CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
Joined at the Hip: AEC and Manufacturing
   Autodesk has strengthened the ties between its AEC and Manufacturing products. Dassault Systemes has crossed the line and is now building tools for the AEC space. What’s going on? Manufacturers who serve the AEC space now have to address the expanding demand for information by their AEC customers. AEC customers increasingly need to understand the impact of their projects at the component level. What are the challenges that the software vendors must address to meet the needs of both?

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
IP vs Scan-Modify-Make
   When Xerox popularized the copier, copyright law and IP issues were stressed, and eventually adjusted. But it took time. Today, we’re at a similar transition point as we can now scan a physical object and reproduce it without the involvement of the original producer of the object. We’re quite close to the Star Trek replicator world. What does that mean for intellectual property rights? What does that mean for software developers? Attitudes towards IP are changing and the digital-native generation is much less protective about IP of others than past generations. What are the future implications for business as values change?

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
When Social Meets Business
   Business is more than product and service. It’s also about reputation, relationship, and trust. As firms have become more aware of this, their reliance on Social Computing to serve these needs has exploded. Social Computing is also critical to the internal needs of a business and within its supply chain. What are the current challenges in meeting these internal, supply-chain, and external needs for social computing in the context of business? Where do or should social tools intersect or coincide with a firm’s other design and engineering tools?

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
Serving Process
   The first several decades of design software were all about serving the needs of the design. Sure, we had project management software, but that was all about getting the product (or project) done. Recently, we’ve seen a new wave of tools designed to serve the needs of process – the way we need things to happen. Some attempt to pre-determine a fixed set of paths and alternatives, but newer tools are more flexible and help to understand more than direct. What are the implications of this wave of tools serving process? What needs are still left unmet?

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
ALM and PLM: BFF?
   The design of software to be embedded in “smart” products has become too interdependent with the design of the product for ALM and PLM to remain completely independent of one another. On the other hand, the two domains have each have special needs that don’t easily fit within the context of the other. So for the foreseeable future, ALM and PLM will have to walk hand-in-hand. What are the challenges in making that effective and as we look to the future, where should we focus our efforts?

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
40 Years in the Desert
   Boomers are retiring. Boomers are the transitional generation. They made the transition from the old (pre-computer) to new. They also have tribal knowledge critical to business survival. Of those that remain on the job, half will be gone within five years. Replaced by digital-natives. What aspects of their tribal knowledge will we need after they’ve left the firm? What strategies have been successful in defining and capturing that knowledge? Some businesses have given up: they’ve changed the nature of their business so that the lack of that tribal knowledge won’t harm their business. Will we face a similar problem when the digital natives retire?

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
My Personal Watson
   IBM’s Jeopardy machine, Watson, wowed the world with its prowess at handing massive amounts of seemingly unrelated data. Watson’s technology has already begun the move to practical applications in the field of medicine. If we follow Moore’s law, what is just possible will move to practical and then feasible at the personal level within a decade. Siri is just a hint of that. What are the implications of the handy presence of Watson-like technology in the hands of designers and engineers? What will design look like then, and what transitions will we need to make along the way?

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
WORKSHOP:Case Studies Applying Model-Based Systems Engineering to Real Products
   When used during the conceptual design phase, higher-fidelity model-based systems engineering (MBSE) processes and tools can result in much more robust system engineering. Integrating models beginning at the concept design phase of a project can be done with differing and appropriate levels of fidelity. This can lead to more realistic and higher fidelity design tradeoffs throughout the design process. These same methods link concept and detailed design seamlessly, significantly reducing the time and resources required during the most expensive phases of the project: hardware fabrication and test. Case studies from three different product areas will be presented and then discussed.
   

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
What about CAM?
   The reality of manufacturing is very different from the way the uninformed think. To many, you do the design and then press a button. What’s the big deal? The practical matter is that reality is much more complicated than theory. Speeds and feeds, optimized tool paths, tolerancing, baseline choices, manufacturing methods, pre- and post-process treatments, springback, - all have a huge impact on quality, cost, speed, and profitability of a business. When our industry was young it was called the CAD/CAM industry. What happened to CAM? Who’s paying attention to the output side of the equation? Why aren’t they here?

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
MIRVing Hardware
   Micro-Cloud, mini-cluster, High-performance computing, multi-core, APU, GPU, son of Larabee… new generations of hardware are coming fast and the diversification of platform is happening at a pace like the MIRVs of the Missile Command game – too fast to keep track. Everyone’s gone mobile, too. Augmented Reality (AR) is starting to be usable for business. How will all of this change the nature of design and engineering? What are the implications for the tool builders – the software vendors that will need to choose to embrace or reject these technologies in order to survive (or thrive)?

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
GUI: Sticky and Changing
   The way we interact with our tools has not changed much since the initial transition from the drafting board. Keyboard. Mouse. Maybe a 3D mouse for the enlightened. GUI’s are sticky – once we move to muscle memory it’s very difficult to change. On the other hand, there’s this whole new generation that has integrated gestures, voice, and other methods into the way they interact with their iPads, Kinect, etc. Where is this headed? From the software vendor’s standpoint, do we just need to write another connection, or is a rethink in the way we work with our tools coming?

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
Look Out – Your Relationship with Your Customer is Changing
   Software vendors’ ties with their customers have been both contentious and tenuous. Vendors have tried to lock in customers with interoperability issues, maintenance, etc. The landscape is changing. Some have found that trust relationships make for better business. Others are pressed with evolving pricing models: the move from asset (paid-up licenses) to expense (software maintenance), from node-locked to floating licenses to tokens and beyond. And from processor- bound pricing to the new realm of pricing where the number of CPU/GPUs is unknown. The move to mobile makes this more complex, as does the complexity of varying pricing by borders. When is the benefit of maximizing revenue from the customer outweighed by the cost? What are the tradeoffs?

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
Where's My Data?
   Local, distributed, private-cloud, public cloud: What belongs where? For some, does it really matter? Which aspects of data need to be under my direct control? Why? When does it matter? When it matters, where do I draw the line? Does it matter who controls the data when it’s clear who owns it? For that matter, when do I want my data to expire?

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
Business Ain’t What It Used to Be
   The Internet changed the way we think about business. Prior to the internet, business were all about return on investment—no one conceived of growing a business without first thinking about revenue. The shift from ROI to a focus on business-model as a core capability has given rise to companies like Facebook, which have generated Billions of equity before ever receiving their first dollar of revenue. Quirky has built its business on the idea that paying its customers a core business value. Crowdsourcing, Maker communities, open-source, are just a few examples of what appears to be an explosion of new and different ways to do business. What does this mean for a software vendor? Or for their customers?

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
Form follows Simulation
   We get it now. Simulation is something that should drive design, not just verify it. What are the barriers to quicker uptake? What’s possible now that wasn’t possible five years ago? What needs to be easier? Where are the challenges and who is taking the lead in addressing them?

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
DaS: Design and Sustainability
   The DaS Symposium, which precedes COFES, attempts to address the question: “What can we (the software industry) do for our customers to help them design more responsibly?” This roundtable brings that question and sustainability discussion to the broader COFES audience.

Meeting rooms are set up in suites around the pool, each with a different issue to discuss. Cyon Research investigates issues in engineering and design. That research forms the basis for the issue topics for these 90-minute group discussions.

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
BWFC (Big White Fluffy Clouds)
   In 1994, Intergraph made a bold decision to move its customers to Microsoft Windows NT, forsaking all other operating systems in the process. With few exceptions, most other engineering-software vendors eventually followed suit and reaped the benefits of designing for a “single” platform.
   With the advent of the cloud, mobile platforms, the resurgence of the Mac (in engineering), and new GPU and APU platforms, that long era of vendors focusing on a “single” platform is ending. There’s a new, rapidly evolving landscape out there, and none of the platform targets are moving in a way that makes them easy to predict. What’s a vendor to do? Better yet, how can we prepare for a sure-to-come, but unknowable, emerging game changer?

A second set of 90-minunte discussions.

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
Bloggers Roundtable
   A gathering of active bloggers (including business-tweeters) to discuss successful ways to improve what they’re doing: for themselves, for their firms, and most importantly, for their audience.

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
“De-Siloing” PLM
   Business assets are often generated within business silos, and often those business silos handle data in a way that is convenient for them, but not so convenient for the rest of the enterprise. What will it take to “de-silo” product/project data?
   Today’s PLM systems address some of this. What problems will need to be addressed by next-generation PLM?

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
Specialists and Generalists
   Successful teams embrace and cherish the need for different types of people, both specialists and generalists, in order to thrive. Example: FEA analysts and design engineers who sometimes employ FEA. Generalists bridge the gaps and draw inferences across the depths of knowledge of specialists to apply them in new and effective ways. Why shouldn’t our design tools follow suit? What are the implications?

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
Sustainability: The DaS Symposium
   The DaS Symposium, which precedes COFES, attempts to address the question: “What can we (the software industry) do for our customers to help them design more responsibly?” This roundtable brings that question and sustainability discussion to the broader COFES audience.

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
The Suite Spot
   Vendors have done an excellent job in making suites of tools available to their customers. The potential value proposition is significant. But how many of those customers are actually using enough of the tools they’ve acquired to realize that potential value? What can vendors do to help their customers realize that value?

CLICK ON TITLE FOR AUDIO
What’s on YOUR Critical Path?
   Richard Riff, Ford’s thought leader for the design and engineering process, has made the bold statement that “CAD is no longer on the critical path” at Ford. It’s not that CAD isn’t important, or strategic; it’s just that it’s gotten good enough that problems in other areas are more significant.
   Do you know what’s on your critical path? More importantly, what’s on your customers’ critical paths? What are you doing to release their bottlenecks? And once those get released, what’s next?