Parametric Technology Debuts Pro/Engineer 2000I2, its B2B Internet Solution
Building on the company's strategy to provide solutions that promote flexible engineering, Parametric Technology Corp. (PTC; Waltham, MA) has introduced Pro/Engineer 2000I2. This major software release features 440+ enhancements to help make product development processes more responsive, innovative, and connected to customers and strategic suppliers.
"A staggering amount of the world's intellectual capital — from aerospace and automotive engineering to simple product packaging — resides inside Pro/Engineer designs," stated Jon Stevenson, PTC's general manager and senior vice president, M/CAD. "With Pro/Engineer 2000i2, we are now making it possible for our customers to more easily reuse their existing design work, as well as work more closely with their customers and partners over the Internet, to deliver more innovative products."
This new release is part of the i-Series of flexible engineering solutions, which spans the product development enterprise process and include conceptual design, styling, design and engineering, simulation, planning, manufacturing, and in-service support.
PTC believes that manufacturing organizations should adopt flexible engineering strategies to survive and prosper. Thus, the basis of the company's engineering approach is built on three "must-haves": responsiveness, innovation, and connectivity.
Beefing up B2B
This new release offers a variety of enhancements that support these strategies. Let's review them.
• Ease of Use. The release contains major upgrades in selection, sketching, assemblies, feature creation, entity modification, design configuration, model tree operations, and more, giving the user a more powerful, full-featured Pro/E to learn and use.
• Windows 2000 Certification. As the first 3D design and engineering system to be Windows 2000 certified, Pro/E 2000i2 delivers deployment, accessibility, and total cost of ownership benefits.
• Design for Six Sigma. The software's patent-pending behavior modeling technology contains multi-objective design studies that promote the complete blending of design criteria, giving users the ability to create innovative, robust products.
• Distributed Computing. The tool now has the ability to delegate the parallel processing of complex design exploration and synthesis problems within its behavioral modeling technology to multiple desktop PCs or data center servers across the Internet.
• Feature Agility. Design features dynamically adapt to major changes by intelligently interpreting placement and construction intent. Minimizing manual feature redefinition, this upgrade facilitates engineering productivity, supports maximum design reuse, and allows substantial automatic customization of standard products.
• Shape Indexing. With this feature, proprietary shape characterization and search technology lets users find similar designs previously created by anyone, anywhere in the enterprise, in seconds, for increased design reuse, reduced redundant effort, and lower cost.
• Visual Search. Extremely fast visual browsing is possible via the software's new remote 3D data streaming and proprietary multi-threaded graphics technology, including local disks and across the Internet. Ultra-large assemblies can be quickly visually navigated for selection of sub-components and fly-through and selection occurs quickly while the level of graphic detail is gradually refined. In addition, network traffic and user waiting time for browsing large assemblies is trimmed.
• Multi-system Integration. Improvements in the tool's associative topology bus (ATB) technology makes it easier to exchange data and change propagation between Pro/E and CADDS 5i, ICEM Surf, CDRS, Pro/Desktop, and CATIA. Other upgrades such as high-order Bezier surface support, server-side automation, and data management integration facilitate operation in a heterogeneous design environment and communication with suppliers and customers using various M/CAD systems.
Flexible Engineering for Collaborative E-Commerce
Based on the company's Pro/E software and its Global Services program, which includes training, consulting, support, and e-commerce services to customers, the i-Series flexible design and engineering solutions address collaborative product commerce engineering initiatives. The series, underpinned by the company's Windchill product, also features Pro/Mechanica, Division, Pro/Desktop, ICEM, CDRS, InPart, CADDS 5i, and MEDUSA.
PTC develops, markets, and supports collaborative product commerce solutions that help manufacturing companies shape innovation and achieve sustainable competitive advantage. These B2B e-commerce solutions employ powerful Web-based collaboration and flexible engineering technologies to streamline product development and delivery processes.
For more information, contact PTC, 128 Technology Dr., Waltham, MA 02453. Tel: 781-398-5000; Fax: 781-398-6000.