Siemens and CADENAS Extend Partnership to Further Align STEM Education with Manufacturing Job Opportunities

Students and educators worldwide now have access to the same huge online catalog of 3D digital parts used to increase product design productivity for industrial manufacturers

Siemens' product lifecycle management (PLM) software business unit and CADENAS have extended their partnership to provide students in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) related fields, with free access to a popular product design productivity tool used by the global manufacturing industry. Siemens PLM Software's academic partners – including students, researchers and educators – can now quickly and efficiently find and download standard parts from a massive digital database based on CADENAS' widely-used PARTcommunity technology. By providing academia with the same technology used by many companies in the global manufacturing industry to instantly access millions of 3D parts from more than 400 manufacturers, Siemens and CADENAS are helping to further align STEM education with real-world job opportunities.

"Our academic program is focused on developing a highly trained and heavily recruited PLM workforce," said Bill Boswell, senior director of Partner Strategy, Siemens PLM Software. "Student engineers and computer scientists who work with real-world data like this can be stronger graduates. In addition, they can save time and increase their productivity using standard parts – just like our customers do every day."

When manufacturing companies design new products, many of the parts they use are standard designs available from several sources. However, if these standard parts are difficult and time consuming to locate and identify, time is wasted searching through catalogs, or possibly even creating a new design for a part that already exists. As a result, for the past several years, manufacturers worldwide have used tools like CADENAS PARTsolutions to quickly locate and use standard parts so they can spend more time on adding value to their product designs. This agreement makes this same level of product design productivity available to engineering students worldwide at no cost. Through geometric similarity searches, intelligent search systems and access to sensibly structured catalog data, the online catalog exposes students to concepts of mass customization and CAD model reuse, both of which are keys to productivity for future employers.

"Engineering excellence can only be achieved with practical orientation," said Jürgen Heimbach, CEO of CADENAS. "Students are now able to use the same resources as the industry pros."

The CADENAS catalog supports all of the 3D data formats relevant to the global manufacturing industry, including those associated with Siemens' NX™ software, Solid Edge® software and the JT™ data format. For more information visit: http://siemensacademic.partcommunity.com/