RealizeLive 2024 Day 2

I have to start by saying that this year’s event certainly looks to be about double the size of last year’s event. I don’t have any official numbers, but there were a lot of people in the room for the general session, and I had to sit on the floor because all the seats were taken. Anyway, it looks like the pandemic effect is finally losing its grip.

For the first time since I’ve been coming to these events, this year I was here early enough to make it to the main keynote. Thanks to the admin staff at Solid Edge who went the extra mile to make sure I got here early. I was able to hear what Mr. Hemmelgarn had to say about the big picture at Siemens and for the industrial world in general.

Mostly, Hemmelgarn’s vision is what I thought it was – integrating the digital applications from the top to the bottom so all data is as available as it needs to be and as secure as it needs to be. That might be an oversimplification, but it’s my take on his message.

His message also helped me realize another fact that is pretty obvious. Realizing the obvious is kind of my thing, but I’m more than just a self-deprecating imbecile. When I figure out what that is, I’ll be sure to write about it. Anyway, the other obvious fact that I realized is that as old as I feel, I’m not old enough to have been around for the earliest CAD products. I came on to the scene when CAD was really becoming a widely commercialized commodity, in the late 80s.

The thing about the CAD industry, or maybe from this distance we can start calling it the engineering technology industry, is that it has had a lifecycle just like the engineers that have grown up within it. We all start simple, grow to be experts, and then start broadening our horizons. CAD has done the same thing.

CAD started as simple geometry tools. Then grew into more specialized design and manufacturing tools. The design tools added 3D, assembly capabilities, BOMs and meta data. Then you had to pass data between programs to do manufacturing and analysis. Eventually those separate tools became integrated. And now companies like Siemens, Dassault, PTC and to a different extent Altair offer single platforms where you can look at your product, your facility, your process, distribution, repair, yada yada all as a single flow of physical items, data, people, ideas, and so forth. So if a big company does it, it is digitally documentable, and can be represented as what is being called this “digital thread”.

This isn’t a revelation so much as the inevitable outcome of the evolution of digitalization and the tendency of all things toward consolidation. The part of this process that I have bucked has been that it really tends to leave small enterprise and especially individuals behind. It focuses on the big picture, and small business is just a component and individuals are just spokes (or nuts as the case may be). We can contribute to the overall effect or success, but the industry has really grown beyond focusing on this part of the process. This blog, and indeed my career both started on the wave of technology that allowed the little guy to make a bigger difference. This was when the personal computer was a new thing, and fancy engineering technology was CAD that a single person could achieve something.

There are still areas where individuals and small organizations can contribute, but the focus especially of these conferences is on the big picture. This is why CAD conferences are now dead, or absorbed into these much higher level affairs.

The technology is still cool and exciting, but nobody headlines this conference with a new function in CAD. It’s all at a scale that you can even think of if you’re part of a larger group. Face it, PDM on its own is not really cool. Even Hemmelgarn in his keynote referenced the appeal that just making the geometry had on him early in his career, and was certainly a factor for me as well.

The individual rungs on the ladder to the dizzy heights are still being developed, and we still need people to use and talk about these developments. So while I may need to adjust my role to some extent, I can’t be that CAD Crier or the guy who rails against corporate consolidation anymore. Technology has evolved, and if I’m going to have a role within it, I must also evolve. I might be 15 years late in realizing it, but we still need people who can think outside the corporate drone lane, even if in the end it’s only to support the corporate drone lane.