Forming Technologies (FTI), the industry's leading developer of solutions for design, simulation, and costing of sheet metal components, has announced the global availability of their entire suite of CAA based applications for Release 17 of Catia V5. By exploiting Catia V5's parametric design and analysis environment, the solutions are fully associative and regenerative to drastically reduce downstream design changes. CATFORM and CATSTAMP identify 90% of the forming problems within minutes at the Product and Process design stages.

They also enable 80% reduction of subsequent incremental analyses.

COSToptimisER and CATNEST empower organisations to achieve material cost saving targets of 10-15% by highlighting cost savings opportunities on product and process geometries and by optimising nesting layouts.

'Our Catia V5 solutions have been extremely well received by our OEM and Tier 1 clients,' said Michael Gallagher, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, FTI.

'We recognise the importance of maintaining full compatibility with the latest releases of Catia since our solutions play such a valuable role in our clients' engineering and procurement processes'.

'At the same time, we realise that many clients are using older releases of Catia so we also recompile our software to provide the latest functionality for previous releases as well'.

FTI's Catia CAA V5 based solutions provide Catia users with the ONLY fully regenerative and associative environment for fast and accurate blank generation, formability analysis, nest evaluation, and material cost reduction.

The software can simulate multiple scenarios in minutes all within the Catia environment.