Cultivating Innovation (cont.)
If there's no shortage of ideas, then how can a company become more innovative in taking advantage of its best ones? This question also generates a multitude of other business considerations when striving for higher levels of innovation.
- How to innovate less expensively without sacrificing quality
- How to maintain innovation while expanding the company's product offerings
- How to sustain growth
- How to quickly respond to market demands
- How to build in continuous improvement and repeatable success into the product development process
On September 15, UGS announced the availability of NX 3, the latest release of the company's software solution for digital product development. The release of NX 3 reflects what is a clear and consistent investment strategy at UGS - to provide digital product development solutions that transform the entire product development process. NX 3 is the most significant release yet to deliver on this strategy. For the first time, all participants in the product development process can use a single digital model synchronized within a single managed collaborative environment, from planning through engineering into manufacture.
NX 3 will dramatically change the playing field with enabling technologies that directly support innovation.
- NX 3 cultivates innovation by enabling companies to quickly evaluate many product alternatives as possible and eliminate those that don't meet requirements.
- NX 3 advances innovation by helping companies re-use proven, existing knowledge in the generation of new products.
- NX 3 encourages innovation by allowing companies to easily simulate and validate each product concept as early as possible in the process where cost impact is minimized.
"With the release of NX 3, UGS continues to expand its very broad technology offering as part of its overall product strategy," said John MacKrell, senior consultant, CIMdata, Inc. "NX 3 provides a platform for product development that spans from initial customer requirements through to product retirement in a single, unified solution that is integrated with a comprehensive data, process and program management environment. Demands for innovation, higher quality and lower costs are making new product introductions more and more challenging; and in turn, increasingly causing companies to understand the value of a collaborative enterprise approach - an approach that UGS continues to support and deliver."
A number of areas are setting NX 3 apart from the competition.
NX 3 delivers a unified solution set from concept to manufacture where seamless application integration rapidly propagates changes of product and process information within a managed development environment. It provides users with hundreds of user-driven enhancements in all areas of the portfolio.
The NX Managed Development Environment - powered by Teamcenter - ensures that essential core data management capabilities are delivered with every NX application. This enables all of the information and knowledge generated during the product definition process to be captured and managed. It is a scalable solution - from simple vaulting to engineering process management, continuous digital validation, multi-site integration, requirements management and manufacturing planning. Customers can implement these solutions in stages, and each solution will deliver incremental return on investment.
NX 3 is built on UGS' unique knowledge-driven automation framework for capturing and managing organizational knowledge and automating workflows through repeatable processes. This transforms product development from the wasteful creativity of non-repeatable processes to automated design processes that maximize engineering and part re-use. NX 3 also delivers major improvements in design productivity that directly impact process efficiency and ultimately reduce wasted effort during the product lifecycle.
NX 3 fully integrates a solution suite for product simulation, validation and optimization to simulate systems' behavior across the entire product development process. Organizations can automatically validate every step, during the early part of the development process where changes are less expensive. This transforms product development from the waste of physical test and prototypes into closed loop repeatable validation at every development step.
The system based modeling functionality of NX 3 allows engineers to manage complex product relationships, facilitating configuration control, change management and complete platform engineering. This allows organizations to take product development away from component and assembly design into top-down conceptual design, while applying systems engineering methods.
"New product introductions become ever more complex in the face of demands for shorter development cycles, compounded by extremely high quality requirements. Companies will gain or loss market share based on their ability to bring innovative, high quality products to market quickly - certainly more rapidly than their competitors. In fact, for some it is not simply a question of shifting market share, it is a question of survival. The stakes are extraordinary and serious. Hundreds of thousands of jobs depend upon the outcome."2
NX is the only solution that will enable clients to effectively transform their product development processes and address the competitive challenges of creating products that meet customer demands.
We are most excited about the benefits NX 3 brings to our clients, but its release also marks an important milestone for UGS as a company. On October 1, we celebrate the third anniversary of SDRC and the former UGS coming together as a single organization and the starting point of bringing together the best features of I-deas and Unigraphics under the NX umbrella. In the beginning there were many voices in industry who said it would be too great a challenge. What they didn't see at the time was our focus, our commitment to do the right thing for our clients and the energy and dedication of our employees. Today we are on schedule with our NX migration and stronger than ever as an organization. NX 3 stands as an example of what we can accomplish together and an indicator of what you can expect from us as we continue to advance our full PLM product portfolio.
1 Reference: G. Stevens and J. Burley, "3000 Raw Ideas = 1 Commercial Success!" Research Technology Management, May-June, 1997.
2 Reference: Collaborative Product Development Associates, LLC, "Agents of Change," Donald M. Brown, 2004.
