SDRC Ships I-DEAS 8
17 July 2000
New Collaboration Solution Leverages the Internet for e-Design Automation
ORLANDO, Fla. - SDRC , a global supplier of e-business collaboration solutions for the product lifecycle, today announced at the ICCON 2000 users conference the immediate availability of I-DEAS 8(a), a major software release to enable e-design automation. I-DEAS 8 features a new set of collaboration solutions, which allows customers to leverage the Internet across the entire product lifecycle, providing the type of communication environment that leads to greater product optimization. Additionally, I-DEAS 8 eliminates the differentiation between high-end and mid-range modelers by providing the first, truly scalable, best-in-class offering for all involved in product development. For details, please see SDRC's press release(b) dated March 13, 2000.ICCON 2000 Chairman, Bob Brown of Lucent Technologies, said, "SDRC has continued to show increased commitment to the development of I-DEAS and to the CAD/CAM/CAE market overall. It's important to us, the customers, to be confident that SDRC will help us to evolve our product development processes by taking advantage of new technology and industry standards."
"As evidenced by the positive experiences of our customers, I-DEAS 8 is setting a new standard in our industry for web-enabled mechanical design automation," said Bill Weyand, chairman and CEO, SDRC. "SDRC has been helping the world's leading manufacturers solve their toughest product development challenges for more than three decades. This heritage, combined with the invaluable input from our customers, enables us to continually enrich our products to meet the constantly accelerating demand for right-to-market, high quality, customer-driven products."
At numerous beta sites around the globe, I-DEAS 8 has been successfully deployed in production environments.
"SDRC's new 3D annotation tool, I-DEAS Master Notation, is very exciting," said Mohamad Samadi, CAD/CAM support, Lexmark International. "At Lexmark, we're moving away from drawings and becoming more solid-centric. Master Notation will help us achieve that goal, and will provide us with a shorter development cycle."
"At ESI, we deal with extremely large assemblies, and we have many engineers in our product development teams," said Laila Hirr, engineering services manager, Electro Scientific Industries. "We're very pleased to see the performance improvements in I-DEAS 8, particularly in the data management area. These will enable collaborative engineering to succeed by allowing our engineers to do their data transactions faster."
ZF, the world's largest independent specialist for driveline and chassis technology, has recognized clear benefits with the I-DEAS 8 product simulation functionality for their preprocessing requirements. "I-DEAS 8 brings significant enhancements to our finite element analysis process," said Dr. Klaus Kelkel, senior manager Technical Calculations, ZF. "In particular, we are leveraging the section meshing technology to significantly reduce the time required to perform the finite element modeling of proposed designs. With I-DEAS 8, we are gaining approximately 30% savings in process time for preprocessing. We are really pleased with these results."
"The mold design enhancements are definitely a big plus for us," said Mark Zeiner, senior CAD/CAM specialist at Ethicon Endo-Surgery. "The VGX core cavity development tools and the automatic parting line generator are really going to save a lot of time for users working with molds or anyone doing core and cavity development work. The beauty of the way the system works is that it's concurrent. The designer's part is taken all the way through core and cavity detail and will update automatically if there are further design modifications."
"Carter Holt Harvey is a plastics manufacturer," said Keith Irvine, CAM specialist, "My job is to program machine tools to cut molds. This is a complex job, and while we've been able to create a robust tool path, we haven't had a lot of control over the finer details of how the tool path runs. With the control that has been added in I-DEAS 8, it allows me to make the toolpath do exactly what I want, with fewer steps."
Availability
I-DEAS 8 is available in eight languages worldwide: English, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and traditional Chinese. For local and international pricing, contact SDRC's worldwide network of local representatives and distributors.
About SDRC
SDRC (Structural Dynamics Research Corporation) is a global provider of e-business collaboration solutions for the product lifecycle. The Company's products address the areas of e-Design Automation, Product Knowledge Management, and Collaborative Product Commerce. Coupled with process engineering and consulting services, the Company's solutions facilitate innovation through collaboration, enabling industry leaders to optimize product development early in the design process, increase productivity, and significantly improve time-to-market. SDRC employs more than 2,500 people worldwide, with 77 offices in 18 countries throughout North America, Europe, and Asia/Pacific.