What is the parallel with engineering? Well, it is the awareness that things can be improved, but we don’t know it. We are not going to ask for improvements until we know it can be better and we are not asking for solutions for problems we do not see.

This may sound very straight forward, but it is a challenge in itself. Very frequently I visit companies where I get into talks about efficiency. Of course there are always things that are mentioned as issues where a solution is desired. Problems in systems performance, data management, information flow are known in organisations. The risk is in the priority of the problems and in the savings of the solution. In several cases improvements could be proposed that the organisation is not aware of, but offered more savings against a much lesser effort.

What is required for this this a regular “self check” of your engineering organisation. Ask yourself some fundamental questions. What is the purpose of our activity? What is input and output? (and please verify what is the real required output, in some cases engineering departments create output that nobody is using). How do we measure the effectiveness? etc. Only after that, look at the methods and tasks at hand and dare to question every single one of them.

If you do this right, and if possible with some help from outside, you should be able to come up with a longer list of improvements. Now these improvements can be listed in order of merits, following the Pareto principle. It helps you to spend you time and budget on the improvement plans with the highest output.

In parallel to the car lights: it helps you to follow your path with a clearer view on the future…

Enhancement Request Top 10, this year presented by SolidWorks “family members” from the early hours, is the most visible proof how SolidWorks invites the user comunity to express which enhancement would really make their life easier. This list is built from user input where users can come with ideas and vote for ideas from others.

Very impressive was the interview of Marie Planchard with Tom Atchinson of Rocket Maverics who started to turn students into junior rocket scientists. He lets children work on small space projects in different levels of complexity, but let them really bring technology into space. In the video shown on stage you could see the excitement shining off their faces as they see their rocket launch into space to deliver a payload the worked on as a team. SolidWorks embraces this kind of initiatives and in this case offered to sponsor Tom’s next launch.

NVIDIA took me by surprise. As a platinum sponsor they were allowed to have a few minutes on stage. NVIDIA took the opportunity to show a few valuable innovations. First there was the alpha version of eDrawings for Android live on stage (one of the top 10 requests) shown on a Tesla powerd Nexus 7 tablet. Next was the statement that with NVIDIA’s GRID Enterprise technology it is possible to run SolidWorks with full 3D accelleration via Citrix over the web. With this we have SolidWorks 2013 (yes, the actual current version) available as a cloud based solution. As a punch line a video was shown of SolidWorks running on a MacBook air.

The main dish of day 3 traditionaly is a preview of next major SolidWorks release. This time the number of improvement were aimed at the user community. Instead of spreading time over all kind of different products in the SolidWorks portfolio, the product team focussed on the large number of productivity improvement in the main CAD product. Many seemingly small improvement, but with high impact on productivity, were presented in a very entertaining context. The product team came up with crazy product ideas and explained new functionality as in a typical TellSell TV show. In my opinion the content and amount of improvements proves that SolidWorks is fully committed to its user community and delivers improvement that directly benefit their daily work.

SolidWorks 2014 will bring us again one step closer to the ultimate goal: Design Without Limits!

Looking forward to a great SolidWorks 2014 coming this year and all the other innovations that will accompany it. Let’s see where we are in a year from now as we meet again in San Diego, California.

After that, two more, very interesting speakers made clear that the community of who we can learn stretches beyond our human society. Professor Vijay Kumar from the University of Pennsylvania showed some amazing video’s of autonomous flying mini-robots that can perform colaborative tasks in groups. To be able to do this, the researchers looked at the way ants move paricles in a group and how a swarm of birds changes direction in flight. To see the robots, called quadrotors, in action you can watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sUeGC-8dyk&feature=youtube_gdata_player

The smallest type of these crafts weighs only 72 grams and they are extremely agile in flight. During development SolidWorks was heavily used to optimize the characteristics.

Also on stage Festo showed some innovative designs derived from mechanics present in animals. The Robotino includes two of these biomimicry applications. They used flexible pneumatic actuators in the robot arm to allow it to move like a trunk of an elephant. For the grabber fingers a principle was used that can be observed in tail finns of some fishes. The principle was demonstrated with a 3D “printed” part live on stage, causing an exited buzz in the audience of mechanics who were already thinking of many other applications of this.

The idea of biomimicry probably is as old as human kind itself. A well known example is Otto Liliental who started experiments in 1867 studying bird’s flight in order to build wings for humans to fly. I’m sure he would be amazed about what we can do today, as shown on SolidWorks World. I guess he would have liked the remote controlled, wing flapping bird of Festo best as it was flying over the 4500 heads present in the audience…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnR8fDW3Ilo&feature=youtube_gdata_player