We recently had a chance to catch up with Siemens Digital Industries Software and get an update on NX. We heard about recent developments, the latest strategic direction for #CAD, their efforts to support comprehensive workflows, and progress to enable a Model-Based Enterprise (MBE). Here are a few of the highlights.
NX Innovation and Customer Adoption
The NX team at Siemens has been very busy. They are on a continuous release cycle, with major releases every December and June. The 4200 enhancements and 45 patents reflect the level of innovation investment over the last year. At the same time, they maintain high levels of quality, as 75% of NX customers are on a release from 2024 or 2023. They’ve also added over 1000 new customer logos, especially in the SMB space. Their cloud offering, NX X, largely drove this. Additionally, they continue to receive awards from peer review sites like G2 and Trust Radius.
Introducing Designcenter
On January 6, 2025, at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, Siemens introduced Designcenter.
Designcenter is a new brand that combines both CAD products, NX and Solid Edge, to provide a single scalable mechanical CAD offering. The intent is to offer comprehensive workflows that integrate with Teamcenter and Simcenter to provide a seamless experience across design, simulation, and manufacturing.
Both NX and Solid Edge are built on the same Parasolid kernel, making it easier to work with Solid Edge models in NX and vice versa. Over the last couple of years, Siemens has invested in evolving the user interfaces to give them a similar look and feel, making it easier for users to switch between the products. Designcenter furthers this approach to bring the two brands closer.
Scalable and Comprehensive
To meet customer needs, whether they are a large, medium, or small enterprise, Designcenter offers four options:
- Essentials
- Standard
- Advanced
- Premium
Essentials is the rebranded product that was formerly Zel X. Standard, Advanced, and Premium are tiered offerings so that customers can match the package with their needs, yet have options to scale should their requirements evolve. All three include built-in data management.
Within these packages, NX offers extensive capabilities for typical parts, assemblies, and drawings. However, based on the business, organizational function, industry, project stage, and supply chain role, some users may need more specialized functionality that is available in an optional module. In the past, it was difficult to justify the investment in an optional module, especially if it was for functionality that wasn’t needed regularly. Siemens has addressed this challenge with a value-based licensing model for NX. This concept has worked well in the Simulation/CAE space to give users access to specialized analyses when needed, so it makes sense to apply it to CAD as well.
NX’s value-based licensing model uses tokens for optional modules, which allows customers to use and return tokens for different functionalities. The intent is to give customers a cost-effective, flexible way to access specialized functionality when needed. For example, an aerospace company may want to use the token pool to take advantage of optional modules to design machined aerospace components or composite parts.
Enabling a Model-Based Enterprise (MBE)
Tech-Clarity’s research has found that while companies who have started the journey to adopt MBE report many benefits, including better traceability, greater agility, and faster time to market, there are still many barriers to adoption. Interestingly, people and culture challenges are even bigger obstacles than either technology or process challenges. To overcome this, the Product and Manufacturing Information (PMI) embedded in the CAD model needs to become more consumable to downstream departments. Siemens is looking to do this with NX Stage Models, which help manufacturing engineers decompose design models into manufacturing stages, and a new NX Inspector, which supports a new standard for model-based characteristics.
In 2024, the DMSC™, an ANSI Accredited Standards Developing Organization and an ISO A-Liaison, released the Model-Based Characteristics Standard (MBC). The new MBC standard defines a common approach for tagging and uniquely identifying product characteristics for quality processes in a way that makes the PMI both human-readable and machine-readable. This is a giant step toward making PMI more usable, which should encourage MBE initiatives. By supporting this new standard, NX Inspector provides a mechanism for automating inspection plans based on the PMI in the CAD model.
Our Take
It is nice to see all the effort into making NX more accessible, especially to smaller and medium-sized enterprises. Solid Edge customers should also have an easier path to scale up to more advanced capabilities as they need them. The token-based licensing model is also a nice way to make advanced, productivity-improving capabilities available to more users.
What’s really exciting to us is the MBE capabilities. The MBE capabilities should be particularly interesting to the Aerospace and Defense industry, which has shown the most interest in MBE.
The vision to move away from 2D drawings has been around for well over 20 years now, but manufacturing still largely follows a 2D-driven process. Capabilities that leverage semantic PMI to automate downstream processes should go a long way to finally realize that vision. The functionality offered by NX Inspector that supports an opportunity to automate inspection plans based on the 3D model is a big step forward. It should save significant time and reduce the risk of errors introduced with traditional, manual processes that leverage a 2D drawing. This should lead to efficiency gains, which will be a huge motivator for adopting an MBE approach. We look forward to seeing how this evolves, especially as Siemens works towards integrating metrology within its digital industries.
Thank You
Thank you George Rendell, Tod Parrella, Jennifer Piper, and Shaun Ennis for sharing this update.