Company Adds Significant Functionality Throughout All Aspects of Its Integrated CAD/CAM/CAE Solution; Announces Support for New HD-PLM Technology Framework

PLANO, Texas & SHANGHAI — (BUSINESS WIRE) — May 19, 2010 — Siemens PLM Software, a business unit of the Siemens Industry Automation Division and a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services, today announced the latest enhancements added to NX™ software, the company’s integrated computer-aided design, manufacturing and engineering analysis (CAD/CAM/CAE) solution.

Presented at The World Exposition Shanghai China 2010 (Expo 2010), the latest enhancements to NX 7 include significant new functionality throughout all aspects of the software. In addition, NX, together with Teamcenter® software, Siemens PLM Software’s digital lifecycle management system, are the first products to support Siemens PLM Software’s new High Definition PLM (HD-PLM) technology framework, unveiled today in a separate announcement.

“Our new HD-PLM technology framework, delivers a visually intuitive environment in NX to enhance the decision making process throughout product development and create significant value for our customers and our industry,” said Joan Hirsch, vice president of Product Design Solutions, Siemens PLM Software. “The value of this release is further magnified not only by the strength of its many enhancements, but also for the balanced level of new functionality added throughout the software’s various product design, analysis and part manufacturing modules, which can produce end user productivity gains of as much as 80 percent.”

High definition decision making in product development

With the launch of the high definition 3D (HD3D) environment announced last year and enhanced in the latest release of NX, Siemens PLM Software begins to execute on its vision to instill HD-PLM technology into all of its enterprise solutions. HD3D unites the powers of NX and Teamcenter under the HD-PLM technology framework to visually and intuitively deliver the information necessary to understand, collaborate, and make decisions in a globally distributed product development environment.

HD3D delivers on the four tenets of HD-PLM with a product development decision support and analytics solution that personalizes the user’s experience by placing them in the proper context, assists proactively with task accomplishment to help make collaborative decisions, clarifies the user’s experience by presenting information intuitively and validates user decisions against established rationale. An efficient alternative to navigating and processing lists of attribute data and manually correlating them to 3D product models, HD3D enables the user to visually comprehend PLM data with interactive navigation, and to drill down to details as needed. Viewing a product’s 3D representation, users can easily get into the right context to instantly answer questions about project status, design changes, team responsibilities, issues, problems, cost, suppliers and other attributes. Color-coding, on-screen tagging and legends enable fast visual assessment and interpretation of product development issues and decision criteria.

HD3D also works with NX validation checking tools, providing direct visual interaction that accelerates the validation of product designs against requirements. Visually rich feedback allows the user to monitor critical functional requirements throughout development, supporting rapid decision making with a high level of confidence to ensure and maximize product quality.

“Siemens PLM Software has shifted up a gear with this release and is extending the HD-PLM concept with integration of HD3D across a wider spread of its product range,” said Al Dean, Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder, DEVELOP3D Magazine. “The ability to use NX and Teamcenter to visualize data often hidden inside a database in a graphically and contextually rich manner enables rapid assessment of a wide variety of product development issues and potential bottlenecks. That, in turn, allows everyone involved in the process to make informed decisions with a higher degree of confidence and much greater efficiency. This should result in a big productivity boost for their customers.”

Redefining product design productivity

In addition to its support of HD-PLM, NX 7 contains a wealth of new features and enhancements to redefine product development productivity. Enhancements to NX 7 within its tightly integrated CAD applications include rapid design tools such as streamlined sketch creation, extension of synchronous technology to transform freeform modeling and new DraftingPlus tools to dramatically enhance 2D design and drafting.

• New rapid design tools accelerate 2D profile creation and positioning, automatically inferring constraints and modeling intent. As result, the time needed to create models from scratch can be reduced by up to 50 percent.
• The integration of groundbreaking synchronous technology with NX freeform modeling dramatically alters the advanced shaping process by making it easy to work with any geometry, including imported models. Users can start with simple prismatic or analytic geometry and use advanced shaping tools to form complex organic models in significantly less time.
• Additional extensions of synchronous technology offer enhancements to patterned features, assemblies, thin-walled geometry, blends, chamfers, and streamlined methods for geometry re-use.
• NX DraftingPlus is a new set of design tools that further enhance the 2D functionality in NX and its integration with 3D models. A role-based interface puts the user in the right context for 2D design work, and robust functionality such as powerful curve creation and modification tools along with the ability to generate 3D geometry from 2D curves, eliminates steps and streamlines the product design process. NX DraftingPlus enables full, single-system integration of 2D and 3D design workflows, eliminating any need to use separate 2D CAD software.