Connection 2013 – Tecnomatix Recap day 1

Chuck Grindstaff, our CEO making the morning’s keynote on PLM strategy and vision.  Chuck started with a short movie about the Curiosity Rover, a fascinating story of NASA JPL’s success with the latest planetary rover to land on Mars. 

Chuck covered a lot of ground talking about how NASA JPL leveraged our technology to pull off the toughest job on earth.  It was a multi-disciplinary effort that required more people collaborating, more searching of information, more complexity and less margin for error than ever before.

He spent some time talking about the complexity of massive volumes of data and how 4^th Generation Design or 4GD from Siemens delivers the ability for our customers to develop and manage massive product programs such as shipbuilding.

The final morning presentation I covered came from William Allen, Jr from JPL – who had that impressive video on the 7 minutes of silence during the descent of Curiosity where they didn’t know if it landed safely or wrecked in a heap of expensive technology.

Bill was a great story teller and talked about how Siemens’ technology supported the success of the Rover program.  Although, he warned the audience that when they build something that’s supposed to last 90 days like the previous rover they landed and it actually goes for more than two years, that sets some pretty tough expectations from management so reuse was a key to their success in moving forward with the next generation rover.

In the afternoon I caught up with Zvi Feuer, EVP of Mfg Engineering Solutions who talked about the future of manufacturing and how Tecnomatix was positioned to start taking on some significant challenges in three areas:

•   Sustainable or green manufacturing,


•   Digital manufacturing and big data and


•   Disruptive technologies such as 3D printing and the latest generation of robots.