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[noorjehan]

Hi,


I am Noorjehan from India. I am not an engineer. I work as a Business Analyst for the the Indian arm of a software company based in the u.s. We are soon going to launch a product in India which is a modeling tool. Hence, I am currently researching on various tools such as Solidworks, Pro-E, SolidEdge, Catia, Rhino and some others. Ihave4 qs, if someone can be kind enough to answer them.


1. Can Pro-E be used to design an entire working system like a car or just parts of it?


2. At what stage of the engineering cycle do you use Pro-E? Conception?design?


3.Can you please list 5 features of Pro-E in order of their importance to you?


And last, 4. What features of a new tool will make you shift from the one you are currently using?


Awaiting a reply,


Thanks!


Noorjehan

 

[Checkmate]

1 yes you can design a whole car


2 i use it at the reification stage / detailing and producing designs


3most important extrude, revolve, boundary blend, style, solidify, all the tools in it are important really


4 not sure

 

[dojo]

4) pro/e with a cheaper list price

 

[design-engine]

1. Can Pro/E be used to design
an entire working system like a car or just parts of it?



entire system? Electronics included? excluding the chip set and
much of the electronics. No. But the mechanical structures.



2. At what stage of the engineering
cycle do you use Pro/E? Conception? design?

Pro/E is good at the conceptual thru to manufacturing. You forgot 'engineeing and manufacturing'.



3.Can you please list 5 features of
Pro/E in order of their importance to you?

tech support, background color (joking) 1. surfacing, 2
ease of use, 3 manufacturing capability, 5 everyone uses it.




And last, 4. What features of a new
tool will make you shift from the one you are currently using?

background color, tech support, (joking) I could make a list
for each module of Pro/E. For surfacing specifically I would like
to see the ability to modify curve vertices on separate curves at the same
time. Since Pro/E is a feature based modeler by definition you can't
modify like that. I would like to see internal cvs on a surface modifiability
like in IGES edit definition. I could talk for hours about this
kind of stuff. a. I want to be able to modify separate curves at the same time but by definition Pro/E is a feature based modeler and you cant do that. b. I want to be able to manipulate cvs of a surface and not be limited to the outer boundary curves on four part boundaries and have my parent child relationshop to the curves hold true still. c. I want to be able to sketch on surface (you can currently do it in Pro/SURFACE now but it don't modify well) and be able to modify it like in ISDX. d. more ISDX and Pro/SURFACE tools inside of IGES edit definition. I want a shading function that will shade a randum shade of silver to each separate surface patch for evaluation.


I wish sheetmetal forms would stretch so my masprops was acurate.


I wish PTC would have bought Alias Studio than
Autodesk.







tought hill to climb
It is going to be tough to do. Your up against all the top 500
companies changing CAD systms. The only way Solidwrks sales people can encourage a manufactuer to change is to lie to them about cost or functionality. And PTC is still quite aggressive in their
software development programs. Solidworks made their mark by
developing the software for the moms and pops and small shops. It does most of what
generic folks want. <st1:city w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">It fits nice under the Bell</st1lace></st1:city>
Curve.



Pro/ENGINEER does that .3 percent of each end of the bell curve.






give it away
if you give your software away like Autodesk did with Autocad. Well.... they looked the other way on software piracy and all the college kids pireted autocad 1990 to current. Once the engineers got into a manufactuer the managers asked them what software they wanted and they chose Autocad. This kind of dummy thing will not work in this more mature end of the CAD development cycle. Solidworks followed that model in the mid 90's and took some new engineers in school. But solidworks does not have much of the market as they want you to think. The job openings are mostly Pro/E.





Milk it!
If I were you I
would milk the sh*t out of your company and
bill them as much as you can because your up against a tall
mountain. Although PTC could slow their aggressive development
process like alias studio did and let a 1000 USD product like Rhino to
gain on
use and price. You might get it. Rome took a thousand years to fall
from being the leader. PTC has been criticized for spending
their development budget on PDM efforts and not on ease of use and
functionality. Give up and come to the states and work on something really cool like google.

My 2 cents.





Edited by: design-engine