Searching for Simplicity

Why is simplicity so valued and so difficult to find? It’s complicated. We’re hard-wired to want more, more, more ... until we have so much that we can’t keep track of what we have, much less use it all. Then we want only what we need, and we want it to come easy. That evolution sums up the paradox many engineering software developers face today. Software suites have to be packed with lots and lots of powerful features for all types of users, each of whom only wants (and only wants to pay for) easy access to the features they need.

But as another great mind, Bob Seger, asked “What to leave in, what to leave out?” Software developers, tired of running against the wind, have some ideas on how to answer that eternal question while simultaneously expanding their user base.

Divide and Conquer

Imagine if the applications in the Microsoft Office suite were all one program. You could check your email, update spreadsheets, polish your PowerPoint presentation and spellcheck your document all in the same place. Now imagine all you wanted to do was write a quick email, but the new message command was buried somewhere among the new worksheet, new slide and new document menus. There’s a happy (or at least content) medium in the suite, which incorporates a familiar user interface (UI) across the different programs to allow users to quickly switch among them. This, coupled with the ability to share data among the applications in the suite, satisfies most end users.

Many engineering software vendors take the same approach to divide CAD and different simulation types in their suites, for instance. In fact, they’re starting to make even more granular divisions. However, design engineers often use different software applications from different vendors, all of which have different UIs. This has led to an array of plugins and connectors that make it a challenge for developers to create a seamless and simple user interface.

It has also spawned a small industry of translation software providers to help end users move seamlessly from one format to another. It will be interesting to see what fruit the recent interoperability agreement between Siemens and Autodesk bears (see page 12). Perhaps other leading vendors will follow suit to help make their products more interoperable.

Customization and Control

The complexity of making the right features in CAD and simulation software available to the right users pales in comparison to what product lifecycle management (PLM) software developers face. PLM software is most useful when it is all things to all people — not just engineers from different disciplines, but people in different departments throughout an enterprise, often on a global scale. Simplicity is indeed the “ultimate sophistication” when it comes to PLM software.

At the Aras users’ conference, ACE 2016, held in Detroit last month, the company’s Founder and CEO, Peter Schroer, shared his thoughts on the challenges of simplicity when it comes to the systems-level thinking today’s product engineering demands.

“This is getting really complicated, very, very quickly,” he said of system design. “The products we’re building have become just too complicated to think about without thinking about the whole system.”

The “system” includes not only how all parts of the product work together, but how the product is packaged, used and serviced. According to Schroer, systems engineering is PLM. That’s a lot for a software tool to connect, especially when it all needs to be accessed by different people for different purposes.

Schroer said he has recently come to the conclusion that all that data can’t be addressed by one system. “I’m starting to believe that we need to think about a two-level architecture,” he told ACE attendees. “There is a very real reason to buy a PDM (product data management) system.” The PDM architecture that is designed to manage 3D CAD file configurations is not the same architecture that is needed to drive the business of engineering processes.

How would those two architectures be linked together? Schroer didn’t say. However, he did address the challenge of presenting that information to end users. “We need a very simple interface, but we need to handle very complex topics,” he said. “We have got to create a system that just simply works, that engineers can enjoy working in PLM.”

So the search for simplicity continues, but a later ACE presentation showed one example of a simple user interface that connects to a world of complexity: Google.com.