Solo Golf's New Creation Hits the Dance Floor

With CATIA V5 Solo Golf can "see square"

What is every golfer's wish as they approach their awaiting little white ball on the "dance floor" (golfing term for the putting green)? The wish: perfect alignment, proper weight disbursement and a nice, soft feel. Solo Golf has taken it upon themselves to make the golfer's ultimate wish come true - with the creation of their C2 (C-squared) putter, they have done just that.

Ed Mugica, Executive Vice President of Solo Golf explains that in designing the "C2 putter, our goal was to take a traditional-looking putter that golfers were familiar with and add the advantage of an alignment aid that would literally help them 'see squarely' to the hole."

CATIA V5 Aligns C2²
The C2 putter is primarily based on Solo Golf's Optical Positioning System ™ (OPS) - patent pending and conforms to USGA standards. According to Mugica, "this allows you to put your body in the proper position for a correct alignment every single time. This system is a direct result of CATIA's genius and its ability to match an alignment system to optically correct a putter. It is perfectly engineered to allow optimum heel and toe weight disbursement, a wider center of gravity - known as the "sweet spot" - and an incredibly soft feel."

Using CATIA V5, digital mock-ups were created to establish how the C2 would work. Mugica says with the help of V5, "we could see how the movement of the putter would affect the alignment aid, and how the aid would then work with those movements, to ultimately get the aid lined up properly."

Competitive Advantage of the C2² "Sweet spot"
Solo Golf President, Richard Mugica says the C2 putter is the culmination of more than 30 years experience in the aerospace industry, plus one big advantage: IBM CATIA V5.

CATIA V5 gives us not only a competitive advantage, but also a game-enhancement advantage for the average golfer," explains Mugica. "Golf changes rapidly due to trends and the consumers' perceptions of what a golf club should look like. With V5, if we need to make modifications, we make them right on the digital model in a Windows environment, which is much easier to modify than some other software. This cuts down on the design time since changes can be made quickly and simply.

"In the end, this allows us to be a leader, not a follower, within the golf market, which is precisely where Solo Golf wants to position itself."

Asahi Beer Pax to Use Information Technology to Reform Ability to Propose Solutions to Customers Onsite

Will use CATIA V5 and 3-D computer graphics to make on the spot presentations of needs at customer sites - new concept of "Concurrent Marketing"

Asahi Beer Pax Co., Ltd., the leading company in the consumer goods and glass bottle industry, EXA, announced that they had created a new business model that would reform its ability to propose solutions to its customers onsite, using information technology. To this end, the company has adopted CATIA V5, the 3-D computer assisted design (CAD) software package from Dassault Systemes as the information technology system that would form the structure of this new business model.

Asahi Beer Pax has conceived of a groundbreaking business model, one that achieves a Concurrent Engineering reformation both in business processes in the area of design and in marketing and operational planning processes as well. In addition, EXA has supplied Asahi Beer Pax with the Surfray high performance 3-D computer graphics software package that it has developed, and has also worked on systems integration. IBM and Dassault Systemes are both offering CATIA, providing technical support, and furthermore, the IBM® ThinkPad® laptop computer is being used with the system in question.

Concurrent marketing is a revolutionary concept, in which releases of new products are carried out over several months, and in which marketing is aimed at customers from the earliest planning and conceptual design stages for those products for which design is an important element in their sales, such that product design commences in parallel with work on verifying and serving the needs of the customer. Asahi Beer Pax traditionally took the demands of the manufacturers that make up its customer base back to its own facilities, and make repeated studies of them, entirely on their own premises. Under this new business model, a marketing manager and a designer will take a laptop with CATIA V5 and Surfray running on it to the customer's own facilities, where they will create and modify a photo- realistic 3-D model of a bottle on the spot, using computer graphics to verify the customer's requirements. As a result, the company has made solid improvements to both the number of confirmed orders that it gets from its customers, as well as to customer satisfaction.

Asahi Beer Pax has adopted CATIA V5 as its new 3-D CAD system. In order to make concurrent marketing work, it is necessary for the 3-D CAD system to have an interface that is both easy to use and highly functional. The system also must be capable of hybrid modeling, surface alterations that are both intuitive and dynamic, and also high precision modeling that can be handed off to designers. Furthermore, the entire system must be compact and capable of running smoothly on a laptop computer. CATIA V5 satisfies all of these requirements. In addition, Surfray, the high performance 3-D computer graphics package, has been programmed especially for use in product design work. The software is capable of generating high-quality realistic computer graphics images from 3-D model data with its fast rendering speed, ease of use and high degree of functionality, and thus, combines with CATIA V5 to contribute to the company's achievement of concurrent marketing.

Makoto Imai, manager of IT management, Asahi Beer Pax, says, "With the adoption of CATIA V5 and Surfray, as well as the support of EXA, we are the first company in our industry to be able to conduct planning and confirmation onsite at our customers' own facilities, using laptop computers. I believe that we have been able to make solid improvements in customer satisfaction through our ability to shorten planning times, as well as to give shape to our customers' requirements and intentions on the spot. Furthermore, our newfound ability to give 3-D data files directly to the mold makers for them to work with has also enabled us to shorten the interval from planning to producing finished bottles as well."

Kenichi Miwa, manager of manufacturing and distribution systems operations, EXA, says, "The case study of Asahi Beer Pax is a stunning example of how a company can successfully apply 3D CAD to marketing. We believe that its applications can be expanded, particularly with regard to products where design is an important concern, chief among these being consumer goods, household electric appliances, and high precision industries."

Surfray is a computer graphics system, developed and sold by EXA, which is specialized for use in product design. With fast rendering and ease of use, the program is capable of generating realistic computer graphics images that display the utmost in beauty from 3-D model data files, making the maximum use of limited time in the process. It comes complete with a studio feature that creates composites of digital photographs and computer graphics images, as well as an extensive library of textures. The company has also developed new features to handle a variety of demands put forth by Asahi Beer Pax with regard to its use as a system for achieving its goal of concurrent marketing. Surfray also has an extensive track record of achievement in such fields as consumer goods, E&E, and automotive parts suppliers.

Connecting Enterprise Islands

At many companies today, even large corporations with massive sums invested in enterprise-wide information technology systems, database 'islands' exist which operate in isolation from one another. Product Data Management (PDM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, for example, are typically run independently with little linkage between the two, even though valuable information could be exchanged between them to generate business process data such as the Bill-Of-Materials (BOM).

The lack of data integration means information is often transcribed in a manual process that is tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone. At one SmarTeam customer, parts information was sent from engineering to manufacturing in a manual process in which essentially the same BOM data was manually entered on five separate forms, lists, spreadsheets, drawings, and reports. The company's engineering manager described the procedure as frustrating and out of control, wasting days and risking incorrect or out-dated information being entered.

At another company, we saw an engineer comparing BOM listings from different computer systems by going line by line with a ruler down two spreadsheets on his desk to see if the databases were in synch with the one displayed on his screen. In this hours-long, nerve-wracking process, any slip or momentary distraction could result in a serious mistake or having to restart the work. This was one of the weakest links in that company's product development process and resulted in delayed time to market.

As ridiculous and outdated as these scenarios sound, they are repeated every day at many different types of companies, which manually transfer data between separate computer systems. Often, companies will even have several PDM systems that are supposed to facilitate data management but which fail to effectively communicate with one another.

SmarTeam addresses this information-flow bottleneck by enabling open two-way communication between heterogeneous computer systems in a number of ways. Firstly, SmarTeam has made this possible by embedding many of its products with the Interoperable Exchange Format (iXF) standard for sharing information between iXF-enabled systems, essentially creating a common language for interaction between the two. In most cases, this information is in the form of assembly component data (drawings, CAD models, and design files) and content (meta data that describes the design such as revision level, file number, or part name) transferred as a self-describing collection of objects and associated files between two systems.

Compatible with a variety of business data exchange protocols, including Microsoft's BizTalk and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), the XML-based iXF format enables the integration of product data stored in a SmarTeam database with existing legacy systems. In addition, it facilitates the exchange of information between an organization's departments, throughout the extended enterprise and across the supply chain.

Another methodology deployed by SmarTeam to foster Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), is through a clever product called SmartGateway. This application manages the flow of information between SmarTeam and all enterprise applications, including resource planning (ERP), customer relationship Management (CRM), PDM systems and other legacy systems to ensure current product information across all corporate departments, including procurement, sales, customer service. Other technologies used by SmarTeam to facilitate interoperability include extremely flexible integration tools and a variety of import and export utilities.

In terms of information management systems, it's a heterogeneous world out there, within companies and throughout the virtual enterprise. Many types of data management, ERP, Bill of Materials systems are in use, both within companies, and certainly in their supply chains. The iXF-enabled gateway approach allows organizations, especially small and mid-size companies, to affordably capture this information and transfer it electronically between groups and among their suppliers and customers. With this technology, they can get their enterprise under digital control, which is an absolute imperative today as business practices become ever more sophisticated and complex. For companies that choose to remain digitally isolated, however, there's a clear danger since they face the possibility of being forced out of business within several years as more astute competitors overtake them.