Parametric Technology Corp.'s numbers are looking good: In 1995, the Waltham, Mass., design software company added 2,700 new customers, increased sales 53 percent to exceed $44 million, and drove up profit 53 percent to surpass $111 million. The firm reports it has a 45 percent share of the market, and 71 percent of its sales last year represented repeat business, according to regional manager Steve Ammann in Pleasanton, Calif.
Parametric Technologies developed and manufactures Pro/Engi-neer design software, which, according to Business Week magazine, has revolutionized part and mold designing and become a national standard for the design industry.
In 1992, Parametric Technolo-gies had two seats of Pro/E installed in the United States. Today, it has more nearly 59,000 seats of Pro/E installed worldwide at more than 10,000 customers' facilities, in industries ranging from automotive and aerospace to medical to service industries such as design and mold making.
The success of Pro/E is attributed to its dimension-driven, three-dimensional, solids-modeling parametric capability. This means that when the designer makes changes to one dimension, the software computes the effects of that change on all the surrounding geometry.
Pro/E offers a variety of add-on programs for the mold-making and design industries, such as Pro/Moldesign, which enables concurrent engineering. It en-sures that product changes automatically are reflected in the mold design. As development teams work concurrently on part design, mold design and the creation of numerical control data, all aspects of the design and build procedures update automatically.
Other features of Pro/ Moldesign include creation of mold designs based on engineering part definition for single or multicavity molds. It can compensate for shrinkage, determine draft requirements automatically, perform mold-fill analysis, define parting surfaces and provide comprehensive documentation of the mold design.
Pro/MFG uses a parametric feature-based approach to define and sequence the machining processes required to create a part. As each feature is created, Pro/MFG determines and displays the tool paths required in the Pro/E manufacturing model.
This program optimizes numerically controlled tool paths for production machining applications, creates libraries of tools, fixtures, features and manufacturing processes, and defines relationships in the manufacturing model among others.
Four Pro/MFG modules are available for generating tool paths for milling and mold making, and wire electric discharge machining requirements.
Spokeswoman Kristin Griffin said Parametric Technology comes out with 300-700 enhancements for each release, with new products being released every six months.
