Sherry Hess, Vice President of Marketing, AWR. Read profile >>
December is the time for lists in my house. Dear Santa lists and New Year
Resolution lists. So perhaps I’ve
been preconditioned to take note of others producing lists as well?
This one caught my eye with its headline:
“Engineers spend 60-80% of work time changing designs.”
Really? We
spend that much of our work life “changing,” “reusing,” “repurposing,”
“recycling” existing/past/legacy work?
Wow. Even if its 50%,
that’s significant—so I read on to find out what PTC had to say.
Five
Things You should Know About 3D CAD Software
(Perhaps this applies to any type of software…you be the
judge)
- Easy-to-use
doesn’t have to mean dumbed down.
I read this to
mean software and technology have come a long way over the past three or so
decades. Easy-to-use no longer
means “it’s a toy”…but, now-a-days, with Apple’s success, if it isn’t easy to
use, it won’t get used. Dumbed
down? Tell that to Steve
Jobs. I’d love to see his
reaction. In software, and with
other things as well, the easier something is to use, often times the more
elegant it is underneath and the more hours and hours of hard work that went
into it.
To take us away
from software, think about writing an article or a report or even a well penned
letter. Isn’t it true that the
more time /edits that go into it, the better the end piece? Easy to read doesn’t mean dumbed down
either.
But likely what
PTC was trying to infer is that the market windows of opportunity today are too
narrow to spend a lot of time learning a piece of software, while at the same
time, today’s complex designs require tools that are powerful, technology-rich,
and intuitive. I couldn’t
agree more here. This is AWR 100%.
Our novel user-interface in the world of high-tech design got us noticed
back in 1998 and, complemented by our powerful underlying and innovative
technology has kept us growing over the years.
- Designs
should be both robust and portable
What you design
must, of course, work—preferably the first time. Being able to refine, reuse,
repurpose is also important and should be straightforward…not cause you to
throw the baby out with the bathwater. This seems obvious enough, but if the
software isn’t built with this in mind, its possible that it could be easier to
start from scratch than to try to reuse something that was built prior with so
many tricks, tweaks, fudge factors etc.
Learn to work around bugs in the software in order to be
productive? Short livedJ
- Shouldn’t
make changes hard to deal with
PTC has a
different spin on “changes” than I do but instead of just thinking about
changes made possible within the tool itself, what about enabling co-simulation
/ collaborative design with tools that are complimentary with your
software?
Software that has
been developed with flexibility and open integration in mind can readily
grow/adapt to your changing/evolving needs without requiring a large time
investment in changing the design.
AWR’s charter is to provide seamless integration with third party tools
in order to make you more productive and successful.
- You
shouldn’t have to hit a functionality ceiling
What’s the next
gotcha in your design complexity?
Maybe you don’t have good visibility into it but you sure need to know
that the tool vendor is thinking this through for you and will be there for
you, providing you with the functionality you need today but also in the near
and longer term.
AWR’s software is built by microwave
engineers, so we know what engineers need, and we’ve got you covered. Look at our recent innovation of
multi-rate harmonic balance (MRHB™), our
acquisition of Analyst™ for 3D
distributed computing – spectral & domain decomposition, and our success
with planar EM through AXIEM™. We are
tuned in to our customers’ needs, and we innovate constantly in order to
provide the technologies needed not only to solve this year’s challenges, but
next years’ and the year after that as well.
- Maintenance
shouldn’t break the bank
Keep up-to-date and current with
the latest releases of your software as well as provide access to solid
technical support – this is part and parcel of the software business these
days—particularly EDA software.
This one is so self-explanatory I’m not going to expandJ
For all you out there, thanks for reading my blog these past
seven months on the MWJournal site. I’ll be ending my place here come the New
Year but hope you’ll find me again on AWR’s own website in 2010!
All my best,
Sherry
