Re-use. It's the mantra for today's design engineers chiefly because it can save you and your company time and money-two things that seem to be in ever-shortening supply.

You might reuse the CAD model of an engine crankshaft to build a variation on the engine for a newer model car. You could reuse an oil pump design for the same project, just altering it slightly so it fits into the new car's engine housing. In either case, you benefit because each original model carries with it reams of information-everything from results of stress tests to the original engineer's notes on why he or she made certain design choices-so you don't have to completely reinvent the wheel, or the oil pump.

The concept of re-use fits nicely into best-practice methodologies. If you've got a challenging design problem, you can look back to see how an earlier design engineer solved it. You benefit, and so does your company, by building a portfolio of best practices over time.

Re-use can help in lots of ways, but there's a catch. To reuse a model or a design methodology, you've first got to locate it. That can be difficult or even risky, if you happen to seize upon an incorrect version as the platform for your new model. You can search by keywords or part numbers or designers' names for similar files, but you'll probably still have a hard time telling which file is the most recent, or the most relevant.

Design engineers may get promoted, change jobs, or retire, and companies may change part names and numbers over time, so you might end up searching, phoning, and emailing to try to find the correct file.

Mathcad, meet Windchill. The latest version of Mathcad 14.0 is now integrated with PTC's lifecycle management product, Windchill 9.1.

Mathcad worksheets can be intelligently managed in Windchill throughout their entire lifecycle, enabling a variety of collaborative product data management capabilities.

In addition to intelligent check-in and check-out from either Windchill or Mathcad, you can now take advantage of Windchill's enterprise search capabilities to locate the correct worksheet when it comes time to reuse the live math within a Mathcad worksheet.

"Searching for Mathcad content spans a few different levels of the worksheets," says Mark A. Walker, Director of Product Management at PTC. "Windchill searches against the Mathcad file attributes, within all text regions of the worksheets, as well as within all math regions. The search term can even include common mathematical Greek characters."

The integration makes it easier to search for best-practices too, and to put Mathcad to use as a powerful analysis feature within a Pro/ENGINEER design.

As an example of a best-practice search, Walker describes a design engineer who wants to see how other designers have handled thin-walled injection mold designs.

"You might have a molded plastic part that is made of glass-filled nylon, and you need to know how thin you can make a particular retaining wall," Walker says. "So, you search for 'thin-walled mold practices' and Windchill returns a Mathcad worksheet that documents and calculates the recommended ratio of section width to section height for a variety of typical materials. Now you can quickly find and apply such practices to your own work with a higher degree of confidence."

Pro/ENGINEER's Mathcad analysis feature. Even better, you can use Pro/ENGINEER's Mathcad analysis feature to apply and maintain such practices for you automatically.

"When used in tight integration with Pro/ENGINEER, Mathcad can perform the necessary analysis using multiple parameters from Pro/ENGINEER as inputs to the worksheet," Walker says. "The worksheet can then calculate the specific results according to the design recommendations, and return them to Pro/ENGINEER to properly drive the model."

This Mathcad-Pro/ENGINEER integration is something that was available previously. "However, now that Mathcad files can be lifecycle-managed in Windchill, we expect more organizations will capture their design practices in Mathcad and then actively leverage such 'live math' content directly within their designs," continues Walker. "Imagine that for a number of specific Pro/ENGINEER designs, each design could actually reference a single Mathcad worksheet that captures a variety of recommended molding practices."

Furthermore, once such a Mathcad reference is established within Pro/ENGINEER (or even from within another Mathcad file), Windchill systematically maintains this relationship. Then, regardless of where you check-out a top-level design or worksheet, you can be guaranteed to also check-out any dependent Mathcad files.

Previews for other audiences. As another benefit of the new Mathcad-Windchill integration, you-or anyone else on your design team-can also see a static preview of every Mathcad worksheet revision that's checked into Windchill.

"This client-side viewable will be valuable for people who don't locally use Mathcad on their computers," Walker says. "A reviewer might want to audit the assumptions and calculations captured in a specific worksheet, for instance, or a customer might require a complete technical data package for a newly designed model. In such cases, detailed interaction with the Mathcad worksheet is not necessary, but digital viewing of the content certainly is."

Walker points to the ability to search, find, and leverage digital "knowledge" as a critical advantage for today's product development companies.

"To put it simply, companies are going to great lengths right now trying to capture the knowledge of their engineers, many of whom will retire in the next few years," he says. "Companies are recording audio and video interviews with engineers; they're trying to get them to fill in spreadsheets-all sorts of things.

"We know that for years Mathcad has helped engineers do their jobs by capturing live math in a readable, natural form. Today, we also expect that this integration will, in turn, enable our customers to preserve and leverage that captured intellectual property for the long term."