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Interview Home | UGS Interview
UGS Industry Interview Summary
November 16, 2004
Interview with Mike Sellberg and Brett Harper
History of UGS
The information below is taken from the UGS (The PLM Company) website: www.ugs.com.
UGS is a 4,700-strong, global team whose driving vision is to work collaboratively with our clients to create enterprise solutions that enable them to transform their process of innovation and, in doing so, begin to capture the value of PLM. PLM is product lifecycle management, an increasingly important and visible enterprise business strategy through which organizations digitally manage a product’s complete lifecycle, all the way from its concept to its retirement -- and gain higher business value from that product as a result.
Through the rich heritage of companies that came together to form UGS, our pioneering solutions have been helping companies accelerate time to market, improve quality and increase revenue for nearly four decades. With more than 3 million licensed seats of our technology in use and 42,000 clients worldwide, today’s UGS is a proven leader in both market experience and PLM solution development. In fact, UGS manages or creates more than 40 percent of the world’s 3-D data.
We provide state-of-the-art, knowledge-driven, standardized and open systems that together represent the PLM industry’s most comprehensive, flexible and innovative set of offerings. Over time, our solutions have become the foundation of the PLM industry. Our portfolio of software and service solutions includes product development, enterprise collaboration, data management and factory and manufacturing planning tools, all operating in an open, integrated environment that ensures collaboration won’t be hampered by proprietary or legacy systems. Our five primary product suites and business initiatives are:
Our solutions enable an enterprise to fully marshal the skills, expertise, knowledge, experience, creativity and ideas of its people and apply them collaboratively at every stage of a product’s lifecycle. As a result, UGS helps companies derive maximum business value from their products, beginning the day they are conceived and continuing all the way until they are retired. It’s what we call transforming the process of innovation…and it’s what UGS uniquely does best.
Company Information from Interview
The focus of the company is “visualization…high end 3-D graphics, large model rendering and visualization type technology.” The company has a history as the market leader in the area of “digital markup.” The company then expanded its focus to “combine collaboration with the 3D visualization.” In 2000, “The company was combined with a company that was a CAD company and also a traditional product data management, and so how do you manage all of the intellectual assets and product knowledge, including, which CAD and visualization files are big part of that obviously.”
The two individuals we interviewed shared their role in the company: “Brett and I work in this group called Team Center and that's the family of products that is our product lifecycle management sweep. So that's kind of how the PDMs have grown up to be both collaboration and visualization, project and program management, requirements management, in addition to what used to be called a core PDM or data management.”
Brett and Mike described the software of UGS, “ Team Center is one of our brands, NX is our [high-end] CAD brand, and we also have a manufacturing brand called Efactory, and we have a mid-range CAD product called Solid Edge. Then we also have a suite of components that we call our Tool Kits, which we offer to the marketplace as well.”
They offered a more technical definition of what UGS provides customers, “What we did and continue to do is to take CAD data and turn it into these digital assets, these 3-dimensional objects with the JT format. We use some stuff with 2-D too, but I think where you're mostly interested in particularly sounds like immersive visualization, which is not a big piece of our offerings, but we do support that. So, the number one thing you have to do is you create the 3-D digital assets for the JT files out of every peak, component you can get your hands on, every CAD file, and then you manage those on the PDM. So, what I'd say our role as a company is to enable companies to establish their own digital processes because the number one goal is to remove physical prototypes and shorten time at the market, and remove paper.”
Definition of Virtual Reality
During the interview, Brett and Mike asked the project team to provide a definition of virtual reality as it pertained to the project. The project team described the use of low-cost virtual reality that involved the use of goggles or polarized glasses – or immersive virtual reality.
Brett and Mike explained that they use a wider definition of virtual reality. “When you say virtual reality, I mean really the broadest sense of that is doing things virtually, not real. You do things digitally that you used to do physically. I think that the narrow definition is the immersive kind of stereo cave VR thing, but really it's a much bigger field than just that. So what our company does is enable visualization digitally of things that previously had to exist physically before you could interact with them. So, you can much earlier in the lifecycle of design and development, start to do analysis, get a feel for it with haptics, you might even actually be able to touch it.” They suggested that we scrutinize our definition of virtual reality because it can mean different things in different contexts (e.g., education, industry). They explained that 99% of their users have single screen applications of VR concepts and users “get most of the value they're going to get out of that 2D rendering of a 3D thing, but because of the manipulation that you can do you can perceive it as 3D.”
Brett and Mike described how their company uses VR, “We translate CAD data, we visualize CAD data, we manage CAD data, we analyze it, we measure it, all of those things around dealing with stuff virtual.” This definition moves beyond immersive virtual reality. “I think you have to realize the business we're in. It's commercial software and so it does have a lot to do with market size and the segment of the market that is interested in higher end technologies. I think what Brett's described pretty effectively is a mainstream market for 3D visualization that provides a virtual reality if you will for the purpose of their business processes and adds value to them without necessarily having to get into things that we might consider high end and beyond.”
Market Influence
They explained that while they primarily focus on 2D visualization, there is still a market for individuals who want 3D visualization for concept design work. “There is still this niche – there will be a group of people who want to do concept design work. And because of our sort of strategy of translating their CAD data into these digital assets, we can do that too. So we aren't just a niche player or just a 2D visualization, we really have by this time with the help of UGS, strengthened our sort of offense so we're getting this really broad provider of this. Which kind of lets us be a company that can do high end visualization and not go out of business. Which lots of companies have done.”
UGS supports some companies that use high-end virtual reality, such as General Motors. These companies use high-end virtual reality for design and modeling. “It's natural for us to have a high end solution that provides [modeling and design functions], because we provide the rest of the, for GM in particular, the rest of the pipeline and all of that visualization.” Mike and Brett explained that changes in technology may change what currently is considered “high-end.” “The day is coming, probably in the next 18 months where you can unroll a power wall on flexible screen and pop it up on the wall and do different things. And so while the cost of entry to some of these higher level capabilities starts coming down the potential for that to move into the mainstream is there.”
“I actually think that manufacturing is probably a growth area for higher end VR, because I can see one of the shapes on this complex right and so you can get some really realistic images with decent frame rate and the idea of doing one to one simulations in a manufacturing cell. [For example] you have reach studies from an ergonomics standpoint. [Or] you're trying to see if a robot arm is going to swing and decapitate the operator. You know I think that that's an area that can probably grow. It's interesting, I don't know if in your project if you're visiting companies, like manufacturing companies.”
Skills Needed in Employees
Brett and Mike suggested several skills that are necessary for future employees. Their first recommendation was computer graphics skills “like OpenGL, or any scene graph, API, anything that you might have done at VRAC. And you can just look at who we've hired in the past and a heck of a lot of people have come through that program because it's very successful in training them in this way, so if you could clone exactly what people are doing there that'd be great.” They explained that UGS is not looking for the average computer scientist. “A lot of our corps team have been engineers that have done research and projects in VR and graphics and computer science is secondary.” They explained that training in computer science “can only get you so far. Sometimes people need to have a more deep algorithmic understanding of data structures.”
Successful employees have the ability to perform multiple tasks and to learn additional skills. “It's finding those people that can do the really tough projects that require that tenacity and a sort of just like sponge like information acquisition where you can learn all these things and just do anything in this area. I think that's probably part of what has made those people so successful there [VRAC] is that kind of complexity of those projects that you're thrown into.” They also explained that employees need to be generalists. “[It is important to understand] computer graphics and 3D concepts in general and programming environments. The specific ones aren't the biggest thing, it's the adaptability of the individual because platforms change, API's change.”
They explained that the company employs both individuals with computer graphics and computer science backgrounds. Some employees begin without any CAD software experience. “I'd love to see, weather it be…computer scientists or even people who are focused on computer graphics…, one CAD course I think should be required. Just because I think it gets them ready for so many different industries. Whether they're working in the software industry or in the companies that use CAD.”
“A familiarity with these technologies is probably one thing to get more students familiar with. Where they kind of take it for granted is always the specific stuff too, with the graphics, API things, or the 3D modeling experience. And you know, that sort of industry specific experience is good even if you’re not going to be doing that, just sort of understanding conceptually you know, what a layer is and why things are done a certain way.”
“Some technical terms…so that you can understand a context of your application.”
Employee Training
We asked them to describe their employee training. Below are some of the points they offered.
“I think the days where they you pluck someone out of their job for a week and send them off to do some training at a site, those are few and far between.”
“I mean if somebody needs to know some API they're going to do it in the context of the project that they're working on and they're going to do it virtually, in fact, I would say there's a huge shift to the virtualization of everything. You know, meetings, training…”
“Jay was saying well do you have any documentation on the some latest office tool kit and Tucker is like, "I'll send you a link, there's a webcast on msdn that they can replay."
“Not everyone gets the exact same training; it’s really kind of job dependent.”
“Job dependent and project dependent is, in general, how it works…it’s just the 80/20 rule, I think it’s moved more towards on the project, on the job training.”
Feasibility Testing
When asked about product development and involvement of end-users, Brett and Mike discussed their usability group. The new head of the usability group, Carl Spiner, has a virtual reality background. The unit has been relatively small, but is beginning to grow. When Carl was in town, they toured the VRAC. The group working with the Solid Edge software is most likely to expand usability, because of competition with other software products such as SolidWorks, AutoCAD, and Inventor. The CAD software market is a big and competitive market.
“Imagine this here, you’re dealing with people like manufacturers….They get a piece of paper and then they sit there with their machine and they do things very manually, very old school, the way they’ve always done it, and trying to change that can be good or bad depending on how you end up doing it. Many times we’ll end up working with a bunch of levels…and so it’s important to really get their [manufacturer] feedback because you might just talk to the IT people in terms of like usability and cost of ownership and all this stuff. And you don’t actually solve it, because that guy, he needs it to be really easy, you can’t complicate his life. So it’s a challenge to actually provide them something they’ll use on a daily basis.”
Curriculum
We also asked them to comment on how institutions can better prepare future employees. Below are some of their statements.
“The world really is highly centered around 3D graphics now….We can do a much better job in engineering education on having curriculum that’s that’s 3D based….Whether you’re doing machine design, kinematics, dynamics, I mean look at all those diagrams and look at all those problems you do that are just 2D diagrams in the textbook….There’s enough tool kits out there for kinematics and viewers and different things that you know, a big a big chunk of those problems should be described to the student in 3D graphics and the result should be delivered in a 3D graphic environment right?”
“You could go the route of just training them [students] how to integrate and create applications with sort of building block components to create that end to end sort of thing. They get the requirements, they work on a small description, and they actually create something substantial. That is not really how I went through computer science, I worked on small sort of algorithmically centered things, we didn’t make big applications. But there’s a trade off there, you can learn how to be an effective integrator of components that you don’t understand or you can learn how to create components. And you have to make that decision, because there’s only so much time. But I can tell you, it seems like the people that deal with creating these sort of larger systems with components…end up with a little more broad experience that’s more applicable. They can kind of hit the ground running [because] they understand what it means to collaboratively create a large application. And that’s what they’re going to end up doing [in the workforce].”
“So I guess maybe like doing more collaborative development, forcing them to use collaboration, you know, that sort of desktop sharing applications because I think what’s really different is that, you know, that school environment you’re going to work with people in the same room typically right? Whereas here we often work with people at remote locations so you have to be able to communicate in a way that you’re not right next to them.”
“You know, this is totally unrelated to the topic, but it’s critical to software development in our industry in general, but has nothing to do with VR. One of the things we continually face is the ability…to give a decent estimate for how long it will take them to do something. So there should be a lab in engineering and computer science class that is centered around techniques for doing estimation.”
“Just quality practices, just getting people familiar with fleshing out every aspect of an algorithm, not just the surface stuff…”
“It’s very interesting because a lot of the data on education points to the collaborative experiences and getting the hands on and getting the immersion with any of the tools, not whether it’s VR, or whether it’s science whatever it is.”
Partnerships
They would like to know if there are courses designed to facilitate use of their software (e.g., Solid Edge). They worked with Jim Oliver (ISU contact).
They have provided tours of their facility in the past. With advance notice, they can arrange for individuals to describe their career, demonstrate software, and answer questions.
Future Trends
We asked them to describe future trends in industry related to the use of visualization tools. “There’s the traditional 2D CAD and 3D CAD and then really I think a lot of people aren’t really aware of this sort of next thing, the sort of 3D visualization digital mockup activity. And what does that even mean to put something together digitally. I mean that’s really an opportunity for learning how they do the modern engineering at a company that has a digital mockup process, because I think they’ve embedded [the process] and they have job titles that actually amount to that process.”
“Our software tires to optimize their [clients’] current processes. So once that happens you hear all the buzz words like business transformation – you know that’s happened when someone redefines someone’s role in a corporation around what your software does. Which has happened…then you have these digital asset wranglers, these people that that’s what they do. They put together the digital vehicle, kind of like the guy that might sit there in the shop…they were called digital mechanics at one company….They used to be actual mechanics, who did the physical prototypes. Well, now all that’s done on computer, so now the natural name for that title is a digital mechanic.”
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