getting work and a future. And we get into the serious questions of a potential employer not being able to find the skills he needs in potential employees.

Of course the local college is teaching Autodesk and SW. They all do don’t they? Now this did not happen by accident it was by design with companies that have the ability to be forward-looking and to plan a market conquest based upon creating a need and a labor resource to fill the need. It is called smart business and planning and laying a foundation for the future. Of course this is something the overlords of SE have never done from Integraph until today where Siemens with huge financial power continues this legacy of ignoring the best mid range MCAD program out there. So I sit here with this young lad and ponder this situation that bugs the heck out of me. Namely the idea that Siemens SHOULD be seeking larger market share for the benefit of all involved with SE. But oblivious to things that would benefit their customers and drive more sales for them we see nothing. Again and still and apparently forever.

I look at yet another prospective employee that has no skills I can use unless I am willing to teach him SE. And I would have to be the one to do it because it is not taught by any school I know of closer than a 75 mile drive for him each way to UAH in Huntsville. And even then the instructors in Huntsville are stuck on lazy and do not teach anything about SE ST SIX YEARS AFTER IT’S RELEASE. I figure it is because they might have to be bothered to learn something new before they can teach it. Yes you heard this right, they only can be bothered to teach ordered. And yes Siemens does not police what is done with contributions here so these students never see the most powerful part of SE. It’s no wonder why the adoption rate of ST is so darned low. How are people supposed to know about and be inspired about ST if Siemens can’t be bothered to get behind SE and push this technology? Osmosis? Siemens is truly anal and retarded about this and it just furthers the idea in my mind that they bought SE by design for internal use only. Buy SE because it works for you not because Siemens will work for you. If you are looking to buy SE you better think hard about this. This kid CAN however go five miles each way to Columbia Community College and be taught SW and Autodesk stuff. By design and by plan there is work out there for people trained in virtually everything but SE.

I find myself in a sad position with people and SE nowadays because what I say can influence life changing decisions. I do not try to talk people into buying or using SE anymore because there is just no work out there for them anywhere close to where I live and after five years I have given up on Siemens trying to change this situation for the better. I do highly recommend SE under these two following narrow sets of circumstances. If you are like me and you do design build under your own roof and are basically a closed complete manufacturing entity you absolutely can not beat the power of SE. Bring in your customers files or do your own and then make the designs become reality better and faster than any other way. The second is that I recommend for those shops that have multiples of seats to get at least one seat of SE to deal with imported files and editing quickly internal files that would otherwise consume whole days to fix with SW or Inventor. But your primary customers will in all likely hood be using SW or Inventor and they will expect you to do the same. Refer back to the shrewd planning idea that the masters of SE have been bereft of since the very beginning.

My advice to this kid was I will teach you how to tig weld. There are ads in the paper for welders. I was not going to waste his time and mine teaching him SE when I know he can’t find any work with it. Once again I come face to face with eventually having to train someone how to use SE if I ever hire a designer. Or buying a seat of Inventor or SW and bypassing the training hassle. I hate to say it but my up front costs as an employer will be far cheaper with software I can get trained users for. This is the reality of the world that has been inflicted upon SE by idiots like Siemens German Management Experts. At least they do meetings well and the meetings to plan further meetings bit to.

I am getting really soured on the SE ecosystem. It seems like every time I turn around there are roadblocks placed before the usefulness of SE to me as a company if I step outside of the narrow range of design build under my own roof with just myself. SE does not get me a single bit of work because I have customers that use it. At this time not one does. SE does not provide me with a potential trained work force because students choose to learn SE based upon the idea they will be employed using it. Students just 75 miles north of the SE headquarters have never even heard of SE and when they and the colleges look at help wanted boards SE is absent there to. So just why should the colleges and students be interested in something that will gain them no work? Answer, they aren’t. So we have these inflicted wounds upon the body of SE that have no relationship to the outright capabilities of SE but have as its sole source owners of SE stabbing SE in the back. Time and time again and year after year they inflict these wounds upon SE.

For five years now I have fought to change this and I have just given up. These Siemens people are truly terminal adding to the long list of idiot owners where SE is concerned and who do not care. I have nothing but the highest regard for Karsten Newbury and I know he gets all the right things and wants the right things to happen. Siemens shoots him down all the time. I am only going to say this one time but I mean it. Karsten, if this is the way Siemens is going to do you why stay? Why not join the others who are leaving because Siemens is NOT going to ever get behind SE as far as I can see and you can do far better than this for yourself. Siemens is not going to give you the support required to make SE #1 and in truth they could care less about that whole idea anyway. So where does that leave you? I don’t know how much time you might spend thinking about this but I do and I wonder where it leaves me as a small business owner. Artificially crippled by idiots in Siemens Germany Muckymuck land is what I am thinking. The dead and utter silence since SEU 2014 does nothing but confirm this to me. Not a word about the Summits this year and just space-filling SEU2014 junk on the official blogs. The CADCAM blogosphere seemingly could care less and has nothing much to say about the best software no one has ever heard of. Every day I can read a lot of stuff from individuals and companies about Autodesk and SW but not SE. I don’t have to be there to know that Siemens has cut the purse strings to SE and that they do not care what happens to SE nor do they care what their existing customers think of all this. I can look around me and see what is being done and make this most accurate judgement based upon what I see in the real world. Quite frankly I doubt entirely the idea that SE is #2 in midrange MCAD and I figure it is another thing pulled out of some marketing guys rear end. No provable numbers and no corporate office that cares and you can’t be #2 under this kind of environment. But you can however put a smiley face on this mess because smiley faces are free and within the Siemens authorized budget for SE.

The only hope for SE as far as I can tell are right minded VAR’s and they are the only ones doing good work and trying to get the word out there. They appear to be the only ones who really care about the future of SE. I think of my VAR which is Ally PLM. They do a superb job of support for SE as a product and me as a customer. They care in all the important ways that the Siemens Overlords do not. Heaven help SE if these VAR’s ever get tired of all this.

So Happy Fireworks Free 4Th to you all at Siemens and may you enjoy contemplating the environment of externally imposed failure you have created for SE.

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Good Management and Good Ideas as Hard to Catch as a…..

Posted on June 2, 2014 | 8 comments

I am finding it hard to stay away from blogging. Perhaps it just gets under your skin in ways that are hard to stop. But in any case the reason I began my public commentaries was severe irritation over how things were being run under Siemens with SE. I still find I get irritated and still have things to say. It is not quite right to just post comments on others forums or blogs and so this blog seems to continue. Reading things today online prompted today’s post as I pondered the rarity of qualified people and the result of this. The rarity of good ideas and good management. Here we have Corporate Managers and Movers and Shakers chasing good things with invariably poor results.
marketing ideas pig chase

Worthy of mention here is the maxim that the buck stops somewhere. I think that considering how ineffective Siemens marketing is at least where Solid Edge is concerned and knowing some of the leader ship of Solid Edge I can only conclude one thing. Their hands are being tied by corporate leadership above them who do not see any advantage in explosive growth. My opinion is that SE was bought as part of a package and that Siemens really does not care what happens here. The only thing I can conclude here based upon what I have heard and observed through actions taken is that Siemens is taking profits from SE and using them for other purposes. Perhaps to make less than stellar balance sheets in other divisions look better as they aggregate all profits and throw them into this Siemens gray corporate bag of ambiguities whereby success can be punished by having their generated profits skewed sideways to cover for those less capable.

Make no mistake here if Siemens decided to allow SE sufficient funding out of the money Solid Edge earns on it’s own merits and free reign to do things right their profits as a corporation called Siemens would be better and the subset called Solid Edge would be dramatically better. And it would be completely self funding from the proceeds from Solid Edge. But they don’t because somewhere some MBA CPA type idiot has decided that his prudent management metric should prevail over logic. Please note here that no CAD or CAM company was ever started by an MBA or CPA. Please note that no MBA or CPA has cut chips or designed products as coders or workers and they lack true insight into both what it is they manage and how it and their customers function in the real world. But somehow these disconnected gurus of fiscal wisdom get to dictate to those who know their products how things will be. Remember when leaders of tech companies used to be engineers? They were people who could and would over-ride bad policies when they saw them as being detrimental to their products. But today we have 90 day windows of MBA CPA placation of institutional shareholders and logic and prudence are out the window. So we have a generous helping of Corporate Siemens stupidity where SE is concerned as once again SE is plundered by MBA and CPA types whose last concern is for their paying on the ground customers. I know SE is profitable but I believe capital that is generated by SE is once again being syphoned off to do CYA for corporate interests. It is kind of funny how things work. A sales guy is promised a 10% commission on his sales. This is fine until he reaches say a million dollars and then all of a sudden he is only worth 5%. So the MBA CPA idiots break their contractural promise and a great sales guy leaves. The CPA MBA idiots then start over with the sales guys list and a new guy who gets the same promises. Repeat and recycle and you have the environment SE operates in. You can only show so much profit before we come in there and take it from you.

By the way, for those of you who email me with comments. Karsten Newbury is NOT the problem and has never been. It is those above him. It is entrenched Siemens corporate policies and things like Marketing and PR departments that do not answer to him and he can’t enforce change upon. Personally I would hate to be in his shoes. A brilliant product with a tremendous world beating potential run by a guy with industrial degrees who understands the product and its uses who is relegated to also ran status by those who have no clues but own the shoestrings. He has been a true firewall against dumb policies and I dread the day they finally run him off. And they will if this continues I fear. Can anyone say SolidWorks Two? Dassault eventually ran their bright people off too.

This is the only thing that can adequately explain to me why SE languishes in never never land and is not #1. The tremendous technical capabilities are now as they have been seemingly since the beginning. Sold down the river by those who have no clue of the gold mine they own. I struggle to think of a term here for leadership that has the best gold mine out there according to provable reserves and yet insists on turning in third rate results because they refuse to allow the mine to buy self funded new mining equipment. Looney bin logic #101 as a prerequisite before admittance to MBA CPA #101 I suppose.

Now this is quite a sideways shift from the above but what started all this today was going over to the Ironcad site. They send me tons of emails and today for the heck of it I went there. And for the heck of it I went to the partners section as considering the goofy implementation of this at Siemens controlled SE I wanted to see what Ironcad had. So I have a look at their solution partners and I see

Ironcad

ProCam 2 has as it’s newest web listing something from 2006. Visualmill is on version 2014 and I figure V4 is probably six or seven years out of date to. Once again website gurus strike right to the heart of the matter with complete and accurate information as an example of their dedication to their jobs. I think there must be a special source of bottled designer water these Marketing and PR people are force fed no matter who their employers are. And a minimum daily quantity must be consumed by each marketing or PR employee per upper corporate management directives so they can spout off things like 500% better and 200% quicker and 300% increases in productivity and never have to fear the burden of accuracy in whatever they do. Never have to worry about updating content or living up to promises. Siemens appears to be the predominate bottler of this fine product.

Sometimes I wish I knew less than I do about what goes on behind the scenes. There are things I wish I had never read. All this accumulated stupidity and inaccuracy and patronizing junk turned out by Marketing and PR at upper management behest just give me a sour opinion of the whole thing and it did not have to be this way. And it IS upper management because the buck stops there.

By the way. I am now going to refer to SE as Siemens controlled Solid Edge. If Solid Edge was left to it’s own devices and Karsten could run it the way he knows how to, without inteference from Siemens, it would be #1 in sales by now. So to commemerate the Siemens interference in what could and should be they deserve to have mention. Each and every time. Celebrate the failure of Siemens controlled Solid Edge as it takes it’s corporate assigned place in life anywhere but as #1. WAY to go Siemens. And stop sending bottled water to Ironcad. They probably would not appreciate it if they knew what you were doing.

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Siemens Marketing and Publicity Update 5-27-14

Posted on May 27, 2014 | 6 comments

You can blame Ralph for this post as my jaw dropped when I read the following in his latest ezine. But before we start in here is a picture from a secret spy camera somewhere in a Siemens parking lot as a Marketing or PR guy is driving in. It is kind of hard to tell which department he belonged to as they all look the same.

marketing guy arriving at work

Here is Ralph’s latest. A great read all the time on many topics and you should subscribe.
http://www.upfrontezine.com/2014/upf-820.htm.

“Re: What I Learned at Solid Edge University 2014
Thanks for attending Solid Edge University and publishing your article in upfront.eZine #819. I work in marketing for Solid Edge and just a couple of comments from me that may be of interest to your readers:

The Solid Edge Apps web page that you refer to is a new resource to help our customers find the most commonly used Apps by category (Analysis, Manufacturing, Standard Parts etc.). We are adding the most popular apps into this area right now and you are correct that there are just 30 or so listed here right now. At the bottom of the page is a link to “All Solid Edge Partners” and it is here that you can search on the 500+ technology partners whose software works with Solid Edge.

Great that you were impressed by the Create Sheet Metal from 3D Part capability, and we would agree we should have featured this more prominently in our marketing materials for Solid Edge ST7. It is featured in the “Fast and Flexible Part Modeling” video on our Solid Edge ST7 web page.
– David Chadwick, mainstream eng global product marketing
Siemens Industry Software Limited”

SO Dave, this Dave the user and not the marketing whiz-bang, what did you learn today reading the above quote from the esteemed Mr Chadwick? What I learn is that once again these people can’t be bothered to do their jobs. There are a number of reasons for this which I know but will not go into at this time. Any one of these, or all of these or maybe even some new monumentally idiotic reasons I may not be aware of apply here.

Suffice it to say that once again with a known convention date that presents a once a year opportunity better than any other by far to promote SE these guys fail to fix yet another website problem. LOOK HERE at all of our partners, 500+ of them!! Don’t you love it when you go there as Ralph did and see 30 some listed right now? And of course right now is heading into two weeks after what should have been a hard must make it deadline. I wonder how many of these are here from last year first off and secondly if they were at all worried about this there would have been more than 30+ even if they could not get them all in there. AND that number would grow rapidly each week until they were all there. Of course I digress because that happens elsewhere and not here in the land of never-ending meetings to decide web page colors. Clearly Mr Chadwick was not worried enough about this to do it in a timely fashion so the year’s best opportunity squandered again. For crying out loud my church just finished a web site and the links work and it is populated quite well and one person did it with a part-time effort in a few weeks. How is it that when Siemens M&PR get ahold of these simple things they never see the light of day?

You guys better wake up and realize that the brand you are making for yourself in the public eye is one of superior product and bungling navel gazing M&PR. Also known as the best software you’ve never heard of. Look people I have a serious question for you. How many times do you have to walk face first into closed doors before you begin to realize that opening the door first gets you farther faster and in much better shape? It will also allow you to take that big red clown ball off of your noses which is another great benefit.

OK I know this is hard for you all to understand but let me spell out why this is important to users who BUY your product. The larger the market share SE has the more we as buyers benefit from increased work that will come our way as a natural and inevitable consequence of growing market share. I said this FIVE YEARS ago and find it nearly impossible to believe I am STILL saying it to people who STILL don’t understand this. Oh, and you guys as a company will make more money too although I guess this must not be too important or else Siemens would be cleaning its dead wood out left and right.

Would one of you with some gonads please reply to this post and explain this situation to me? I want to try to understand this continuation of absolute and I fear deliberate evasion of duty to your customers and corporation to do what they and we have hired you to do. Really, I want to know.

From yet another secret spy camera purportedly in a Siemens M&PR meeting room where important decisions are made.

marketing decision process

A rather simple and elegant answer to determining what gets done. The Siemens gray color-neutral darts are labeled with cool to do M&PR stuff and the blindfolded guy whips it to the dart board which is invariably in the upper left quadrant of the selected wall as you face it. The tally guy writes down what makes it according to the points each dart gathers and this sets the agenda for the next meeting where highest scoring dart gets forwarded to a subcommittee for further study. This happens again for all the other darts until they all make it through the vetting process. Any darts that miss completely are discussed in another series of scheduled meetings where darts are labeled accordingly and launched with great hopes and expectations that these will graduate to the points category thus proving to themselves the great progress being made.

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CAMWorks for Solid Edge SP2 Has Arrived

Posted on May 10, 2014 | Leave a comment

Short post here. CAMWorks has posted for current customers an important release. We now have assemblies capability for CW4SE and SE. Add to the mix the upcoming changes to the Tech Data Base and great things are in store. I have a “beta” version of this on hand and while I have not had a chance to play with it this is proof things are moving quickly along. Now would be the time if you have been sitting on the fence to give CW4SE a good hard look if you are an SE customer who happens to also manufacture. I will have more to post on this after I get done with the glut of work over the next week and have time to play with new toys.

CW4SE is to me the biggest deal in the SE ecosphere this year and I hope you have a look.

http://camworks.us1.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=99a7c340667821f4ee55fc3c5&id=c00bc81d3e&e=1458db190e takes you to the download link for current customers and

http://camworks.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=99a7c340667821f4ee55fc3c5&id=e579361745&e=1458db190e takes you to an introductory video.

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Siemens Marketing, PR and the World of Never Never Land

Posted on May 10, 2014 | 2 comments

Reading the statistics here on my blog today and something that has been drawing more of my attention is this. Months ago, 10-6-13 to be exact I wrote a post comparing the direct editing capabilities of SE and SW. It has been BY FAR the most read post ever for me and still comes in the top three read posts every day including the new one if there is one. Many thousands of reads. Of course Larry, Curly, Moe and Shemp are to busy setting up meetings to determine colors on web sites and the next meeting and on and on. Way to busy to directly compete with those who should be regarded as competitors. By my reckoning and the number of reads the CAD world is keenly interested in a direct comparison where it is shown on the same part how things differ and how file sizes and complexities grow. These are what my numbers PROVE to me. But the symphony of crickets is the stiff upper lip of competition these people bring to the contest.

Meanwhile back in the chirping crickets department life goes on. In case you don’t know who the Stooges are read https://solidedging.wordpress.com/2014/02/07/the-destructive-siemens-corporate-mindset/ and add the fourth one Shemp who is Jon Fox to the list. As the social postmortem for SE goes on in my mind I ponder how people who are supposed to be planning conquests and growing market share and beating the competition can possibly be this inept and still get paid by the company they are sabotaging.

Funny thing about the sound of crickets. It is meant solely to attract themselves to themselves and has no other purpose. Kind of like what happens in real life with the Siemens crickets as they plan another meeting. Heaven forbid a multi-year cogent and properly themed strategy and multi-year dedication in serious time and money to the same. It would interfere with the meetings where the cricket noises prevail and life is never bad.

Wait till Autodesk gets ahold of these clowns with plans that span years and have serious effort in community and identity. A crummy product can still prevail over a great one that no one knows about. SE is doomed to third place if nothing changes here. The real choice is the color of granite on the tombstone unless Siemens gets smart and gets real and sheds their dead wood. Funny thing about dead wood. I go out for firewood and around the bottom of the pile there are always crickets.

These people do not want to win.

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Solid Edge University and the Lackluster Launch

Posted on May 9, 2014 | 15 comments

I guess in writing this I have made a decision. I have come full circle and I find myself back where it all started, namely the best software you have never heard of. Here we are just days before SEU 2014 and the totally incompetent Marketing and Publicity departments with the Four Stooge’s combining from Siemens the top Marketing and Publicity incompetents and the cluelessness of Jon Fox for a powerful and deadly body blow to the user community and the future potential of SE in numbers of sales of seats. What first brought me here was complaining about the very same things I find myself complaining about today. For some years now I had entertained real hope things were going to change. On the technical side they have and SE is the best midrange MCAD program out there along with finally a true integrated CAM partner. But this social side of it all still reeks of the foul odor of either people who could care less about SE and it’s future or outright gross incompetence.

Some time back I had written a post on “SEU 2014 No News is No News” The purpose of it was to be a pre-emptive strike against incompetents Like Jon Fox and force him to actually have to do something. I was sent a letter that stated that if I wanted to be on the inside as I had been I needed to stop writing these types of things which were harming their attempt at building a brand name. Out of respect for the individual I did. But I have to admit the first thing that popped into my mind was what brand? Did I miss something here? Out of respect for that same individual I now address the same topic and let the chips fall where they may. I have very little desire to be a part of something that is doomed to fail unless big changes are made. Sadly I do still care and I care a lot. I care enough about what is going on to come right out and say can’t you guys see you are destroying any potential for SE to be #1? I understand that threat to not be a part of the “inside” is real but remember my primary loyalty is to USERS of which I am one and a failure to fix this long-standing problem is of far greater concern to me than someones opinion of me. In this day and time where sycophants are so easy to come by and real honest input is not, if honesty is secondary to hearing the glad handing and falsehoods about how well things are going from the sycophants take me off the privileged insiders list.

This is why I am not going to SEU2014. I am going to work and take a little time off and ignore an event that will have many more Siemens employees attending than actual users. I am privy to the numbers and it is appalling. What really got me going today was looking at Novedge again and seeing a continuation of week after squandered week where nothing much is made of the premier annual event for SE. Folks, if it is not showing up at Novedge it is not showing up anywhere and what I said about the incompetence of PR and Marketing is not only true but has now produced exactly what I feared it would and the indisputable truth is in the numbers.

Three years now and two of them with regional summits where interested people cared enough to attend. If there was a lick of sense in the idiot PR&M (Public Relations and Marketing) departments this would have been the nucleus of user groups across the country. Instead this data just sits and rots. Which brings me to another point besides outright incompetence which is after all so capably manifested by the four stooges. There has been basically no change in the status of users outside of the Universities. There are some VARs who are doing great work with information and reaching out but Siemens itself is a big fat fail. I figure that when the final numbers are in of actual USERS who attend the Nashville event from two years ago will have been the peak. however in the mean time these clowns can waste days talking about what should be the approved background color for the official Siemens website.

There is another idea that has been floating around in my mind for some time and it is not all bad either for the users. But it is a wretched thing for the potential for SE to have explosive and technically well earned growth and a thriving user community. Talking with an ex SE user last week and he came right out and said he could confirm my idea to be more than fiction. What if Siemens bought UGS for their own manufacturing ecosystem and their sole concern was to have best of class software for their own purposes under their total control? I can see that this would by and of itself be a more than adequate reason to buy UGS. It means that if you want to have software that is designed for manufacturing by a manufacturing giant that eats it’s own dog food you are in the right place.

What really puzzles me though about this is that I thought profit from any division of a conglomerate was desirable and funds and management would get behind an area like SE that has such potential for growth. Instead we get things like jackasses saying stuff like why should SE users be treated any differently than NX PLM World users? These Siemens people genuinely can’t see that different markets mean different strategies and no one size can fit them all. By math I have generated here before I figure these guys have saved limited budgetary expeditures on advertising and cost a ton of profits as a result. Penny wise and pound foolish. Quite frankly if I was an industry analyst I would be paying attention to this myopic treatment of SE and wonder just how many other areas of huge profit potential these same individuals in PR&M are costing the corporation in other areas to. Is there a point that can be reached where a company becomes divorced from what made the companies they buy out tech leaders because they are to big or to hide bound? Or smothered by self serving bureaucrats whose main concern is paychecks and fiefdoms?

After SEU 2014 I will have some other things to say about all this but for now I just shake my head over the management of Siemens that can’t see how they are enabling significant failure to utilize the profit potential of SE. For whatever reason. I fully expect that within two years if nothing changes and the current PR&M people are not fired and replace with competent individuals who are empowered and directed by upper management to prevail against the market the Universities will be a thing of the past. A fading but fond memory of SE users just as the Summit from 2005 in Cincinnati became to SE users for years.

A, you can’t take people and strategies that do not work and do the same things again and expect the miraculous to happen. B, You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. So what is it going to be Siemens? Are you going to fix it or do we play the dirge for what could have been and should have been under rational profit seeking hungry owners? I for one am thinking that this mess is just not worth my time and effort to support. I make no money from this and I am not an employee and your attitude has managed to take one of your biggest fans and destroy my desire to be anything other than a silent dues paying customer. Have a nice time at SEU 2014 and look at all the Siemens employees around you that far outnumber the users and remember that it could have been thousands of users with a sprinkling of Siemens types and your user base could have been the largest. But hey, at least I am eating the same dog food as is used in the Siemens kennel and that is not all bad.

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Solid Edge University 2014 Update

Posted on May 2, 2014 | Leave a comment

It is with a great deal of regret and sadness that I announce that I will not be going to SEU this year so you will have to tune into other venues for updates about Solid Edge. I hear there will be good things to see there so if you have a chance to go consider it. The incentives are all gone though so it will be full ticket for everything and none of the goodies that expired at the end of April. I am a huge fan of Solid Edge and believe it to be the best midrange MCAD program out there. If you don’t know about it and you earn a living designing parts you are only hurting yourself.

Due to ancillary things that have nothing to do with this most capable program itself rather than spending my own money again for everything I have elected instead to earn some and will be working. All I am going to say here is that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.

I have had updates with Camworks because I am involved in the process and as more information becomes available that I can talk about I will. Suffice it to say that the SP2 update with assemblies has been delayed and the Geometric guys are working feverishly to get this done. The choice was made to fix some stuff rather than release something not quite right and it is turning out to be more complicated than they thought it would be. They are also of course working on the Job Shop tech Data Base and making good progress there. We had an update discussion last Friday about this and I will say without a doubt that the right things are being done as quickly as they can do it.

I wish to give a little tribute to Rick Mason from Australia. He was at the very first Solid Edge V1 rollout with Kim Corbridge and has been with the program since. Rick has been a major contributor with his ability to use SE and has been willing to pass his knowledge along to anyone who is interested. “Ricks Rules”, a methodology for robust ordered modeling I have personally heard mentioned with reverence by some of the programmers in Huntsville. Rick is also proof that ordered Dinosaurs can learn to feel the Synchronous love with a little effort 🙂 Sorry to miss your “Blunder Down Under” last appearance at the main SE events and wish you the best of everything.

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