Help needed in persuading boss to upgrade from V18

[TechnicalConsultant]

Hi, All

Could really do with some help. I’ve been working in the DO for an Engineering company for the last few years. We have relatively old hardware and really struggle on some of our 3D assemblies and intricate components. We are using V18 of Unigraphics and in my opinion need to update hardware and migrate to NX3-4.

I am set with the task of persuading our management to spend some money but need to go to them with some REAL benefits to changing to a newer version (which we would need a hardware upgrade).

Any suggestions/comments/opinions very much appreciated

 

[looslib]

I take it you have not been on maintenance. In which case, you will need to get with UGS and negotiate an upgrade fee. The standard charge for a compnay off of maintenance to upgrade, come back on to maintenance, is 25% per year that you have been off of the current list price of the UG module. If you have not upgraded in 4 years, negotiate new licenses as it may be cheaper.

Look at the change in hardware for productivity gains as well as the software. 1Ghz vs 3Ghz CPU speed will not be 3:1 increase, but it does help significantly.

Do you use UG for CAM as well as CAD? There have been a lot of advances that would make NX3 more productive than V18.
The ease of drawing templates in NX is nice.

Good Luck.


"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."
"Fixed in the next release" should replace "Product First" as the PTC slogan.

Ben Loosli
CAD/CAM System Analyst
Ingersoll-Rand

 

[TechnicalConsultant]

Yeah we are on a maintenance agreement. The problem is our hardware is around 7 YEARS OLD and wouldn't be sufficient to run NX. We have around 30 CAD users in the DO so its a rather big investment.

They want to purchase a few machines at a time but thats not much use as we all need to be on NX

We do use CAM so it'll be interesting to see whats changed.

Kind regards

 

[looslib]

Have you looked at leasing new machines? That way you get new machines every 24-26 months and the hardware will always support the latest versions of software.

7 year old hardware, my condolences.What are they, 300mhz CPU's with 512 mb of ram? A new 3Ghz machine with the latest graphics, Nvidia FX3400, and 2GB of ram will scream compared to the old machines. Get a hardware vendor to loan you a machine for performance benchmarking. Just run V18 on the new hardware and compare the times. The justification should then be obvious.

"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."
"Fixed in the next release" should replace "Product First" as the PTC slogan.

Ben Loosli
CAD/CAM System Analyst
Ingersoll-Rand

 

[HellBent]

There are just way too many improvements to list. In short...it's a ton better and faster. As far as CAM goes....totally new from v18. CAM really sucked prior to NX. They've made major improvements. Tell your CAM guys they can now write programs easily using previous cut stock as the blank stock...no extra steps. That alone should get their knees knocking. Tell them there's been some major interface improvements and the PostBuilder is completely new. By the way...you'll want to get with UG about the post processors. You may need to write entirely new ones...unless UG can give you what you need.

Look into Windows machines....preferably 64 bit. That's where everything is going. You can get really nice dual processor workstations starting at about $6k that will blow the doors off a unix box....I'm assuming that's what you're on if your hardware is 7 years old.

Take care...

 

[wmalan]

Noyce,

My condolences as well to your hardware prediciment. I was in the same position last year as an NC programmer using UG 18. My employer decided to use cracked licenses to "upgrade" to NX for the company - so I quit. Strangly, I reported them to the BSA. (Does that make me a bad person?...) They are still using the cracks...

Anyway...
Since you're going to have to negociate from scratch on licenses - I would go so far as to say start upgrading the hardware first. The productivity gains will be far more on the hardware than upgrading the software. V18 is sweet on a fast box. It will be like upgrading your software!

NX2 is not hugely different from v18 on most levels. NX3 the icons are crazy (IMHO). The toolpath play buttons have been reversed from v18. Drafting has changed a lot mostly for the better They've moved a lot of the standard features around on the menus. But like I said, I was looking at cracked versions so perhaps the legal release is much different.

Go for the hardware first. Heck, for the price of one full manufacturing license you can get 6 awesome computers!

Good luck

--
Bill

 

[HellBent]

He's going to NX3 or 4 Bill....there are a lot of CAM improvements in 3....some of which I mentioned. You can also rotate your model around now while doing path visualization....another big time-saver on complex paths with a lot of ramping. Generally speaking they put a lot of much needed time into the CAM package to get it into the 1990's....lol.

Take care....

 

[wmalan]

HellBent,

Thanks for the info on NX3. I would not say cam "sucked" prior to NX though...<g>

I've been using Vericut for so long that I rarely define the workpiece except for CavityMill. Usually we import stl from Vericut if we need an inprocess model. Not really an extra step as one must save the inprocess model in UG as well. The models are smaller in UG though. I like to have various points of inprocess models to go to when programming. That's where UG is still behind. It gets confusing to have mulitple stages of cut stock strewn across various layers in UG. For me, it's very easy in Vericut. Much more thorogh interigation of the cut model as well. Xcaliper is still top dog there. That said, with a few improvements - such as a standalone UG verifier - many shops will be able to drop Vericut.

As far as Postbuilder: Has it changed since NX2? I made a couple 3ax and one 5ax post with it. The docs for it were very sketchy especially covering tcl. I just wish they would get on the bus and give us a few more samples of common machines and controls. Most the other cam vendors do. Most of the aerospace shops I've been to are either using the old GPM or a third party such as ICAM, or Postworks with cls output. It's hard for a long standing shop to change its post setups.

Btw, I missed the part where the OP stated he did have maintenance. By all means he should upgrade UG!

--
Bill

 

[TechnicalConsultant]

Many thanks for all your opinions, i'll keep posted with my progress.

 

[HellBent]

Hi Bill....3 made improvements to the in-process stuff. You don't need to save out anything anymore. It added IPW (in process workpiece) operations that do everything automatically. And even on the cavity mill (my most used program as well) you can tell it to reference previous path without having to verify it and create a ipw file for each and every cutter path.....it does it all for you and saves a ton of time compared to the old way. It's totally re-vamped and a major improvement. I also used vericut previously but between the IPW improvements and the big improvement to the built in visualization tools I haven't had to use it since going to 3.

To be honest with you I can't remember for sure which release it was where I had to redo my posts. It came along with the Postbuilder change though....when they introduced the pretty user interface. I thought that was NX1 but I may be wrong....it could have been 3....I can't remember when I re-did those...lol.

Take care....

 

[HellBent]

oh...lol...as far as "sucked"...I was referring more to the user interface more than anything else. It's pretty much impossible to take someone out of another CAM package and put them in UG and be able to get good output from them in a month's time...mainly because of the interface and all of the redundancies....it can be pretty confusing to a newcomer....heck...it can be confusing to someone with UG experience. It's getting better though!

Take care...