<img src="http://www.66infra-strat.com/79795.png?trk_user=79795&amp;trk_tit=jsdisabled&amp;trk_ref=jsdisabled&amp;trk_loc=jsdisabled" height="0px" width="0px" style="display:none;">

Concurrent Engineering Blog

4 Creo Extensions on Our Christmas list

Posted by Emma Rudeck on 09-Dec-2016 13:00:00

list-786213-edited.jpg

What’s on your Christmas list? Aside from the inevitable pairs of socks and mini toolsets that’ll get thrown into a drawer never to be seen again, we have our festive sights set on multi-CAD collaboration tools.


Specifically, the collaboration extensions for Creo have got us rather excited, due to their ability to enable collaboration between teams during the product development process.


The prospect of working together isn’t new, of course, but engineering teams are long overdue tools that negate the need to retread old ground and duplicate work as designs change. This encourage the reuse and sharing of data and fosters a culture of concurrent engineering, which is why Creo’s latest extensions couldn’t arrive soon enough.


Perhaps most importantly, collaboration enables products to be built to the highest quality, complete with innovative design and a speedy time to market. And which engineering firm doesn’t want that?


In this post, we’ll take a brief look at each extension and consider how they could benefit your operation.


The PTC Creo extensions are available in four formats, with each one providing two-way collaboration for a specific third party CAD platform. They are as follows:


  1. Creo Collaboration Extension for CATIA V4
  2. Creo Collaboration Extension for CATIA V5
  3. Creo Collaboration Extension for Siemens NX
  4. Creo Collaboration Extension for SolidWorks

Each extension supports a number of languages including English, German, French and Japanese and makes collaboration across multi-CAD environments much easier.


Users can create, edit and maintain models across different platforms with any changes to the design and inherent relationships automatically updated without any human intervention. Parts and assemblies can both be exchanged bidirectionally, associative updates processed and native data imported and exported without the need for licenses for the supported third party CAD platforms.


Collaboration works best when it takes place early within the design process, and often, as ideas develop. Unfortunately, the traditional way to do this when multiple CAD environments were involved would be a very manual affair. As a result, the ability to preserve design intent was challenging and, often, prohibitive.


Key benefits of the Creo Collaboration Extensions

 

With the addition of any of the four collaboration extensions, PTC Creo addresses the challenge of preserving design intent across multiple platforms. It does this by ensuring that revisions to designs in Siemens NX, CATIA or SolidWorks platforms are automatically incorporated into live Creo models.


Beyond the time saving benefits and significant reduction in design errors, all four extensions offer the following benefits:


  • Encouraged design reuse and sharing
  • Higher levels of concurrent engineering are possible as non-Creo data is automatically incorporated throughout the design process
  • The impact of late-stage design changes is greatly reduced
  • The ability to ensure consistency and integrity throughout the design process increases the ability to deliver products on time and to spec
  • Updates to designs are seamless with design intent maintained across models, regardless of which platform they were originally created on
  • The need to create and look after neutral formats is greatly reduced as the most common 3D CAD formats are supported
  • No additional CAD software or customised integrations across platforms are required

To us, that’s a rather bumper Christmas stocking. Anything that enables engineering to take place quickly and more coherently makes our list, and Creo’s new collaboration extensions remove an inordinate amount of hassle from the design process.

 

Register for a Creo 4.0 Free Trial alert