Products: June 2005

By DE Editors

Problem-Solving with Greater Collaboration

Invention Machine Corp. (Boston, MA) has released Goldfire Innovator 2.0, the latest version of its integrated environment to bring a structured process to inventive problem solving. It provides engineers, researchers, and technical personnel with easy-to-use problem definition and analysis capabilities, enabling users to systematically tackle engineering problems across a product’s lifecycle, thus reducing the delivery time for new product innovations.

Goldfire Innovator 2.0’s new Collaboration Repository enables greater coordination and communication among team members via centralized access to project files, reports, and workflows. It supports hierarchical device modeling, enabling users to analyze and represent complex systems and to delegate design problems across a team. Goldfire Innovator 2.0 lets users browse the full content of corporate and personal knowledge bases by categories, and is said to further accelerate productivity and “time-to-ideation” by enabling automatic summarization of documents in personal knowledge bases.

For more information, go to invention-machine.com.

Goldfire Innovator 2.0 from Invention Machine received the most votes in our March 2005 issue. Vote for your favorite product from this month by going to Departments, then Products at deskeng.com.

To vote for your favorite product from this month’s Products and Briefings sections, use the ballot at the end of the sections.

Teamcenter for MRO (maintenance, repair, and overhaul) is a new product suite from UGS (Plano, TX) that extends the value of PLM to MRO organizations. The solution offers a new approach to the support and service phase of the product lifecycle’s configuration-driven MRO. Unlike traditional offerings for MRO, which focus primarily on ERP transactional data, configuration-driven MRO puts the product at the center of the MRO function—bridging the gap between the logistics, maintenance, and engineering communities.

By providing the link between engineering and point-of-service, Teamcenter’s source of product knowledge helps service teams plan by determining what parts and materials are necessary to carry out an operation, what the local sources are, and what substitutes might be needed.

A secure, Web-accessible environment means service teams can access knowledge at anytime from anywhere using laptops, PDAs, and wireless phones.

In-Service provides service organizations with total visibility to an entire base of capital assets; Maintenance Planning enables service organizations to perform maintenance planning for capital assets ranging from components to entire fleets; Maintenance Execution enables service organizations to execute an auditable maintenance process while retaining event histories that can be easily retrieved and reviewed on demand; and Material Management enables enterprises to track and manage all of the parts, tools, and equipment inventories used. For more information, please visit ugs.com

Applied Production, Inc. (Milford, OH) announced the release of its ProFold sheet metal unfolding software product line for KeyCreator 4.0 from Kubotek USA (Marlborough, MA; cadkey.com). ProFold is completely integrated into KeyCreator for companies that work with sheet metal parts. Engineers and designers use ProFold to create accurate flat pattern layouts faster and easier. The ProFold product line consists of ProFold Solids, ProFold Wireframe, and ProFold Lite.

ProFold enhances the sheet metal capabilities of KeyCreator, complementing the geometry-based approach to design. ProFold simplifies the unfolding process, quickly developing the correct flat pattern while remaining within the design file. By using the information already in a sheet metal model, errors are quickly eliminated, saving valuable time and helping manufacturers meet tight production deadlines. The numerous features of ProFold described above are also available in versions for CADKEY and AutoCAD.

Solid models are easily unfolded with a click of the mouse. ProFold Solids stores your material and bend parameters in a database and automatically applies this data to the bends in your part. An interactive tree displays all the bends, allowing fine-tuning of the parameters for each. The tree is color coded, letting you know if the data was found in the database as well as whether the bend data is valid for that bend. ProFold Wireframe, included with ProFold Solids, unfolds 3D wireframe models of sheet metal parts.

For a 30-day trial of ProFold software as well as a training guide, visit appliedproduction.com.

The new Precision 380 workstation from Dell Inc. (Round Rock, TX) starts with a convertible mini-tower/desktop chassis design that’s easy to open up for adding new components. The new chassis includes rotating optical storage so that the correct orientation is presented to the user regardless of how the system is installed.

The heart of the Precision 380 is the Pentium 4 processor with up to 2MB L2 cache in addition to the Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 64-bit dual-core processor technology, or twice the CPU on a single socket. Intel Pentium 4 processors provide support for EM64T technology. (Hyperthreading, which might increase the performance of some applications, is available with some Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processors. Contact Dell for a complete explanation of this functionality.)

The Dell Precision 380 can support up to 8GB of memory. Other features include Intel 955X Express chipset, which supports up to four SATA II drives and RAID 0, 1,5,10; DDR2 ECC memory for reliable operation, and rack-mountable chassis. The Precision 380 will support Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64, when available.

Price: $2,567, to start. For more information, visit dell.com.