The acquisition also clearly sets a new agenda for the entire PLM industry. Customers across manufacturing and process industries will now able to benefit from the integration of the physical world, through Siemens’ leading automation design and production technology, and the virtual world, through UGS PLM Software’s leading factory design, product design and digital collaboration software.”

Press Release: Siemens Acquires UGS(emphasis mine)

So what’s the next step along this road? In a word – storytelling. PLM and ES have come from and remain largely focused on products manufactured from bulk materials. The growing role of software has shifted this somewhat towards bits, but these bits are still mainly about material processing. Products are created to play some part in human activities which are best described by stories. Besides, as noted in the Roots of Hardware, dematerialization is reducing the amount of bulk material in products. Nanotechnology is accelerating dematerialization. In addition other “products”(services, media, financial) and human activities(arts, sports) are already dematerialized. By design, Rhythmeering integrates storytelling processes at a fundamental level in ways not found in PLM or ES.

Innovative
We create breakthrough solutions for silicon technology and business processes that result in product successes for our customers.
Innovation can happen in a more predictable manner than invention, with a shorter time-to-profit
Key components of innovation are motivated people plus an open environment
Our ability to innovate is tested daily by our customers

Collaborative
People are the foundation of our organization. We empower teams to be business owners, foster boundary-less organizations, and embrace diversity. We enjoy working in partnerships, both internally and externally.
Working together toward collective goals
Being a “team player”
Working with customers and for customers to achieve optimal solutions

Agile
We are quick, resourceful, and adaptable; completely focused on meeting customer needs. We do this by:
Listening to customers and doing our best to meet their needs
Being flexible in business negotiations to create mutually beneficial partnerships between Jazz and its customers
Thinking “outside the box” to arrive at creative solutions for our customers, their end products, and their design needs

This synergy isn’t surprising given the close relationship between hardware I recently posted on in The Roots of Hardware. Wozniak, the hardware genius behind the original Apple computer appears to be very involved, holding three positions:

• Executive Vice President
• Chief Technical Officer
• Chief Visionary Officer

Very interesting given the musical relationship between the counterculture of the 1960′s and technology – Apple was born out of that counterculture .
Jazz

Wozniak

Apple

Engineering has been undergoing a profound transformation in the past 50 years, going from a discipline which dealt primarily with matter and energy, to one which deals with knowledge processing. This change in engineering is so fundamental that it requires a new term to describe the discipline. Rhythmeering™ is that term.

Early in the industrial era progress in engineering seemed to be correlated with increasing size and force as machines got larger and more powerful. However, with these increases came the need for greater precision and efficiency. Both required greater volumes of more accurate information from which the knowledge of how and when to manipulate matter and energy could emerge. This information was acquired and manipulated by brute force techniques until the demands of World War II brought about the computer era. After the war, during the space race and cold war, machines rapidly began to get smaller and/or lighter.
Energy Shifts

The energy associated with large machines tends to be primarily thermal and kinetic (in other words, derived from the motion of matter). As machines get smaller and/or lighter, they either have more to do with electrical energy or require more information for analysis and design, or both. Electronic measurement techniques ultimately deal with vibratory, rhythmic phenomena, so they can be easily digitized and represented as information.
Dematerialization Appears

At the same time that the reduction in size and force was increasing the role of information in engineering, another factor was also contributing. Dematerialization, the shrinking of the scale of manipulation of matter and energy, began to turn engineering structures into information structures and engineering process into information flow generated by electronic signals. As a result of dematerialization today, a significant part of all engineering activity is concerned with things not visible to the human eye. This is true even for large, complex machines such as cars and planes.

Greater emphasis and value is placed on smaller size and more subtle force. Compare the size and physical force of a $20,000 car and a $20,000 computer. Then consider implications of the fact that the car is becoming more and more computerized! The design, construction and operation of light, aerodynamically efficient, high-performance vehicles is an information-intensive process. From composite materials for cars and planes to microchips to nanoscale devices, the amount of material per dollar for products is shrinking.

In industrially developed economies, dematerialization…is an established trend. When measured in terms of physical quantity per constant dollar of Gross National Product (GNP), basic materials use has been falling since the 1970s…. Practical examples of this trend are the steadily declining size and increasing power of computers, or the nearly 20 percent drop in the average weight of U.S. automobiles between 1975 and 1985.
Industrial Ecology

Bulking Down

There is also a reduced emphasis in engineering and manufacturing on the importance of bulk matter. In the Industrial Age, a great deal of time and energy was spent storing and moving materials, parts and products. Raw materials were shipped to manufacturing plants, turned into parts and shipped to a warehouse. Parts were shipped from the warehouse to another manufacturing plant where they were assembled into products which were then shipped to a warehouse. Products were then shipped to stores from warehouses to stock the shelves or to the customer.

Nowadays, inventories are disappearing. Typically, materials, parts and products are shipped only when needed and warehouses are becoming final-stage manufacturing or assembly locations. In less time than it took for the PC to evolve from the first computer, this trend will be extended dramatically by nanotechnology and teleportation technologies currently being developed. Clearly something is going on here! Yet engineering has not yet incorporated enterprise information structure and flow into its methodology, which continues to maintain the outmoded perspective of large machines.

iphone

“The actual is the new virtual,” Sterling said in an interview with Wired News. “The virtual identities of objects and plans for objects will become more economically important than the actual things.”

Wired

This is, as detailed in the above-mentioned preface because:

The design, construction and operation of light, aerodynamically efficient, high-performance vehicles is an information-intensive process. From composite materials for cars and planes to microchips to nanoscale devices, the amount of material per dollar for products is shrinking.

With the cost of 3D printers dropping into the upper end of consumer pricing($20K), more and more companies like Fabjectory will emerge along with the need for methodologies and tools of Rhythmeering.