【灌水】老美对Ford的分析

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MY OPINION: EDS and their hybrid UG/IDEAS (NX) will only be around long enough for Ford to make the transition to CATIA V5. It makes absolutely NO sense for Ford to use UG/IDEAS (NX) for interiors, and/or chassis, and Catia V5 for body structure and external panels. If Catia V5 has the surfacing capabilities to do Class A surfacing on exterior panels, why wouldn't they use it to design the interior. Class A surface is class A surface, right? If Catia V5 has the capabilities to design the body structure, why wouldn't they use it to design structural components in the interior and chassis??? I'm unaware of any other major OEM doing anything like this. Didn't Ford learn their lesson with the their past CAD  
software (SDRC) debacles???  
Out of necessity, we were forced to work with two CAD systems at Saturn several years ago. The body designers came from GM and were familiar with CGS. The Vehicle Interior Systems (VIS) group benchmarked several CAD systems and chose Catia (V2 at the time). Trying to work with two separate CAD systems was a complete mess. The only way to get CGS data into Catia, and vise versa, was throughan IGES translator. The translated data was garbage; barely usable to perform menial design tasks. Saturn finally switched to Catia 100%  
  
across-the-board in the early 90's. Unfortunately, when Saturn was assimilated into GM in the mid-to-late 90's, they were forced to switch to Unigraphics, which had replaced CGS as GM's corporate CAD system. At the time, Unigraphics was clearly inferior to Catia (V4 by then) and no one at Saturn was happy with the move. Many of my former Saturn colleagues are still grumbling.  
I'm not an expert on software develOPMent by any means, but from what I understand Unigraphics and Catia V5 do not share the same core architecture. Thus, they are NOT interoperable. As of this writing, there are no built-in "save-as" translators. As such, IGES, STEP, or 3rd party translation software will be required for the two CAD systems to share data. One of the strengths of modern CAD software is the ability to retain a parts history, thus making it very easy to make downstream changes. Parts translated via IGES or STEP translators do not retain their history. Thus rendering the parts as "dumb solids" or "dumb surfaces". Such was the case nearly 15 years ago at Saturn. 3rd party "feature  
based" translation software is getting better, but at it's best it is not as cost effective, efficient, or as accurate as native data that requires no translation. So why would Ford choose to use two CAD systems when they've just chosen one (Catia V5) that can do it all? The only reason that makes any sense is that Ford is buying time so their designers and engineers can get up to speed on Catia V5.  
In my estimation, Ford could not risk any bad blood with EDS at this critical  
  
stage by telling them they are being eliminated. To do so would be to risk losing EDS' "enthusiastic" support on current programs. Ford cannot afford to put themselves in that position. They need EDS onboard during the transition faze. And how long will this transition period last? Not as long as you might think.  
Despite the fact the Catia V5 announcement came on February 6th 2003, my sources tell me that Ford has been working with Catia V5 for quite some time now (as reported on this website nearly two years ago).  
  
The next question is whether General Motors will be next to jump on the Catia V5 bandwagon. Consider the following; Bob Lutz, formerly of Chrysler Corporation and regarded as "the father of the Dodge Viper", has joined GM as Vice Chairman of Product Development. And which CAD software is Bob Lutz most familiar with??? (Hint: CATIA) Also, one of my former Catia V5 students has recently taken a job at GM doing data translations. She tells me that the department she's working in (at GM) already has Catia V5 workstations and that they were very pleased that she has already had Catia V5 training. Hmm...wonder why?  
These are my thoughts, what are yours? If you'd like to share your opinion, please send me an email at mailto:keith@practicalcatia.com?subject=My Opinion.  
Cheers,  
Keith  
在美国一个网站上看到的一个美国汽车业内人士对Ford采用两种CAD系统的评论，摘要如下：  
Ford现在采用CATIA 和UG（NX）并行的方式只是为以后完全转向CATIAV5的权宜之计。对Ford而言，用UG（NX）做内饰和底盘，CATIA做车身和面板是毫无意义的。而且，两种软件的数据转换是非常困难的。那Ford为什么把会这样做？唯一的理由就是Ford在花钱买时间，以便让自己的员工转向。而在这个关键的时期，福特不愿和EDS交恶，而直截了当的告诉EDS：你们出局。Ford现在还需要EDS的热情来解决目前的问题。而这个转换期可能比想象的短。2003.2.6福特宣布消息，而我的消息来源告诉我，Ford已经使用CATIAV5很长一段时间了。  
下一个问题是GM是不是下一位跳上CATIA花车的人。考虑到以下的一些情况，以前在Chrysler Corporation，被誉为“蝰蛇之父”的Bob Lutz，现在已加入GM，任分管产品开发的副主席，而他最熟悉的软件正是CATIA。还有，我以前的一个学生现在加入GM，她告诉我，他们部门已购进CATIAV5工作站，并已进行CATIA培训，为什么呢？

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