Who We are
Innova Engineering Inc is structured as an mechanical engineering
firm specializing in product development services. The company
focus is on PTC products, both in day to day engineering tasking,
and as a reseller.
Background:
The company was originally formed as Leading Edge
Design, in 1987 by John Cogger, as an engineering
consulting firm in the mechanical engineering arena.
The company grew to 11 full time engineers, and was
sold to a nationwide technical services company in
fall of 1991.
After the sale, a new company was formed, which was geared
to product development, and relied heavily on sophisticated
MCAD tools such as Parametric Technologies' Pro/Engineer solid
modeler. Our experience with Pro/Engineer began with Version
6. An additional emphasis was on non-linear finite element
analysis, using the MSC.MARC solver, and software prototyping
became a differentiator in the product design marketplace.
This activity resulted in more than a dozen patents, mostly
in the pharmaceutical industry.
A hallmark during this period was industry wide recognition
of our expert level utilization of Pro/Engineer, with these
skills highly sought after by client firms. This evolved into
a similar level of expertise with Pro/PDM, and ultimately
Pro/Intralink and Product View.
This expertise was a natural extension of our participation
in the product development world, wherein we were asked to
participate in the scale up and production aspects of the
products that we designed for clients. This was a formulative
period in the evaluation of our business model, as we determined
that there was a significant demand for rigorous implementation
of a robust design process, centering around FMEA (Failure
Mode Effects Analysis) and other computer simulation tools
in the conceptual area of product design.. Many of our clients
lacked the infrastructure necessary to take advantage of these
types of products and services, and these skills were quickly
embraced by the medical and pharmaceutical communities in
particular.
The result of this experience was a wide spread recognition
among our clients of considerable experience in computer simulation
tools in product design applications. This experience was
based on "in the field" successes and real world implementations.
We began to formulate solutions to customer requests to add
additional fidelity to the conceptual design engineering process,
and we formalized our experience into a well documented series
of process steps..
In March of 2000, the company was incorporated in California
under the name of Innova Engineering Inc, with the express
mission of providing access to these tools and processes,
as well as database management expertise for the engineering
database.
Description of Business Model:
The business model uses the experience gained during the
prior 16 years of providing engineering services to discrete
manufacturers, and encompasses several "out of the box" service
applications..
The premise of the process driven conceptual engineering
model is to reduce the cost of product development, while
at the same time decreasing time to market. This is achieved
by investing engineering man hours at the conceptual level
to:
- Predict component behavior during functional cycling.
- Optimize component design to achieve best in class results.
- Apply non-inutuitve loadcases and evaluate the product
performance.
- Predict and correct potential failures before they occur.
= Failure Modes Effects Analysis. Use of this tool
in the conceptual design engineering phase allows Innova engineers
to overlay formal product specification with a wide variety
of potential failure modes, evalauting manufacturing, process
and functional criteria. An additional use of these studies
are to identify, challenge and refine the loadcases used in
the subsequent finite element analysis.
= Non-linear Finite Element Analysis. Innova's use
of the MSC.MARC finite element solver is well know in the
product development community. We have used this tool, coupled
with our engineering expertise, to provide significant benefits
in a wide variety of product development environments, both
for optimization programs and new product design.
= Physical Response Testing. Lab testing is generally
applied to all programs, for determining exact material properties,
as well as validating computer models for accuracy.
= Mechanical Design Engineering. Using our Pro/Engineer
installation, full scale product development and protoyping
is performed on the conceptual models.
= Software sales. All PTC engineering software products
are sold as bundled solutions.
= Intranet based bundling of fully associative Pro/Engineer
solid models with third party manufacturing documents,
for an engineering driven document management system. These
proprietary solutions use standardized utilities with Innova
developed functionality to create a central repository for
linked manufacturing documents, such as manufacturing process
instructions, field service manuals, QC documents, etc. Intralink
and ProductView are used together in a bundled application
to provide permission based viewing functionality of linked
Pro/Engineer solids, drawings, and documents. Additionally,
files formats such as PDF, DXF, IGES, and HPGL can be automatically
ported to any ERP system.
The current business model achieves these goals, as the
software installations are configured as Client/Server, with
the Intralink master storage vault and file server on site
at the customers' facility, on a Innova supplied server. Future
plans calling for a remote hosted solution, utilizing thin
client technology in conjunction with distributed file vaulting,
to allow the native Pro/Engineer files to still be stored
on site at the customer facility. The Intralink and ProductView
client licenses are distributed to the remote clients through
the FlexLM license server located at Innova. Innova provides
each subscribed customer one paid up license per remote node.
Advanced services are available:
- Shared repository for linked third party files (Word, Excel,
etc)
- Templates for typical manufacturing documents
- Standardized Intralink templates for ECO submittal and administration
- QC composite document templates. (Fully associative)
- Manufacturing composite documents. (Fully associative)
- Vendor accessible read-only repositories for both ProductView
and native files.
Planned services:
- Integration hooks to supply chain management applications
- Gateways to external ERP systems through the Windchill
interface
- Customized, "out of the box" Windchill applications
focusing on the engineering dataset
- Integration of other PTC Division applications into the
ASP model
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