Bridging the CAD-PDM divide

Translating geometry from one CAD system to another is not always the easiest process. You may lose some data during the importing process, and have to fill in the blanks later, recreating the missing links.

There are so many suppliers and customers with dissimilar mechanical design systems that translation products are becoming a necessity.

One company that has been in this space for nearly 20 years is Elysium Inc. (www.elysiuminc.com), which offers translation products that specialize in 3D CAD systems. The company offers about 50 different translators that cover just about all of the major and minor CAD systems out there.

Now the company is moving into the PLM space: It is developing products that integrate SMARTEAM (www.smarteam.com) Product Lifecycle Management solutions within the Unigraphics and I-DEAS CAD environments. This, the company says, should be another time-saver for OEMs.

The new integrations will let manufacturers use SMARTEAM from within the I-DEAS and Unigraphics NX environments to manage all product design and attribute data, including 3D geometry and product data intelligence, explains Peter Heath, director of product management for Elysium.

The products, which Heath says are expected to be available by the end of the second quarter, are a natural progression for the company, which continues to expand its expertise in the area of data exchange.

Elysium's PDM translation products, known as CAD.pdm, enable 3D product data, together with the "design intelligence" captured in the related 3D attributes and metadata, to be used, shared and manipulated throughout the product lifecycle.

"What we're starting to see is that some customers want to use PDM-enabled translation," Heath says. "As they buy PDM systems, they are trying to bring everything together. What we're enabling is for that translation to happen automatically. PDM is just starting to explode for a lot of people."