Productivity Summit in Boston

Boston is one of my favorite American cities. There is so much there, and so much going on. It’s a great college town, and has a personality all its own. Its a great combination of history and modern development, tradition, and discovery. Old and New. And it was the site of the latest Solid Edge Productivity Summit.

Well, it really happened in the suburb of Westborough, which isn’t nearly as interesting, but I flew in to Boston, and at least sped by some of the landmarks.

These meetings are a great chance for you to meet some of the people who really drive the Solid Edge product, and who can make things happen within the company. Karsten Newbury, Dan Staples, and several others were at this event, and they aren’t shy about talking to real end users.

For me, this was a good event to see some real Solid Edge users. It was nice to be in an environment where I was more or less anonymous. To most of the people there, I was just another guy with a name tag. Solid Edge University had a lot of high profile users, but most at this meeting (aside from Bob Mileti and Steve Lussier) were not. With that sort of user, I was very interested to see some of the “raise your hand if…” sort of polls that some of the speakers took.

One poll of this sort was to ask how many users were using Synchronous capabilities. I’d say it was less than 10%. There are several things to take from that. The first is that it is possible for a CAD company to make a huge change to their product, but not disrupt their customer’s preferred way of working. These guys are obviously still interested in Solid Edge, because they came out to spend a whole day of their time talking about it. But they can still work the way they are used to if that is what they want to do. I agree that for most things, Synchronous is a better way to work, but I’m not running these people’s businesses for them, and neither is Siemens. It’s great that they can continue to get support, and get updates and to work with their preferred methods, and don’t have to make a choice whether to dump their old CAD software or gut their entire design process. Vendors that force you into that kind of change are not the kind of vendors I want to work with. Dan Staples made a point of standing up and specifically saying that “ordered is not going away”. I think he also said this at SEU.

Solid Edge seemed interested in establishing their reliability. In these days when CAD vendors might just change the whole concept of your CAD tool to suit future users at the cost of present users, reliability is in short supply. One of the slides in Dan’s presentation established that Solid Edge is now on a yearly release cycle. ST4 was released in July 2011. ST5 was in July 2012, and ST6 will be in July 2013. This kind of thing gives customers some comfort, knowing generally what to expect, and when. The discussion around ST6 has been largely about surfacing, but Dan made it clear that it is still the stated goal for Solid Edge to be the best mechanical design tool available. Solid Edge still sees their strengths as being sheet metal, large assembly tools, and world class drawing creation. Surfacing has a place within the overall mechanical design topic, but machine design is likely to remain the first priority, with mechanical product design as a secondary.

The primary mission of these meetings is to offer users some productivity tips; stuff that you can use in a practical way from day to day. They covered both synchronous and ordered, and took questions from the audience. They were focusing on enhancements in ST5, but talked about things that existed prior to ST5 as well.

Another of the “raise your hand if…” polls asked about what people were using for file management. I’d say 5% were using TeamCenter, and maybe 10% were using Insight, with everybody else using local or network drives. Dan asked this question before launching into a description of what’s new in Insight XT. I’m not as familiar with this stuff as I should be, but Insight ships with Solid Edge Classic, the basic, lowest cost version. Insight XT is obviously going to cost a little more, but it will also do a lot more. This hasn’t been a focus for me, or I would have more to say here.

I have some other insights that I gained from Ilya Nazarenko, the Siemens employee from the Connecticut office who did the main part of the technical demonstration. He had a lot of great stuff to say. That part of it is important enough to get a separate post of its own. I’ll get back to that, but I have some other things I want to include here.

One of the other main topics of this summit meeting was “community”. We’re all aware that if the Solid Edge product is going to move forward, community is going to be a part of creating that success. At the end of the meeting, Karsten made some announcements about an effort to start a user-led group to have meetings on a regular schedule to help people learn the software in more depth.

Local user groups are an important ingredient for success. They get and keep people involved and excited. They educate, and possibly remove some tech support burden. They are also a great way to help spread the word. From the user’s point of view, it’s also nice to get news from your peers rather than from people with primarily sales in mind. User groups can also help you develop personal skills like public speaking, leadership, web authoring, and what not. Plus, it’s just nice to get together from time to time with people who share some common interests.

So I think this was an excellent event. I learned a lot about the software, saw presentations I didn’t get to see in Nashville, and I got to make some new friends. It was a good investment of a day. If you are interested in finding out about more of these events, visit the Siemens website for events and webinars.

And finally, Solid Edge is getting ready to announce a program to help get armed services veterans back in the swing of things here at home. They will provide free training and a free license of Solid Edge Premium for veterans through the Still Serving Veterans program. This kind of thing is important to me. I’m a veteran, although I never risked life or limb (I was a musician in the Navy in the late 1980s), and my brother did a tour in Iraq. It’s hard to adapt to civilian life, especially when the economy is already down. If you know someone who might be interested in taking advantage of a program like this, put them in touch with Still Serving Veterans.