Introduction

One type of regular activity within COE is the work of Committees, such as those under the Development Planning Council (DPC). The DPC consists of committees within the following Process Groups: Product Life; Engineering; Ship, Plant, Fluid Systems; Digital Enterprise Infrastructure; Manufacturing; Advanced Planning. Each Process Group coordinates the work of several committees.

The primary DPC objective is to “assure that the CATIA users' needs for enhanced functionality are properly communicated to the Dassault Systemes developers.” There is a mechanism provided to submit Enhancement Requests (ER).

The purpose for this section of the NewsNet is to report on ERs and their status. DPC activity is voluntary and perhaps not as widely appreciated as it ought to be. Perhaps, these regular reports will elevate the attention level.

For this first report, a Surfacing example is detailed. The Surfacing Committee is under the Engineering Committee named Shape Design & Styling.

Surfacing
Gary Fisher, Black & Decker

CATIA V5 is a very powerful design tool which is a significant step forward from V4. It has fundamentally changed the way we work, contributing to a faster time to market, and facilitating design changes later in the product development cycle. However, there are still many improvements which could be made.

To Dassault’s credit, a huge number of issues which existed in the early days of V5 have been addressed. The majority of bugs submitted by our company through the PMR process have been fixed, and many of our enhancement requests submitted through COE have been implemented. Still, there are a number of persistent problems which continue to take a toll on productivity.

The most critical issues which we run into in V5 are problems with actual geometry creation. Some of the most frustrating issues involve adding the final fillets and drafts to solids in part design. These typically are not critical surfaces, and in most cases we can accept a significant amount of deviation from the radius value or draft angle specified. Dassault has given us some helpful options with both of these functions, which help in most cases, but sometimes the operations still cannot be completed in part design. When this happens, the workaround usually involves creating the necessary surfaces using GSD, and incorporating them back into the solid. In some cases, the designer responsible for completing the solid does not have the necessary skills for creating these surfaces, and he must then enlist the help of a surfacing specialist. This obviously has a negative effect on productivity, and the end result is a more complex model which tends to have more problems updating if changes are made.

Another type of issue which cuts down on productivity involves the basic user interface. One example is changing the step values in many of the dialog boxes. All of these boxes have a default value (i.e. 1mm) for the amount of change when the up or down arrows are selected, however, many times it is desirable to have a different value (i.e. .1mm or .01mm). The process to change this value involves 4 mouse clicks, and entering a new value using the keyboard, and this must be done every time the function is used. Another issue which we find frustrating involves customizing workbenches. Customizing toolbars could improve productivity, but they frequently behave erratically when switching workbenches and adding sharable licenses, sometimes disappearing completely, and requiring the user to restore their CATSettings. Issues such as these, if examined individually, are not overly important, but when taken together, they all contribute to lower productivity, increased frustration, and a diminished user experience.

Another area of frustration involves tools which are “improved” in a new release of CATIA, but result in a less useful function. Two examples of this are the Draft Analysis tool, and the Freestyle Isophotes analysis tool. These were tools which we were very happy with in V5R9, but they were completely changed in later releases. In R9 the draft analysis allowed the user to drag a slider to change the draft angle, and the visualization on the surfaces updated dynamically. This functionality is now gone, and most users find the new tool harder and less intuitive to use. Similarly, the Isophotes analysis in Freestyle was extremely useful, but we find the new tool almost useless.

In conclusion, I want to reiterate the fact that V5 is an excellent design tool, and we feel it is still the best CAD system for developing our products. We are hopeful that Dassault will continue to address the issues which still exist to make it even better.

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