West Michigan CATIA Users Group

An Exchange of CATIA ideas and solutions

The meeting took place on Wednesday, February 12, 2003 at the IBM Corporation, Briefing Center in Grand Rapids, MI. The meeting began with Cliff Streeter discussing CATIA V5 support for Prototyping. An overview of ENOVIA DMU and its capabilities was given by Jim Dallos, CATIA Sales Specialist and Joanna Zakrzewski, CATIA AE, Virtual Services.

In the afternoon, Phil Borchard, Director of Process Consulting, Virtual Services discussed Implementing CATIA V5 with Data Management. Phil described that Implementing CATIA V5 within your engineering organization will require some consideration to how your company plans to use the new functionality available within V5. Simply using CATIA V5 in a CATIA V4 way will not give your company or the users the productivity gains designed into the software. This includes not only additional design engineering functionality, but also assembly management, change management, vaulting, and catalogs. Virtual will present some of the key questions you should ask yourself, and illustrate many of these benefits of V5 and data management through a customer case study.

Lastly a group open forum was led by Pat Fisher and Jeff Roark who led discussions on the following topics: User Group Involvement, CATIA V5 Implementation, and COE.

The meeting was sponsored by Virtual Services. The West Michigan CATIA Users Group is now on the Web at http://www.coe.org/about/wmcug.html.

Arizona CATIA Exchange Meeting in January

By Larry Gauthier
General Dynamics Decision Systems

The Arizona CATIA Exchange (ACE), Arizona's CATIA regional user group (RUG), held a meeting at the University of Arizona (U of A) in Tucson, Arizona on January 15, 2003. The U of A's Department of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering (AME) provided one of their lecture halls for our meeting. Thank You to MSC Software for providing refreshments for the meeting, and a big thanks to COE for its continuing support to RUG's.

Besides the regular ACE attendees we had six or eight University of Arizona students and an AME Professor. The University of Arizona does not use CATIA so this was new material for them

Mark Holmberg from Krebs Engineers in Tucson lead the meeting and two of his associates gave excellent presentations. IBM, MSC Software and Rand gave short updates on their activities. Colleen Kennedy from Krebs gave a presentation on the COE Forum web site and how to navigate it in search of useful information. Kevin Soukup from Krebs gave a presentation demonstrating advanced CATIA V5 functions such as the power of "Result" theory as it relates to parts, products, and drawings (the ability to design contextually remote from other users as well as the ability to send design solid information without exposing the magic behind the design) and advanced Knowledgeware use. There were many questions from the audience especially from those new to CATIA.

We hold our meetings in the Phoenix and Tucson areas trying to accommodate all of our CATIA user community. We want to present information that is timely and useful. With Companies either looking to migrate to or using V5, our focus is on presenting V5 information. We will present V4 information when there is interest.

Our next meeting is being planned for April 2003 right after the Spring COE Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. Date, time, and location will be announced as soon as they are set.

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).

CATIA Operators of Wisconsin Meeting

The CATIA Operators of Wisconsin (COW) February Meeting took place on February 27 at the Fox Valley Technical College in Appleton, Wisconsin. The meeting will cover such areas as Simulation Data Management, Managing Workstation Resources Efficiently, CATIA v5 Issues Update/Scripting Demo, V5 Migration issues and continuing V5 CAD quality using Verifi and Icheck5, and will conclude with CATIA v5 r10 Highlights.

If you have any questions please contact Jim Tilidetzke jtil@phmining.com FAX: 414-671-7532, or visit their web site at www.cowrug.org.