COFES 2010: Mike Payne responds

A few days ago, I posted a few thoughts about this year’s COFES, including my take on a brief presentation given by Mike Payne. Mike graciously responded and below is his email in its entirety. He makes a number of good points: Monica, I had condensed the talk down to the required 18minutes, so I may not have explained myself as well as could have, so that I would like to clarify some of the points that you made: ·  I do not doubt that many, if not all,  mechanical object can be modeled with feature-based parametric modeling products, or 2D drafting, but rather the 3D tools of today mostly exclude the engineers, the designers. Companies do not buy these tools, by and large, for engineers, but rather CAD operators, who spend their whole life using these products. And, some of the modeling can be very complex, requiring very skilled people. Hence at the CATIA user group, which in North America is called the CATIA Operators Exchange (now just COE) there is a “Top Gun” contest to see who can solve the modeling problem the fastest. The majority of the current CAD products could be likened to the original word processing where people got trained in the Wang word processor, and only they were able to write a letter. This all changed with Microsoft Word. Everyone can write a letter. · While many objects can be modeled, a design process is iterative, and concepts need to be changed. The regeneration problem inherent in feature-based modelers means that sometimes the change will fail. · An aircraft manufacturer is an example of a company who needs to archive designs for decades. This archiving cannot be in the binary form of the CAD product, neither the computers, nor the software, nor the operating system will allow for retrieval. So, they archive it in STEP. The problem with that is that all they can do is to look at it. They cannot make any changes with the feature based modeling tools. So, if they have a need to run simulations, make design changes, etc, they may need to rebuild the model in a current system. · It is not startling that only 5% CAD operators have university degrees. It would be startling if 95% did. 3D in mechanical CAD covers only about 20% of the possible users, because it is so expensive to buy and to own. Younger people coming out of school and university are accustomed to pretty sophisticated 3D in games and other things. What they see is industry is much less so. Obviously, this is all just my view, but the key point is that the job of producing CAD that can be used by all of the stakeholders without a huge amount of training is not yet done, and that this is the challenge for the future. After all the Congress On the Future of Engineering Software should all be about that. And yes, all of the tools should work together, and not just the ones from one vendor. Mike Mr. Payne is a founder and currently Chairman of the Board of Directors, SpaceClaim Corporation. His engineering software resume is long, including leadership positions at Spatial Corp., Dassault Systèmes, SolidWorks and PTC. He is also the 2010 recipient of the CAD Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award at COFES.