PTC Inc. (PTC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Simulation-Led Design webinar. We're going to have a conversation with Bob Farrell from Revolution In Simulation. And later, be joined by PTC's own Todd Kraft to give you a sneak peek into our simulation portfolio road map and also demo some new features. So without any further ado, Bob, would you like to introduce yourself?

Thanks, Shawn. Thank you for having me on today. My name again is Bob Farrell. I'm a content generator and one of the co-founders of Rev-Sim. I worked with companies such as PTC to help create some content relative to simulation and some related topics.

So you specifically helped us create 2 pieces of content that are doing great at PTC. One, revolving around a survey that we conducted of engineers, designers and analysts around their use of CAE tools and also white paper around the democratization of simulation. So starting with that concept, Bob, what is the revolution in simulation initiative to democratize simulation?

Right. Yes, Rev-Sim, Revolution Simulation started out probably about 3 years ago. And we initially focused on democratizing simulation. Since that time though, we've expanded the scope to include a lot of related technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, additive manufacturing. So today, we've evolved into what we call cutting-edge simulation. So anyone who's interested, it's a free online portal. We don't host a lot of materials in content, but we point to it from different locations throughout the world, such as PTC and other providers. It's a repository of information. Anyone interested in what's cutting-edge and simulation today and what's coming ahead, should check it out.

Perfect. And we'll actually link off to the website in our resource section in the webinar console. And so Bob, when we talk about democratizing simulation, what does that mean? What does that phrase mean?

Yes. It's what you would suspect it means. It means putting simulation into the hands of more users. And typically, today, with a lot of companies, simulation is pretty much -- or has been traditionally pretty much in the realm of a few selected experts. Simulation tools are complex. Companies invest a lot in these resources. It takes -- it has taken a great deal of expertise and experience to use these tools. So simulation -- democratizing simulation is all about, hey, how do we get non-experts using these tools? How can -- and what are the advantages of that to the organization, to the designer, even to the analysts themselves.

That's right. In fact, I think in our survey, a lot of people said, at least 37% of them said that they were the actual analysts who conduct the survey and 28% said that they were design engineers who also carry out some simulation and analysis work. But about 21% said that they are just designers, right, that once they're done with their design phase, they pretty much moved the CAD model to the CAE expert. So this is really aimed at that 21%, I would assume?

Correct.

So what is -- when we're in the design process and the product development process, what do you see when it comes to people either scrapping their work? Is it -- does it happen earlier on in the design stage? Does it happen in the concept phase or does it happen much later when they go into prototyping?

Well, preferably, it does not happen much later. I mean, that's the whole idea is that you might think of this democratizing simulation as -- and may like a spell check for your word doc or an app, you may have on your phone where you can check a route before you head off on a trip. What it does is it allows these anomalies, these imperfections, this design challenges to be determined quickly at the design stage rather than waiting for analysts to do their job and come back and which delays the product. It also stifles innovation. And it just is an unnecessary delay. And again, as you said, if these things are caught well downstream at the manufacturing phase, that's a huge financial hit. You think about it, I believe I read a report once who talk about 80%, up to 80% of our product's total cost is determined at the design stage. So anything that can be corrected there obviously is a huge savings for the company.

That's right. But we're talking about scrap and rework and also just the redesign phase the time lost in all of that.

Right. Innovation is another key aspect there. Let's talk about that for a second. Studies show that leading companies who are thought as market leaders, who are thought of as innovators, they have to keep that up. And there's a direct correlation between their ability to innovate and their profit share. So any time that it is either or a non-CEA expert can take a look at multiple iterations of a design, check some different options as far as material as far as all that goes, everything goes into design, any time that, that can be evaluated early on, it's going to give you more time to look at some more options and be more innovative.

That's right. And I still want to point out to that survey because when we surveyed our respondents, they said that about 10% of them scrap in existing design when it's just the mathematical calculation phase. And around 40%, actually, which is a good sign, when they see potential issues in the simulation and analysis phase of their product development process, they actually scrapped that design there. So they don't go into physical prototyping. We did have actually 21% of our respondents say that the actual redesign happens when a physical prototypes fail. And so I think what we're trying to say is maybe not go there, right, try to move simulation to the left to the point where you're using it earlier on. And not when your physical prototypes, which costs money, not when it fails. So that's good to hear.

Now you're never going to eliminate that completely. But I think you're going to see incremental or drastic rather reduction in prototype costs and all the things associated with multiple prototype building and testing. And that's going to -- just as a whole CAE concept was intended to do simulations is going to take that exponentially further.

That's right. And so I think companies are moving in that direction. But why are companies moving towards maybe centralizing key analysis capabilities and decentralizing more routine operations?

Well, any number of reasons, I guess. I mean, you're talking about early attempts at some of this method, some of these tools lacked. They weren't quite as robust, like any technology that evolves putting simulation in the hands of the designer early on had some challenges with some of the early softwares. And let's face it too. Some designers or some analysts also had some kickback on that because they may see this as a threat. And really, actually, what we're talking about here is a way for them to offload some of these less challenging or early design analysis jobs and take on more sophisticated, more complex analysis projects, higher-value projects and so forth. So what we're really talking about here is offloading some of those -- I don't want to call them minimal, but some of the tasks that can be done by the design or some of the basic upfront, early analysis and let the designer, let the analysts rather focus on what they do best and be of the highest value to the organization. So those are some reasons.

Yes. And also the aim of this is not to replace the analysts. It's to make sure that when a design comes to them, it's validated to the point where they don't have to send it back. They can do their further analysis and do what they do best. However, they're given a design that's of good quality, and it's just a faster process. And if anything, it gives the designer more tries to iterate more, right, to be more creative and it just makes the whole process faster. And so you touched on the aspect of earlier on some of these tools, where necessarily their best version, right? They were light versions, let's say, of what we have today. And so how has some of these tools changed? Like, can you give a picture of that?

I think what you're seeing is you're seeing a lot of -- you're seeing some collaboration between some of the solution providers and ANSYS PTC is a great example of that. You're seeing -- again, technology progresses, but then so do relationships. And when these companies who specialize in certain areas who are able to partner, then you're going to get the best of both worlds in that regard.

That's right. That's one of the biggest reasons why we partnered up with ANSYS, they were simulation heavy weights. And what we wanted to do was integrate their solvers into a CAD environment that our engineers are familiar with, right? So marriage of Creo and ANSYS solvers was a perfect blend for sort of the simulation-led design initiative.

That's right. And what you get there from the designer's perspective, now they're operating in an environment that they're used to. You're not asking them to learn simulation tools and to step out of their comfort zone. They're staying within their comfort zone. They're staying within what they know. And by the way, we're performing some basic analysis. So it's made a lot easier and a lot more acceptable for a lot of organizations.

That's right. At PTC, we'd like to say it's the unbroken digital thread, right? When you start a design, you're still in the same interface or not closing a window, opening another window, converting files. It's all in a seamless design environment and you get to carry out your simulation as when you model. So that's one of the great benefits. Speaking of benefits, how do you see companies benefiting from implementing [ SLD ] do you have a few examples for us?

So yes, this is based on a study that Rev-Sim conducted in -- from January '22 through June. And what we found there was that SLD technologies were improved by reducing labor and prototyping costs by 26% to 30%. I mean, that's pretty significant when you think about that. There were some other benefits as well, increased product innovation, broadening the design scope expiration. That was increased by anywhere from 40% to 60%. Again, that gets back to the innovation that we talked about we never look at multiple design concepts. Finally, there was a decrease in the cost of the quality assurance, that was 19% to 33% on testing costs. So again, you're talking about doing -- using testing more selectively. So what you're doing is you're eliminating a lot of the prototype by the time and cost there. So again, these numbers, 26% to 30%, 40% to 60%, up to 33%. Those are pretty significant when you're talking about a manufacturing environment, product development environment and all the costs involved there.

That's right. And I think you had a wonderful example with American Axle manufacturing, where they were using traditional stimulation. And they, of course, encountered some limitations there. Do you want to walk us through that example?

So that came from a research that was done by Ora Research from a paper that Bruce Jenkins has created. And at the high level initially, American Axle was very reliant on traditional simulation as we might think of it, where you've got a design group that throws some things over to the wall of the analyst group, and they do their thing and toss it back and so forth. And that -- as we've seen historically, that's going to result in some like the product development time, costs and everything in between. After implementation, however, Bruce went on to point it out that they saw some staggering results. One was a 75% time reduction for each analysis iteration. I mean, that's -- you're cutting things by 3 quarters, not only time, but again, you got the costs involved there. This resulted in, I believe it was $130,000 annual cost saving for just one facility alone, one [ player ] alone saw these kind of savings. They see them every year. This -- in addition, you're talking about now the ability to allow analysts to perform some -- rather designers to perform some analysis capabilities. There was some manual work involved in that; that was eliminated. So you've gotten rid of some opportunities for errors. And again, you're talking about now where you're allowing designers to be an innovator rather than just a designer, but you're also allowing your analysts, you're really tapping into their expertise just allowing them to kind of focus on things of high degree importance to the company and to -- you're just utilizing resources on those sides more effectively all the way around. That's the bottom line to it.

That's right. Yes. And that really is the magic of implementing simulation-led design. And so with that, Bob, thank you for sharing your findings with us. And like I said at the top of this, you can actually find both papers that Bob worked on us, the -- worked with us on, the simulation-led design white paper, as well as the survey that we conducted in the Resources section of the webinar console. [Presentation]

And now let me introduce you to Todd Kraft, PTC's own CAD product manager who handled simulation products. Todd is going to walk us through a couple of exciting things, a road map of our simulation solutions, what you can expect next with our next big release in Creo and also some demonstrations of the product.

All right. Thank you, Shawn. My name is Todd Kraft, and I am a Creo Product Manager here at PTC. And most of the responsibilities that I take care of at PTC are around our simulation products. I also cover Creo Weld and a few other of our partner products. And today, I'm going to talk about what's new in Creo and our simulation products and also do some demonstrations. So let's go ahead and get started with that. I will share my screen. Okay. So Creo 10 and stimulation what's new for Creo 10, I will be shipping in around the April time frame. And let's talk about what's new in Creo in our simulation products. So I've got 4 categories to talk about today. I've got the Simulation Live, Creo ANSYS, Creo Simulate and also Creo Flow Analysis. And since I have slides for each of these 4, I'm going to go ahead and go into each of these and talk more in depth. So first thing we talk about in Creo Simulation Live is we finished our project in Creo 9010 and this includes being able to do small amounts of frictionless sliding inside of Creo Simulation Live. So now we can do contacts in CSL. In the past, we were only doing bonded and assemblies. But now we can see in the 2 examples on the right there, we have now like more bold stresses and plates that are not glued together anymore. Now we can actually see that, that free contact and give much more accurate and realistic results. Next is we've updated to the latest ANSYS solver. This is 22R2. This is the most accurate and current ANSYS technology. This is going to be for all the physics that we've implemented, and this is for both Creo Simulation Live and also Creo ANSYS, giving us better GPU performance and higher accuracy for all physics. Next is we've added a few things around CSL and results. So we have complete vector results for fluids. And you'll see this the entire implementation that ANSYS has. We have that now inside of CSL. We've also put some new structural results such as strain and contact stresses. Moreover, just to give you better results, more of visualization and just also for all these, we have also expanded the prototypes as well. In both CSL and Creo ANSYS, we now have a new contact detection. So if you remember in the past, we only had one-to-one contact. Now we have implemented the ANSYS contact detection. That gives us a faster and better automatic detection, which supports now one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many. We also have now a repeat button when we're doing manual creation 2. This gives us just a much more efficient, faster detection and a faster setup. Now in Creo ANSYS, we've now have a new advanced license, and part of that is going to be this nonlinear contact. So this is a sliding contact. And we have put a lot of things into Creo ANSYS for this area. We have frictional, frictionless, rough, all the formulations that ANSYS provides plus detecting contacts by radius, a factor. Really, the entire availability of contacts is now inside of Creo ANSYS. Next, on the Advanced License is the non-linear materials. So we have 3 types. We have Neo-Hookean Hyperelasticity, Linear Orthotropic Elasticity and Bilinear Plasticity. So now if you define a material for any of these that are similar to these 3, the solver will see that and we'll go ahead and give the appropriate solution to those types of materials. Again, the Creo ANSYS advanced license is required for this. So much more powerful, getting to customers lots of benefits to do very complex setups inside of Creo ANSYS. And lastly, in the last part of this advanced license is the ability to combine structure and thermal physics together. So whether you have a structural simulation or a thermal simulation, you can go ahead and say, include the other physics and go ahead and run the simulation combined, and then it will go ahead and give you, for example, like a thermal expansion simulation. And also, we've done some enhancements around Creo Simulate. So now we fully support multi-body inside of Creo Simulate. We sort of had some workarounds in the past, but now we fully supported -- you'll now see the word bodies in many areas for applying heat loads, for applying contact, paying material, for example. And what I like it most about this is that we can now support bodies in results, like I want to see results of deformation just for that one body or these 2 bodies. Okay, that's a very big enhancement for our Creo ANSYS users. And lastly, we have some enhancements around results for Creo Flow Analysis, okay. So a couple of these are the ability to do indicators for streamlined display. We can now see arrows or spears and you can control the size of those. We also have an improved animation effect on the bottom right corner there. It shows a 1 single streamlined animation. You can also save the streamline animation as a output as a gift. And then also around settings that you do. So you put a lot of work into setting up post processor settings like I want a cross-section or an iSo-Surface or a streamlined display. And now we can set up scenes for each of those. And also when you save your project, those scenes and all of your post-processor settings are now saved with the project and preserving those results. Okay. So that's my last slide. Now what I want to do is go ahead and show you a lot of these new things. I'll show you how Creo Simulation Live works with Creo ANSYS and also a few more things that I have in store for you. All right. So let's go ahead and get started with some examples. I'm going to first start in Creo Simulation Live. Now when I have an assembly like this, I can go ahead and click on live simulation, I haven't done anything yet to this part or this assembly. I'm going to pick on this part first, though, just to show you how easy it is inside of Creo Simulation Live. I'm going to open this part, say that these 2 surfaces are fixed and then apply a moment here to these 2 surfaces there. And we pick on that front surface there. Let's just do like a 200 inch pounds and then simulate. So now we've opened up the simulation to all kinds of users. I can go ahead and say, see where the stresses are. I can animate that, I can see inside the model here in this case, I can look also outside the model on the outer surfaces and get a good idea of what kind of stresses are going to be on my model from that kind of load? Then I can add one more load may be on the bottom, could be on these 2 surfaces, let's pick on those. And then I'm going to say it's going to be from the bottom of surface here. Let's say it's just a negative 50 pounds are pointing up. Once we do that, you can see the results have changed from this area here to the area on the right side. We animate that again. And we can see our stresses have updated too. So there's 2 simple examples of Creo Simulation live, really easy to do. Let's go ahead and close here and go back to the assembly. And just to show you how easy it is, again, I'm just going to pick on some surfaces here to fix these pins, pick on these 5 over on this side and then spin it around and I'll get on these 5 over here. There's 8, 9 and 10. Let's just say those can't move. And let's put some kind of force in the front. I can pick them individually or I can just kind of do a box select, those are my surfaces and this one, too. I want to use this angle right there on that edge right there and then give it a 1,000 tons. Now we have that direction. And that's really as easy as it gets. I can go ahead and say simulate. Now because I haven't defined any contacts at all at this point, it's going to go ahead and bond all my parts together for me. And if I look at this, just with a bonded simulation, I can see that I have about 79 MPA. And I can see that my stresses are down in this pin area on the bottom here. So there's if I'm counting, that's number 3. I see there's lots of stresses in this hole, too. So maybe at this point, I want to see, what if I take that hole out of there. Am I going to go and activate that part? And what I'm going to do is just to remove that surface here for that little cut, it okay and then simulate again. Again, I have a bonded assembly at this point. It goes from 79% down to 75%, that's good. And this is the kind of work you do with Creo Simulation Live trying to really fine-tune what kind of connections you have, what kind of geometry, where is the stresses at? Where can I add material, remove material? And in this case, now what I want to do is because the assembly is bonded, it's bringing in some extra stiffness and it's really -- that's not real. It's actually providing less stresses because it's kind of artificially holding it together. So what I want to do now is in Simulation Live, I can now do contacts. So I'll do detect contacts, pick the top level assembly here. And I'll say it's bonded at this point. I'm also going to say make just one-to-one at this point, hit okay. And there I have a bunch of contacts to find now. Now I have 41. And if I say again, simulate again, I should get a pretty similar answer, 74, 75 is where I'm still at. That makes sense. But now what I want to do is I want to go ahead and modify some of these contacts, okay. So I'm going to say, let's take like this contact up here and just kind of move it around. I want this one to be free, okay. Okay. And I want this one here, right about it there. I want that one to be free as well. So I'm not letting that those 2 surfaces -- between that surface and that surface no longer bond together, okay. Hit okay. It's free now. It's the same thing other side. So I'm getting rid of those kind of artificial bonded areas. It's other one I want to find i right about. It's right there but that'd free as well. Okay. So I've taken those 4 like bonded areas out and now they're free. Now I should see some higher stresses. Now instead of being glued together on those walls, I should see some higher stresses on the areas of the pin that are holding it together, which I do. And now we're like at 158%. So now you can see because we've taken those artificial bonds out of there, it's really becoming more realistic and much more accurate, okay. And I could continue to do this. I have these bonded contacts and free contacts. But I want to show you how everything you do inside of CSL. And with these 6, 7 simulations I just did. Now when you fine-tune those, everything I do on this side will automatically go over to the Creo ANSYS side. So I'm going to kind of show the cake out of the oven here now on the Creo ANSYS side. I did a bonded simulation first with Creo ANSYS. And if I just show the results of a bonded assembly, again, here's all my elements, if I say [ easy ] stress I'm at 96. So I'm in that same ballpark. There's some differences based on the mesh resolution I have in Creo ANSYS and also the GPU power or the amount of memory I'm using on the GPU side as well. So there's some variation. But I'm in the ballpark. I'm also looking at the high stress area. I'm still in that same area. Okay. But then what I can do is I can take that this assembly and now apply things like joints. I have these hinge joints that gives me freedom between parts to move together. I've also defined a number of frictionless contacts on the surfaces that are right there. And also, I have a number of bonded contacts where the bonded of the -- some of the nuts and the bolts are together there and these front parts, okay. So now I have a much more realistic setup for my simulation in Creo ANSYS. And again, that's the goal. In the Creo ANSYS side, I'm going to get high fidelity, very accurate, high-quality ANSYS prototype level results on the Creo ANSYS side. And if I just say, let's look at Advanced and [ form easy ] stresses. Now I'm in that 189 that higher level, but I'm still done by that pin there. And maybe I could change my boundary conditions a little bit. But now I have a much more realistic result. And if I animate that, you'll see how that looks. So I'm very happy with, again, how I can go from CSL to Creo ANSYS, get some fantastic results with these amazing ANSYS products we have integrated into Creo. All right. So after that, let's go ahead and show our next demonstration. So I'm going to minimize that. And what I wanted to do here is just show that inside of in Creo 9, we added the capability of shells. So now in Creo ANSYS, we can have beams, which are these beams up on top, we can have solids, which is these portions over here of the bridge, and we can also have shell pairs in the middle. So we can have shells, beams and solids all together. Let's look at the elements there. And there are the beams, we have some beams on the top and also those verticals. Then I have also a number of contacts that I've connected those beams and shells together. Also, I've done some joints too to connect all these things. So I do have to some work to connect everything, okay. But once I've done all that work and I can look at results, let's look at [ form uses ] first and we can also look at our displacement. So that's just a simple example to show you how now with Creo ANSYS, very powerful, we can combine shells, beams and solids altogether. Next, I want to show you an example of how we improve the contact detection within Creo ANSYS. So -- and we also do that with Creo Simulation Live 2. But in Creo ANSYS, if I want to do a snap fit like this, this is an early build of 10 before we have the new contact detection, I would have had to make these contracts one by one. Here's 1, 2, 3, 4. And each of these, I'm defining as frictional one-to-one contacts. This would have taken me 5 minutes minimum, and I'm also prone to some errors too. So let me go ahead and just delete those and show you how to do it now with the new contact detection we have implemented with 10.0. Let's do a -- first, let's just define a contact behavior. I'm going to do frictional and give it a 0.15, co-efficient a friction. Here's the additional settings that we have now with contact behavior. We have all the formulations, you have different ways of detecting contacts, stiffness factor as well. And actually, I like that 0.1 as well and hit okay. Now what I'll do is do a new contact. And now we have in the first reference and second reference, we have multiple selections we can use. So I can pick on the first one, I'll pick on this bottom surface here. And the second one, we'll pick on that surface and that surface, multiple surfaces. So it's one-to-many, and we'll say that frictional 6 is what I want to use. Then I have a repeat button too, you repeat. And for this first reference, I'll pick on this one, this one and this one, those top surface is there. And for the second references, we pick on this, this and this. Just keep on going around in the corner. And again, less than a minute, I have both of them define and hit okay. So now I have 2 contacts where before I had 23 and I think it was 23. And I have much easier, much more efficient, and this is going to help users to get things done a lot quicker. And when you run the ANSYS solver, it sees these 2, just like I would see those 23 previously. All right. Let's minimize that and go to our next example. This is our last one. And this shows hyper-elastic materials. So I've defined a material here. Let's go ahead and redefine this as silicon rubber. And this is just a material from our library, and you see that I've defined the material as neo-hookean, and there's our material properties right there. And once the solver sees this material that goes ahead and uses the solution for that normal material as it should. And let me cancel out here. I don't wanted to think that I'm defining anything new. So I'd say cancel, yes. And for this setup, I just have a simple constraint on the bottom, and then I have a displacement on the top of 20 millimeters. Okay. And then when I can get the results, I'll say look at this placement first, and I want to look at the true scale and then I can look at that and animate it. So we should get about 20 millimeters for our results. If we look at form easy stress here, we should also see very little stress because this is a rubber boot. We have 0.25 NPA. That's about right. We can also look at things like elastic strain in this case, too. And there's our strain values. So now we can cover a lot more material types, so we couldn't previously. Again, this is hyper-elastic materials, neo-hookean formulation. We can also do bilinear plasticity as well. The 2 more common types of [ non-linear ] materials to do. Here's the last one, just a cross-section, I believe. And take a look at that with that true scale. Okay. So that wraps up our demonstrations of Creo ANSYS and Creo Simulation Live. Let's go back in next, I'm going to go ahead and show you what we're doing with Creo 11. All right. So in Creo 10 just to recap, this is the full list of what we did in Creo Simulation Live on the left side, the middle is Creo ANSYS and the right side here, we do it with Creo Simulate and Creo Flow. Creo Flow Analysis also updated the latest platform from [ Zimmer ] as well. So this is Creo 10, let's talk about Creo 11. All right. So Creo 11, the first thing we will do is we will update to the new solver from ANSYS 23R2. And that will happen for both Creo Simulation Live and also Creo ANSYS. And then on the left side, for Creo Simulation Live, we have 3 major projects we're going to complete, which is the conjugate heat transfer. And also we're going to do bolted connections and preload. So conjugate heat transfer or CHT, people refer to it. We can do true like flow of air over a heated area to get interaction between solids and fluids together. Bolted connections will do bolt idealization also with preload. And then we're going to expand all the structural and fluid results as well. So we're going to really make a much more comprehensive list of results we can do with both structural and fluids. And then we have a couple of backlog items that I think we can get done as well. They're very small projects for a bearing load, a point mass and also automatic results for all mode shapes. For Creo ANSYS, we, again, we're doing the solver update. And the 3 major things we're doing on the Creo ANSYS side are transient simulation, our current transient structural, missing diagnostics. That's actually on the -- or already started and also bolted connections and preload similar to the Creo Simulation Live side. And then a couple of backlog items, I think we can also possibly do is improving the substep animation dynamic cross-section. And then add 2 more items to our advanced license, random vibration and fatigue. On the Creo Flow Side, we plan to introduce a new capability, which is emag and that's just built right in. It will be just kind of rolled into a new -- into an existing type of license, the premium license, a real-time mode for Creo Flow Analysis. And also if we could do a couple more things kind of the backlog items, expression editor improvements, XY plot enhancements and new fan curve and real gas database templates to choose from. Okay. So that really wraps it up. That's all the new things in Creo. We plan to do in Creo l1 and hope this has been helpful. And thank you for the opportunity to show you.

Thank you, Todd, and thank you all for sticking with us. This concludes our webinar.