Live from COFES – Mechanical Conngress

So I’m sitting in the Day 1 congress at COFES (the mechanical version) moderated by Peter Marks from Design Insight. Just a few random thoughts captured from the crowd:

• Too much functionality / too little functionality (that’s easy for a vendor to address!)
• Configuration management needs work
• Interoperability – the topic that everyone wants solved, but no one wants to talk about
• Integration with ERP systems needs work
• System level design tools are under represented in the current set of applications
• Users want to do more engineering and less modeling…this could be interesting.
• Customer facing configurators seem to be of interest
• Tools require us to be too specific too soon – we need an “electronic napkin”
• The easy waste to eliminate in the process have been largely identified (tools that work, finding the right data)…what is left are the hard things (am I working on the right thing? What do my customers want?)
• The tools need to be fun

Ah…user feedback is fun.