Fall 2002 North Texas RUG Meeting Report
By Jim Johnson

The CATIA Operator's Exchange North Texas Regional User's Group held their fourth meeting on November 15th at the Tarrant County College South Campus. The meeting was well attended with over 50 people representing various industries in the North Texas area.

The morning sessions were focused on manufacturing. Jim Johnson opened the meeting with greetings and followed with a presentation on the current status of NC manufacturing activities at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company in Ft. Worth, Texas. Next on the agenda, was an open election held to replace two of the governing committee members whose terms were expiring at the end of 02. Rod Windsor, current governing committee leader, opened the floor for nominations. Nominees were presented and ballots distributed. After the voting was completed there was a coffee break that allowed everyone to network with his or her peers at the various companies. The morning break was sponsored by Weatherford College. Following the break Mr. Lee Encapera, of IBM, presented the latest NC Manufacturing capabilities available in CATIA V5R10 and also demonstrated how utilization of Knowledgeware could benefit the NC programmer to accommodate design changes quickly. Next, Mr. Cameron Griffin, of MSC, gave a presentation on CATIA V4/V5 Interoperability for Manufacturing. This provided some useful tips for companies utilizing CATIA V4 data to drive CATIA V5 manufacturing processes.

The lunch break followed and was held on site. Bell Helicopter Textron Inc. sponsored lunch. Also during the lunch break a trip was taken to view the CATIA V5 lab on campus at TCC. The lab was quite impressive and included a total of twenty-one HP X-4000 workstations with twenty-one inch monitors and plenty of memory and graphics to run CATIA V5.

Following Lunch, Rod Windsor presented the results of the election and the new governing committee members were introduced. Sandra Nowak, of Lockheed Martin Engineering Information Services and Allen Richbourg of Bell Helicopter Textron Inc. were elected as new RUG governing committee members. After the presentation of new governing committee members, Mr. Greg Premetz of Vought Aircraft Industries Inc. provided a very interesting presentation on the topic of utilizing Knowledgeware and Visual Basic automation to develop a bond tool application. This was an excellent presentation that provided some great tips for companies just beginning to explore the capabilities of automation in CATIA V5 for designing parts or tools. The afternoon break was sponsored by Rand Corporation. Scott Mauk gave a brief description of the products and services available from Rand Corporation and offered his support for future meetings. After the break, Mr. Dan Zuefeldt, of IBM, provided a presentation and demonstration of the new functionality available in CATIA V5R10 for Aerospace Sheet Metal. Dan followed up with questions and tried a few things on the fly that the audience requested. The product looked very impressive and robust.

Finally, an open forum was held to discuss future plans for RUG meetings. This allowed the group to voice their opinions and provided insight into future meeting subject matter and formats. There are currently three meetings scheduled for 2003 on the following dates, January 24th, May 2nd and November 14th. Following the open forum the meeting was adjourned by Jim Johnson.

Additional info for future meetings can be found at the following website http://www.vought.com/ntcoe/

News from Arizona
By Mark Holmberg

The Arizona CATIA Exchange (ACE) meeting was held Wednesday January 15, 2003 at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona 6:00 p.m. Mountain Time. Presentations were given by Stratasys 3D Printer Technologies, Krebs Engineers Kevin Soukup and Mark Holmberg and IBM.

The Stratasys 3D Printer Technologies presentation gave a demonstration of capabilities and announcement of local company purchasing 3D printer to assist with local Tucson and Phoenix 3D rapid prototyping needs

Krebs Engineers, Kevin Soukup demonstrated the power of "result of" technology to reduce Knowledgeware writing as well as contextual design techniques that make the links between parts and assemblies transparent reducing overall update times for large assemblies.

Krebs Engineers, Mark Holmberg also demonstrated advanced Knowledge techniques by using booleans to turn on and off features allowing for highly configurable on the fly designs to reduce time from order to completed engineering / customer approval models and drawings.

From IBM, Bill Carly presented overall PLM efforts by IBM Rand, while Scott Hamblin gave a brief presentation of Rand of Phoenix.

Finally there as be an open round table discussion, Open Forum - CATIA V5, PLM.

For more information contact Mark Holmberg, Chief Operations Officer of Katana Enterprises L.L.C. at 520-982-2217 or email him at catiacron@qwest.net.

Want to find a local user group? Interested in creating a local user group? Discover how COE is reaching out to support regional user groups (RUG) at http://www.coe.org/resources/other.cfm