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Meeting with claudio

Meeting with Claudio — Full Summary

Date: April 6, 2026 | ~35 min | Context: Claudio is a mechanical design engineer in aviation, working in a Teamcenter + NX (previously PTC Creo) environment.

Industry Context He Shared

Claudio works in aviation, which he describes as very slow, conservative, and heavily documentation-driven. His view: drawings won't disappear in the next 50 years in this industry — they'll evolve toward reference documents with Model-Based Definition (MBD) carrying most of the information, but drawings will remain for flag notes, assembly instructions, and manufacturing callouts that are hard to embed in the model. He sees a future where CAD features are directly linked to manufacturing standards (e.g., a hole feature linked to the drilling standard), forming a kind of knowledge graph — but that's long-term, not today's reality.

His current environment: ~4 design engineers across different products, some products very mature (long lifecycle, lots of change management), some newer. Previously used PTC Creo, now on Siemens NX + Teamcenter.

His Current Workflow (the pain)

The change process works like this:

  1. A change is needed (e.g., simulation reveals a wall thickness must increase, or a standard pattern on a drawing is outdated)
  2. Designer changes the model in NX
  3. Designer updates the drawing in NX
  4. Designer goes into Teamcenter and creates a new revision of the part/drawing
  5. Designer creates a DCR (Design Change Request) — this is the formal change record
  6. Designer must manually write what changed and why inside the DCR
  7. The DCR gets attached to an EC (Engineering Change)
  8. The stress lead (or appropriate engineer) reviews and writes an ECR (Engineering Change Request/Report) — a separate document assessing whether the change is applicable, meets standards, etc.
  9. The whole package goes through an approval workflow — multiple people must sign off
  10. If it's a manufacturing partner, they also need visibility into the change, standards compliance, etc.

His key frustration: Steps 4–7 are almost entirely repetitive clicking and manual text entry. For simple changes — like replacing an outdated standard pattern on a drawing, or updating a note — the actual design work takes minutes, but the documentation/workflow overhead takes far longer. He estimates 90% of change management is clicking the same buttons.

What He Wants (his exact request, prioritized)

Simplest → most complex:

  1. Extract log data from NX/drawing changes → auto-generate the change report. If the system could read what you actually did in the model/drawing and write the DCR description automatically, that alone would be huge.

  2. Template workflows for common changes. A "drawing change simple" button that: opens the drawing, lets you swap the pattern/note, creates the revision, attaches it to the EC, and routes the DCR — all in one flow. He referenced PTC Creo's macro/recording feature as the interaction model he has in mind.

  3. Custom workflow builder. The ability to create your own workflow templates for different change types, so each team/product can define their standard process once and reuse it.

  4. Integration with existing PLM. Everything above only works if it plugs into Teamcenter. He's not looking for a replacement — he wants automation inside the existing landscape.

His Feedback on RapidDraft Demo

You showed him the injection molding DFM review, the batch processing, the vision analysis, the review platform concept, and the collaboration vision. His response:

  • He thinks the long-term vision is the future and "very cool"
  • He believes the technical/software part isn't the bottleneck — the organizational and change management process is
  • He says the hard part is finding the first door — a company willing to let you in with their real data so everything can be connected and produce useful output
  • He suggested focusing on one specific document type that's created most frequently or is simplest to automate — and his answer to that is the simple drawing change DCR

His Offer / Relationship

  • He said "Check DM" — willing to continue the conversation
  • He offered to connect you with a colleague from Airbus ("the guy from CDFC") if that person is interested
  • He's studying cyber security part-time and transitioning into a Smart Factory application manager role — bringing digital tools to the shop floor, long-term interested in factory automation/robotics startups
  • He's entrepreneurially minded and explicitly said he's open to sharing problems and giving feedback going forward

Action Items

# Action Owner
1 Follow up via DM — ask for a concrete step-by-step of one simple drawing change DCR workflow (every click, every field) Adeel
2 Ask Claudio what fields the DCR contains and which could be auto-populated from NX change logs Adeel
3 Research NX Journal/log file format — what actions are recorded and in what structure Adeel / team
4 Research Teamcenter Rich Client / Active Workspace APIs for programmatic DCR creation and revision attachment Adeel / team
5 Ask Claudio about the Airbus/CDFC contact — whether an intro is possible Adeel
6 Send Claudio access to RapidDraft / share updates as promised Adeel

Open Questions

  • What exactly does an NX change log contain? Is it rich enough to auto-describe a change?
  • What are the mandatory fields in a DCR in their Teamcenter setup?
  • How standardized is the DCR workflow across aviation companies, or is it company-specific?
  • Would Teamcenter's API even allow external tooling to create revisions and DCRs programmatically, or is that locked down in aviation environments?
  • The Airbus contact — is this a realistic pilot opportunity or just a casual mention?