Cutting-edge technology helped bring together both new and veteran PTC/USER members at the 2004 World Event in June. “Discover,” the theme of our fifteenth annual conference, drew 1,310 design professionals from over 20 nations to Nashville’s incredible Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center. Experts from the user community, PTC, and our Industry Partners presented over 80 technical sessions during the three-and-a-half days of the conference. While it’s impossible to adequately summarize the breadth and depth of these sessions, here are some highlights from this year’s PTC/USER World Event.
Through IBM’s sponsorship, PTC/USER introduced an exciting and innovative technology to enhance the conference experience for attendees. The nTAG interactive badge system, with its electronic display screen and RF technology, offered a number of previously unavailable features. For example, the system helped match attendees according to shared interests, based on profiles completed during the registration process. When two attendees met, the nTAG badges would automatically display any common interests along with some additional information about each individual. In addition, the system allowed attendees to send messages to each other using the public kiosks—a big improvement over the old method of tacking a note to a corkboard in the lobby and hoping that someone would see it. Conference-goers were also able to view and personalize their daily session agendas, exchange electronic business cards with other conference-goers and exhibitors, and provide their opinions on each presentation.
The nTAG badges were designed in Pro/ENGINEER
Over 80% of the attendees preferred the nTAG badges over paper ones, although there were some complaints about the weight of the units. Happily, nTAG is expected to introduce a significantly lighter generation of the badges in time for next year’s World Event.
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Adoption of Wildfire by our members is advancing rapidly and this is borne out by the results of our first nTAG poll question. About 46% of attendees are using either Wildfire 1.0 (33%) or 2.0 (13%), and 45% are still using 2001. (We also asked some questions using the nTAG system purely for amusement. I won’t repeat the results here except to say there are entirely too many “Barney” fans in the audience.)
Tuesday’s nTAG poll revealed attendees were divided on their most urgent concerns, with reducing time-to-market getting 32% of the vote. The remainder was split among improving quality (26%), reducing costs (25%), and production moving offshore (14%).
The final nTAG question polled opinions about where PTC should focus its attention. Over half (56%) of respondents said that improving software quality and robustness was most important, followed by decreasing the cost of software licenses and maintenance (22%). Although PTC has made significant strides to address software quality issues, it’s clear that users believe that efforts in this critical area must continue.
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If attendance is any measure, Monday’s most popular topics (in no particular order) were “Another Tool for Top-Down Design—The Inheritance Feature” and “Mastering Selection, Flying through the Dashboard and Animating Your Assemblies.” Product Update Briefings for Core Modeling, Drafting and Simulation were especially well-attended, although the PUBs for Sheetmetal, Pro/INTRALINK and Customization also had sizable audiences.
Tuesday’s most popular sessions included “User-Defined Features: From Mystery to Magic,” “Do’s and Don’ts of Migrating from Pro/INTRALINK to PDMLink,” “Using Wildfire a Different Way: Proving Design Form, Ridiculously Robust for Any Designer,” “Large Assembly Management 101,” “Managing and Driving Models Using Skeleton Assemblies, BMX and MDX,” and the Wildfire Usability and Training PUB.
Wednesday’s most attended sessions were “Jell-O® Molds and Cookie Cutters: Shrinkwrap is Not Just for Leftovers,” “Paperless is Coming: Are You Ready?,” “Is Your Business Ready for a Model-Centric Engineering Process?,” “Mapkey Magic,” “Migrating CAD Data into Windchill,” “High Performance Global Design with Pro/INTRALINK,” and “Implementing a Standardized Multi-Site Pro/ENGINEER Environment.”
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The Exhibit Hall was crowded throughout the 2004 World Event
On Sunday night, “Dolly” and “Garth” were on hand to greet attendees for the grand opening of the Exhibit Hall. Delicious food and drink were consumed in great quantities while banjo and fiddle players provided an appropriate backdrop for the evening’s festivities. With exhibits covering over 22,000 square feet of the vast Ryman Hall, this was the biggest PTC/USER tradeshow in several years.
Many of the most important names in the technology world participated, including Adobe Systems, HP, IBM, Intel and Sun Microsystems. Sun also sponsored the Cyber Café where attendees could check e-mail and surf the web. In cooperation with our Industry Partners, PTC/USER launched an exclusive member discount program at the conference, with opportunities to save hundreds to thousands of dollars on software and hardware purchases.
Jim Heppelmann, PTC’s Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Software Solutions, took the stage on Monday morning to outline the company’s vision of software technology and the direction of its products. Jim described expected enhancements in upcoming releases of Pro/ENGINEER and provided a live demonstration of new features in Wildfire and Windchill “Link” solutions. The debut of multiple undo and redo of Pro/E commands brought a spontaneous round of applause from the audience. Attendees Kelly Bryant and Edwin Muirhead have posted a report on these new features and plans on our website at www.ptcuser.org/2004/reports.html.
In the afternoon, CEO Dick Harrison and Senior Vice President Brian Shepherd presented a review of the state of PTC Corporate. Their talk was followed by a brief question-and-answer session with all of the PTC senior executives on hand. In a bit of nTAG fun, the attendees got to choose their favorite PTC executive; Jim narrowly edged out Brian with 31% of the vote for the top spot.
On Tuesday, attendees learned about the use of Pro/ENGINEER in the design and manufacture of NASCAR race vehicles. Team Engineer David Holden explained how Richard Childress Racing applied PTC technology to solve many of the challenges from modeling and simulation to machining. RCR builds virtually every part used on their vehicles, designing bodies in about seven days and building a complete car in three to four weeks. Talk about short product cycles! David also talked about RCR’s plans to incorporate more advanced technology into the development process, including computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and more sophisticated kinematics simulation.
After a year’s hiatus, the Tips & Tricks session returned to the 2004 World Event in a new format. Drawing on submissions from the Regional User Groups and from an open competition, the session showcased 14 technical tips from 9 finalists—each of whom will receive a check for $250 from PTC/USER. Clay Martin of Clay Martin Consulting and Ted Bradshaw, PTC/USER Director of Education, presented each tip in a very dynamic session. While it’s no small feat to switch on the fly between demonstrations of Pro/E 2001 and Wildfire, Clay made it all look easy.
Attendees chose Ronnie Shand of Parametric Solutions in Jupiter, Florida as the overall Tips & Tricks Contest winner. [Editor's Note: Due to a judging error, Dan Moran (see below) was declared a "co-winner" of the contest and shares the honors with Ronnie Shand.] His submission, “How to Automatically Color Machined Features in a Casting,” was the overwhelming favorite with over 41% of the votes. This simple but powerful tip details how to use Pro/E’s ability to color features selectively. By first coloring the entire model in the “casting” color and then “painting” the outside surfaces in a different color, machined features are automatically and clearly revealed as they are created. Dan Moran in Lexington, South Carolina was voted runner-up with his entry, “Creating a Straight Instance of a Bent Tube,” a complex but useful tip involving relations, user-defined parameters, and family tables.
Step-by-step instructions for all of these great techniques will be featured in upcoming issues of Profiles Magazine. We wish to thank PTC for sponsoring the prizes awarded to all of our regional semi-finalists. This year was a great kickoff to the new version of the Tips & Tricks Contest and we look forward to even more participation in 2005.
This has been a year of important change for PTC/USER. Four senior Board members are stepping down over the next few months, and we took a moment during the Wednesday luncheon to recognize these individuals for their contributions.
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Ron McCuskey (Board member 1994-2004) completed his term as Past President this year. Ron has served on the PTC/USER Board in various capacities, including Vice President and President. We will miss Ron’s wealth of knowledge and experience that we’ve depended upon for so long, but hope to see him at Pro/GOLF Tournaments. |
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Linda Rodda of Motorola (Board member 1999-2004) will transition out of her role as Secretary/Treasurer over the next six months. Linda has also served as Director of Regional User Groups and has been an important force on the Board during a very tumultuous time. |
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Don Patterson of Harris Corporation (Board member 1991-2004) has been with PTC/USER almost from the start. As the key person in setting up the first e-mail exploder for technical discussions, he established a service that continues to help thousands of PTC professionals every day. Don also launched the PTC/USER website in the very early days of the Internet (even before PTC did). Don served as Vice President and President for several years and moved PTC/USER past some significant challenges for both the organization and the membership. |
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Pierre Quesnel of Nortel Networks (Board member 1992-2004) has also been a fixture on the Board. Pierre took leadership in establishing the PTC/USER Technical Committees, which have had a profound impact on the development of PTC software. From their earliest days, the TCs have been providing guidance to PTC on the enhancements and concerns that are most important for software users. As Vice President and President, Pierre brought a quiet and effective style of leadership that brought together people of differing goals and geographies. |
Together, these individuals represent 40 years of experience that cannot be replaced. Because of their dedication and hard work, we now enjoy many services and activities such as the PTC/USER World Events, the e-mail exploders, the Technical Committees, and the Regional User Groups that touch the lives of many people around the globe. We thank them for their efforts on behalf of PTC/USER members everywhere and wish them well in their next endeavors.
Announcement of the PTC Award winners is always an eagerly awaited moment at the PTC/USER World Event. While the finalists in each industry category are chosen prior to the conference, conference attendees vote for the overall winner. Congratulations once again to the design team at John Deere for scooping this honor for the third time. All of this year’s winning entries are on view at the PTC website at www.ptc.com/go/awards.
Tom Bartlett of John Deere accepting award from Mark Hodges
We want to thank all of the expert presenters from the user community. Once again, everyone did a fabulous job pulling together some very informative and helpful sessions for conference attendees. The following presenters were singled out for special recognition:
"Make Your CAD Administration Slicker with Some Automation"
Edwin Muirhead
Weatherford, UK
" 'Paperless' is Coming: Are You Ready?"
Michael Sandford
Technical Documentation Consultants of Arizona
"High Performance Global Design with Pro/INTRALINK"
Thomas Brosius
John Deere
Every conference is a great experience, but judging from some of this year’s comments, 2004 just may have been the best event ever. Our conference evaluation surveys indicated that over 96% of attendees felt that their conference attendance was a good investment of their time. Furthermore, attendees gave a record score (4.2 out of 5.0 points) for the Expert User Presentations. The scores reflect a long-term focused effort that began in 2001 to improve this area. Through our renewed processes for solicitation of papers, preparation and on-site support, we have made tremendous progress in both attracting qualified speakers and assisting them in the delivery of their materials. Ted Bradshaw has been largely responsible for these improvements and we have seen sustained increases in attendee ratings each year. We appreciate his work as well as the contributions of the community members who develop these sessions for the benefit of everyone.
If you were not able to attend this year, we hope that you’ll make plans now to be part of the 2005 World Event in Orlando, June 5-8 at the Marriott Orlando World Center. This amazing resort—with its own golf course, spa and huge pool area—will provide a fun and comfortable backdrop for the World Event. And as we all know, fun is an important component of the learning process. We hope to see you there! 
The Marriott Orlando World Center, Site of PTC/USER 2005
Thanks to Kelly Bryant and Edwin Muirhead for their contributions to this article. Rick Snider is Executive Director of PTC/USER. He can be reached via email at rick@ptcuser.org.
