Senior Vice President Global Revenue Operations & Chief Information Officer, Autodesk
Autodesk University 2014, Carl White speaks with the press
Carl White, Senior director of manufacturing and engineering at Autodesk speaks with the press.
About Carl White
At Autodesk University 2014, Carl White, then Senior Director of Manufacturing and Engineering at Autodesk, discussed the company's expanding focus beyond design into manufacturing and production. White stated that "Autodesk as a whole is moving beyond just design — we've been 30 years as a CAD company but whether you're in construction or whether you're in manufacturing the whole company is starting to think about how you go make something." He described the company's strategy as "plan, program and produce," noting that Autodesk was investing in areas such as factory design, point cloud work, and machine tool data visualization to help small to medium machine shops become more efficient. White highlighted the importance of the programming and production phases, saying "This is where we decided we'd spend most of our energy because this is where the money's made and lost; cycle times are important here — how fast can I get a part out, how quickly can I program that part, am I going to get a good part?" He also provided updates on product developments, including the release of Inventor HSM Professional with five-axis capabilities, the integration of three-axis CAM into Fusion Ultimate, and the continued growth of the Delcam subsidiary following its acquisition.
Transcript (36 segments)
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Carl White0:07
My name is Carl White. I'm the senior director for manufacturing engineering. My group is responsible for what happens when that design gets finished. It gets put through a PLM system and then some poor soul somewhere has to figure out how to make it on a machine tool like this, or on a water jet, or however the product is going to be fabricated. We focus solely on making people more productive in their manufacturing process.
Last year at AU when you came here, we talked about the acquisition of Delcam. The Delcam team continues to be a wholly independent subsidiary. They're actually growing quite well. We're starting to trade some technology. I'll talk a little bit about that and some of the work that they're doing with their products.
Over the last couple of years though, we've been talking a lot about CAM: the acquisition of HSMWorks, the acquisition of Delcam. What I wanted to take the time today to do is kind of pull the story back a little bit and talk about the broader thing that we're trying to do for manufacturers. And as part of that, I got some slideware and some videos to show you guys what's going on.
We're really trying to concentrate not just on the cutting of metal or parts. We're trying to work across the entire workflow. When you get outside of the design department, you know, if you haven't noticed, Autodesk as a whole is moving beyond just design. We've been 30 years as a CAD company, but whether you're in construction or whether you're in manufacturing, the whole company is starting to think about how you go make something. You've heard it here at the show: the future of how things are made, whether it be buildings or roads or cars or airplanes.
This is really what we're trying to do: move beyond our traditional stronghold, which is the design and engineering section of this building where we have been for 30 years. We know those people, we are friends with their families and see them at Christmas. But what we're trying to do is get out into the factory floor now. Not all businesses look like this, but if you take a small machine shop as an example, you still have somebody who's doing programming, somebody who's a machinist, and somebody who's managing that shop. And we believe we've got solutions that can span the gamut of small machine shop all the way up to large enterprise.
So I want to talk to you about that process and what we're thinking about today. We think of it in three specific areas. The first is what we think is the most important but least paid attention to in all of these processes, which is planning. What am I going to do? How am I going to make this particular part? What facility is it going to go into? How am I going to understand what exactly is going to be the process by which it's made?
Two and a half years ago, three years ago, we started with a product called Factory Design Suite. We very quickly expanded around the outside of that. In this particular case, what you're seeing here is a process analysis tool: two sources, a processor, a buffer, and an end product. How fast can I make the products? Slide the slider. How many do I get in a day, a week, an hour, a month? Now this is a pretty simple diagram, but what you'll see in a second is a far more complicated diagram of how this works.
What's unique about what we've done is we've used the assets that you see on the right-hand side there to tie these processes together. So when I start to build more complex processes like the one you see here, you can see buffers, processors, but I have machine tools, I have pallet racking, I have bins, I have everything that I might need for my manufacturing process. And what I want to do is keep that seamless workflow to understand what happened, understand what that process did over a period of time.
So we've got a full reporting suite that goes inside of it, and I can very quickly go and understand exactly what happened at each machine tool, what the travel time was. I've got meantime to repair, meantime for failure. I've got variability settings inside of here. But the key is this process analysis tool is the what-if scenario for your manufacturing, and it doesn't matter if it's machine operation or if it's factory floor.
Now because we're using the standard library of assets, we can link it directly from that process planning phase into layout. And what we find is most of the folks who are doing the factory layout are using AutoCAD. 3D is a foreign object to them. They're using AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT. So we like to keep the environment one that they're used to, that they understand what's going on, and it's simple to pick up and use.
What you see here is somebody doing a layout of a conveyor, and we can automatically then sync that directly into Inventor and turn it into 3D. That's where we start to do the advanced stuff: point clouds, collision detection. The key to this planning part is not just setting up factories, but what's going to happen inside of that factory over time, because those lines move. You need to be able to go back to that data again and again.
Now one of the biggest things that we've heard from our customers over the last year was they're putting bigger and bigger factories into this product. And as you put a 3-kilometer-long tire plant, for example, in there, it works great in AutoCAD, but when you hit sync to go to Inventor, it really turns to get that out. So what we've just done is added a sync feature. Taken that same AutoCAD file and now we sync directly to Navisworks.
So whether you're syncing from Inventor, AutoCAD to Inventor and want that level of detail in your model, or whether you want to go to a really large model and have great visualization and performance across that, the Navisworks syncs that we've built in really help solve that problem. And you've got the ability to go forward and backwards: Inventor to AutoCAD, AutoCAD to Inventor, out to Navisworks. So this is a big piece for the plan part of our business.
Once you've planned what you're going to do, you clearly have to tell these machines or the people on the floor or the water jets or laser cutters what to go do. So this is where we start to think about program. This is where we decided we'd spend most of our energy, because this is where the money's made and lost. Cycle times are important here. How fast can I get a part out? How quickly can I program that part? Am I going to get a good part?
So this is where we've done the acquisition of HSMWorks, we've done the acquisition of Delcam. And the way we position those two: HSMWorks is integrated CAM. It sits inside the design application. It is all about—and I got to slow down to get this part right—low variability, high variability, low volume. Right? This is about your job shop guy who needs to get a toolpath on a part and get it out the door as fast as you possibly can, and he's willing to go really fast.
It's integrated inside of the design tool so they don't have to use another application, transfer data back and forth. It's all integrated: SolidWorks, Inventor, and in the Fusion 360 product. So we just put out the HSMWorks 2015. Again, we bought this product two years ago. We've done, I think, upwards of eight updates to the SolidWorks product. It was widely thought we'd go ahead and kill it, but you know, we don't have the ability to decide whose design software we're going to live inside of. So we've continued to update the HSMWorks or the SolidWorks integrated version.
What you see here is our new Adaptive 2.0 toolpath. This has got stay-down on moves and more constant cutter. So this is just continuing to rough out faster and faster, and this algorithm continues to progress.
Yesterday we released Inventor HSM Professional. So we've had Inventor, the three-axis version. We now have the five-axis version that includes five-axis contour and five-axis swarf. This comes also with Inventor Professional, and if you go back in time a little bit, inside of Inventor Professional are some mold and die design tools. So we're really starting to build up a set of products and pieces that are all about how we can help the guy who's making that mold and die, or help that job shop get the product done really quickly.
And then two weeks ago, we just integrated the three-axis version into Fusion. So in the Fusion Ultimate package, the two-and-a-half-axis version that we have is included in Fusion, and the three-axis is included in the Fusion Ultimate. Now across SolidWorks, Inventor, or Fusion, we have the free two-and-a-half-axis CAM product.
So what's the half-axis? So it's the movement up, but it's going to move, yes. Okay. So there's the free version for SolidWorks. We still continue to sell and ship, give away. We also give the free version for Inventor. So if you have either of those products, you have two-and-a-half-axis CAM for free. We only sell the three-axis and the five-axis in both of those products.
Now when you're really doing expensive work, you're working on titanium, you can't afford to do scrap, you need expert CAM. If you're doing mill-turn and high production, this is high-volume, low-variability work. This is the MORI NTX 1000 we have at Pier 9, where you turn it on and walk away. It may take you a considerable amount of time to program that machine tool, but it's production-level CAM. You want to kick those things out over and over and over again.
So the Delcam guys have been working on, in FeatureCAM, a lot of turning enhancements. The mill-turn execution in FeatureCAM is top-shelf, and they continue to just continually advance that turning functionality: pinch turning, better synchronization, steady rest movement, all of the kind of things that you're going to expect from a turning package and a mill-turn package. They're working on.
When you look at PowerMill, you know, when you're machining things as big as that table or a block as big as a car bumper, you know you can't afford to make a mistake. And so the collision detection and the collision work that's being done in PowerMill is one of the big things that they continue to add. So when you turn that machine on, you want to know that you're not going to run into anything.
What's interesting is you'll see the head on the machine tool turn from red to yellow. Yellow is a close—it's not a collision. It's within a tolerance that you set. In this case, it's 10 mil. So in that particular case, it's close enough. It's going to let you know that it's not going to hit, but you should think about this because there's going to be a little bit of differentiation there. So this is a big piece of what the Delcam team are working on.
So one of the things that we haven't had is a solution for composites or fabrication. You know, fabrication when we talk about it, at least as part of my team, this is flat metals: think water jet, laser, plasma. You know, if you're doing heavy plate for shipbuilding or locomotives or something like that. And the other area that we were interested in—it's a bit of a black art right now—but we're always interested in trying to democratize technology with composites.
So in June of this year, we actually acquired a company named Majestic Systems. Majestic Systems is out of Westwood, New Jersey. You probably know them by their fabrication product, which is TruNest. They are a very high-end provider, similar to Delcam in the CAM space, of water, laser, plasma, oxy, punch processes that basically serve as lights-out, direct from ERP, robot kitting, robotic picking. So this is a very high-end way to go push these technologies out there.
It's a very good business. In fact, one of our good customers for Inventor, Greenheck Fan, is a TruNest customer as well. Every time they open a new plant, they put in a whole set of TruNest. But we're working on some interesting things here in the future. You'll see a water jet strategy included with the CAM package. So inside of HSMWorks, we're going to include a two-axis water jet strategy because we believe that in the machine shops where a lot of guys are doing this type of work, that water jet strategy is going to be a big part of helping to do the CAM stuff.
The other part of Majestic is composites. A very interesting black art, you know, very leading-edge in the world today. Lots of airplanes, the MonoRacer over there, that's a carbon fiber car. This is coming of age very quickly, and we want to be invested and in the right place to help our customers as they work to work composites into their products in the future. So while it's very high-end aerospace and automotive at this point in time, and custom automotive, we're going to see what we can do to help bring this down.
Now the Majestic team brings some interesting things to the table on the composite side. So automatic tape layup, automatic fiber placements are the programming of the robot to lay down the fiber on an airplane wing. This is exactly what they're doing. They're also helping drive manufacturing decisions at the design phase with one of their products.
What's really interesting, and we've done this before, one of their major products is embedded inside of CATIA. So we will continue to support and drive the CATIA workflows for the Majestic products. That's actually the screenshot you see in the middle is the TruFiber implementation inside of CATIA.
They also do hand layup, and one of the interesting things, if you haven't been in a clean room, there's a lot of laser work that's done for orientation of fiber as you do hand layup, which is kind of the process which most folks use today. So they also have tools for setting up and directing the lasers to understand where the charges need to be put down inside of the mold as it gets put together before it gets vacuum-bagged and put into the heating. So an interesting space for us. Keep an eye out. We're going to be doing some interesting things with some composites in the future.
The last phase of this, when we're manufacturing things, is the production phase. This one's really interesting because I think this is one of the most broken parts of manufacturing today. A lot of attention is paid to this middle one, the program. People do planning, but I don't think they do a really good job of spending the time up front to make sure they understand what's going to happen. And on the back end, we see this mostly as Excel spreadsheets, tracers, trackers. There's a little plastic envelope that usually travels around with something that's being made on a shop floor. We think there's other ways to do that.
But there's also a lot of implementations that are going on out there right now, like MTConnect is a standard. If you haven't heard about it, it's effectively a standard by which machine tools can give off information that can then be reviewed and you can understand what's happened on the shop floor. So if you think about what we did in the plan phase, which is create a model of what our process is, what we're doing, and we're working with a company called Systems Insights. They make a product called VizPool.
What you're seeing here is a Factory Design Suite model. We've implemented the VizPool technology inside a Factory Design Suite. What they do is they capture all the information from the machine tool, and they offer a service which basically captures it and allows you to look at it. But the way you look at it is in speedometers or tachometers and bar graphs, and it's really hard to understand what's actually going on. So what we've done is put that data over that model that the person created in the beginning, and now you can really look at what's going on in the world of that shop floor.
So this is somewhere we're going to continue to invest in as we go forward with this manufacturing vision. This idea of plan, program, and produce is really what we're marching towards. We feel like we're doing really well in the program space in the middle here, especially with the addition of Majestic Systems. Plan with the Factory Design Suite product, the point cloud work that's been done, the Navisworks connections—we're continuing to mature that side. The produce is where we think we can start to get into some really interesting territory and helping the small to medium machine shops who don't have access to this kind of technology become way more efficient.
So with that quick run-through, I'll leave that up and take any questions you guys might have.