Hi Christopher, Charles, and Eric,
If I read your answers correctly and evaluate what other Simulate users told me, PTC really seems to have severe quality problems with Simulate, so it is not only my personal experience as more advanced user.
Charles, Eric, I fully understand your frustration and being annoyed about spending time to file issues or look for workarounds – this is what makes me upset, too, since the time the SJ engine group was laid off. I would be pretty interested in what issues you have observed to obtain a better snapshot where PTC stands currently with this code. I have opened >100 cases after I left PTC mid of 2012. I attach an actual EXCEL file that just lists all my personal cases and SPRs. Please don’t be surprised that starting with July 2015, Christian Thon appears as case creator and not me. The reason is that since this time I am not allowed any more to directly open cases online at PTC, I have to do this over our reseller Econocap in Germany.
You can see that the time between opening a case, SPR creation and closing it has increased significantly after the engine group was laid off in October 2013; before, it was pretty fast and absolutely acceptable. It is still very frustrating for me to file issues and spent my time if I have to wait so long for resolutions. I understand comments here in the community that users simply use another code instead of struggling with PTC, but if we do not report issues nothing will happen and PTC becomes the impression users simply do not use these functionalities or – similar worse - all runs fine. For what do we pay our maintenance fees?
B.t.w., we had a phone conference with PTC/Marc Fisher and his successor Jose Coronado early this year where PTC now committed to fix approx. 10-12 issues per 6 month. The open SPRs are tracked in a separate EXCEL where they have been prioritized. However, that still means that we have to wait more than two years until all open SPRs are fixed – if I do not find new issues (what I already did). B.t.w.: Several things were addressed as so called “enhancements”, which means they will be fixed in Creo 5.0 earliest…
Christopher, if you are TC member and join a TC meeting in June, I’m glad if you could collect user feedback like my case list attached, may be some other users reading this have experienced similar trouble and can upload their issues here or sent it directly to you as well. You may also contact me outside the community, my coordinates are also available at the last slides of my Altran presentations (you may also look at www.saxsim.de). I think it is very important to confront high PTC management with the actual, inacceptable situation. I would guess R&D fights against 200-300 issues or even more, but I don’t know.
I also attach the PTC presentation about the Creo 4 enhancements that was provided on the SAXSIM DVD given to the participants two weeks ago. You see that not even one improvement is planned for the engine. Just have a look on the image on slide 8 to see what’s up.
I hope PTC reacts adequately with ramping up sufficient R&D resources again.
Best,
Roland