PTC Takes Aim at Barriers to Productivity with Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0

By DE Editors

PTC described Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0, the latest release of its CAD/CAM/CAE product, as a technology to “help customers eliminate traditional design barriers to achieve faster, more efficient and more innovative product development.”

In the announcement, PTC identifies present day manufacturing challenges as “the difficulty of making design changes, the length of time to productivity, dealing with heterogeneous CAD data, working with a multitude of disconnected point solutions, and identifying resources and leveraging collective knowledge when needed.”

In Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0, PTC says it’s introducing more than 330 enhancements, aimed at productivity and better user experience. “Real-time, dynamic editing and disruption-free design will help users overcome the traditional barriers to design modification” and “accelerate time to productivity by up to 10X,” the company predicts.

Other R&D initiatives to deliver design efficiency and reduce time-to-market include simplified subassemblies and mold part creation, up to 80% faster in the company’s estimate. For design visualization, PTC offers an Advanced Rendering Extension, based on the rendering technology from Mental Images.

To facilitate better communication between mechanical engineers and electrical engineers, Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire offers an ECAD-MCAD collaboration module. The new manikin, a digital human model, enables users to verify plant safety and improve field ergonomics digitally.

Brian Shepherd, executive vice president, product development, PTC, said, “Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 demonstrates PTC’s ongoing emphasis on quality and commitment to deliver capabilities that enable our customers to develop winning products and bring them to market faster and at lower costs.”

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.