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