Do you remember back in 1998, when NASA sent the Mars Climate Orbiter to study the atmosphere of the red planet? The Orbiter was also supposed to become a relay station for sending signals back to Earth from the Polar Lander, and hopes were high for a thorough examination of the planet.
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There was much hoopla at liftoff, but utter dismay when NASA flight controllers lost communication with the Orbiter. After a review, it turned out that the probe burned up in Mars’ upper atmosphere because of a units error: One program was sending data in non-metric, English system pounds instead of the metric newtons that another program was expecting. This miscalculation caused the Orbiter to pass too close to Mars and disintegrate.
The headlines were disastrous: Metric Confusion, NASA Flub, Probe Lost Due to Simple Math Error, and Math Goof Crashed NASA Probe. A contractor ultimately took responsibility for failing to do a units conversion check, but the image of the space program nosedived.
Your products may not be quite as complex (or failures quite so public) but the same principles apply. You need to create an environment where teams work independently when that’s most effective but periodically combine everything, regardless of source, to be absolutely sure that it all fits and performs as specified.
Today’s world is increasingly tending towards “design anywhere, build anywhere” with less and less control over the tools use in interim steps. You may use PTC Creo but your partners my not; your company may grow though acquisitions that don’t use the same CAD technology you do. Does it make more sense for everyone to use the same CAD system or work in their favorite tool? Often the question isn’t whether to consolidate on a single CAD system, it’s more a matter of whether it is even possible. Yes, a single CAD tool can cost less from an IT perspective, including in-house support and hardware. It also makes it more natural to reuse designs and components. But is it always the right strategy? Perhaps not. Designers are trained on their corporate tool set, so they’re most efficient using it and can be the most innovative with it, since an unfamiliar tool doesn’t get in the way of their creativity.
If your project team works in a heterogeneous environment, where everyone uses their native CAD solution, how can you gain some of the efficiencies of a homogeneous installation? With PTC Creo 3.0, Unite technology can improve collaboration because, regardless of the format in which data is created, users can open the design data, work with it and update to new versions.
Users will be able to open native CATIA, NX, and SolidWorks parts and assemblies, without buying or installing 3rd party software or converting data. PTC Creo 3.0 will create smoother collaboration workflows, which lead to more efficient work and fewer errors. Unite technology enables these different CAD formats to be used directly in PTC Creo apps, including PTC Creo Parametric, PTC Creo Direct, PTC Creo Simulate, and PTC Creo Options Modeler.
Just think what this means for concurrent engineering. Your engineers can incorporate native CAD data from suppliers or partners, whether created in Creo or not, into their designs, as early as that data is available. No one needs to wait for it to be put into a neutral format, and design intent isn’t lost. There are no time-consuming conversions, and no derivative file formats to manage. Perhaps most important: Unite can notify you that a colleague has updated the geometry in a CATIA, SolidWorks, and Siemens NX part, so that you can immediately take the appropriate actions, right inside of PTC Creo Parametric. Your work is not lost; you continue to collaborate around the most current design information. You can save these multi-CAD assemblies in your supplier’s format, enabling them to continue as well.
Fifteen years ago, NASA’s problem wasn’t a CAD problem, it was a collaboration problem. They had no way (or didn’t create a way) of testing whether the output from one subroutine was appropriate as input for another. They lost a $125 million Mars mission and became the target of many a late-night joke. The CAD analogy is fit: Does tab A fit into slot B? PTC Creo Unite technology can help you manage those intersections, regardless of the format of the original data.
Editor’s Note: Here’s a quick video that features NASA talking about a more recent — and more successful — launch of a Mars Orbiter:
