Dassault Systemes Announces Two New CAA V5 Partners

Dassault Systemes recently announced two new CAA V5 partners within the Software Community Program extending again the 3D PLM product portfolio.

Sigmetrix, a RAND Worldwide division, joined the V5 ecosystem last July as a CAA V5 Gold Software partner. Sigmetrix will develop and sell a CAA V5-based 3D tolerance analysis solution fully integrated within CATIA V5 for the entire product development process.

The leading car crash simulation editor, Mecalog, will develop and sell as a CAA V5 software partner, the new generation M-Crash environment integrated within the CATIA Analysis V5 solutions.

Ned Smith Joins ENOVIA Corp.

Long-time Asia business authority to drive sales and market development of ENOVIA and SMARTEAM brands in Asia Pacific.

Dassault Systemes announced that Ned Smith has joined ENOVIA Corp. as Vice President, Sales and Business Development for Asia Pacific. Mr. Smith will be based out of the Dassault Systemes K.K. offices in Tokyo, Japan.

Mr. Smith is responsible for sales and market development of the ENOVIA and SMARTEAM brands in Asia Pacific. He will team with IBM and IBM Business Partners to develop new strategic opportunities and accounts, promote value propositions around 3D Product Life Cycle Management (3D PLM), and establish and drive alliances with business partners for extended development of the targeted market throughout Asia Pacific. Mr. Smith reports to Joel Lemke, ENOVIA Corp. chief executive officer.

Before joining ENOVIA Corp., Mr. Smith held several Asia-specific business development positions with Commerce One (Japan), Nasan Group, Inc. (Korea), International Data Corporation (Hong Kong), and International Atoire Corporation (Japan). He holds Bachelor of Arts degrees from the University of Minnesota and Koran University in Kobe, Japan.

SmarTeam's Product Collaboration Solution for the Electrical & Electronics Industry

SmarTeam Corporation Ltd. has recently released SMARTEAM for Electronics, its latest product information collaboration solution specifically designed for companies that produce products with electronic components such as consumer and industrial electronics, medical device and microelectronics, automotive, heavy machinery, and white goods.

Created with the participation of leading electrical and electronics (E&E) manufacturers, SMARTEAM for Electronics is a best-practice solution that facilitates concurrent management between mechanical and electronic and software designs teams, design coordination between subcontractors, suppliers, and customers, and overall collaboration across global and multi-disciplinary projects. All participants in the design to production process communicate around a single, open source of product definition data, managing the Bill of Materials and all related documents.

"By incorporating SmarTeam's proven collaborative and information management methodologies, E&E customers can automate key product development processes, dramatically reducing the expenses of redundancy, inaccuracy and loss of critical intellectual property, and significantly improving their profit margins," says Avichay Nissenbaum, SmarTeam executive vice president of marketing. "SMARTEAM for Electronics, created together with leading manufacturers and industry experts, enables a wide range of companies to streamline collaborative efforts with customers, suppliers and partners and throughout their global enterprise."

SMARTEAM for Electronics integrates the management and release processes for defining documents, and facilitates Bill of Material collaboration throughout a product's life cycle. All mechanical, electrical and software data is handled through SMARTEAM for Electronics' powerful and robust enterprise product platform, providing an integrated solution by which multiple roles - such as mechanical engineer, electrical engineer and software engineer - work together within a single integrated environment.

Based on core SMARTEAM capabilities, including workflow and BOM management, SMARTEAM for Electronics provides proven best practices for E&E business logic, including process templates for Engineering Release, ECR (Engineering Change Revision) and ECO (Engineering Change Order), support for reference designators and Approved Manufacturer List (AML), and unified Bills of Material. Customers benefit from increased product innovation, reduced cycle times and ultimately greater profit margins.

Unique capabilities of SMARTEAM for Electronics:

• Quick Start - enables companies to "Quick Start" a project through the reuse of existing data, reducing overhead costs and search time.
• Integrated electrical, mechanical and software environments - supports design and Bill of Material cooperation between the document-oriented MCAD structure and the item-oriented ECAD structures.
• Process templates - drives multiple, best practice processes, specifically tailored to the needs of the E&E industry, speeding up each stage of the product lifecycle, facilitating standards compliance and more.
• Component Approval process - Manages internal catalog with librarian functions, item searching and more, facilitating vendor/supplier selection, reducing purchasing overhead and speeding time to market.
• Change processes - offers a complete scenario to manage, minimize and expedite ECRs and ECOs, including working with external suppliers and subcontractors.

Connecting Enterprise Islands

At many companies today, even large corporations with massive sums invested in enterprise-wide information technology systems, database 'islands' exist which operate in isolation from one another. Product Data Management (PDM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, for example, are typically run independently with little linkage between the two, even though valuable information could be exchanged between them to generate business process data such as the Bill-Of-Materials (BOM).

The lack of data integration means information is often transcribed in a manual process that is tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone. At one SmarTeam customer, parts information was sent from engineering to manufacturing in a manual process in which essentially the same BOM data was manually entered on five separate forms, lists, spreadsheets, drawings, and reports. The company's engineering manager described the procedure as frustrating and out of control, wasting days and risking incorrect or out-dated information being entered.

At another company, we saw an engineer comparing BOM listings from different computer systems by going line by line with a ruler down two spreadsheets on his desk to see if the databases were in synch with the one displayed on his screen. In this hours-long, nerve-wracking process, any slip or momentary distraction could result in a serious mistake or having to restart the work. This was one of the weakest links in that company's product development process and resulted in delayed time to market.

As ridiculous and outdated as these scenarios sound, they are repeated every day at many different types of companies which manually transfer data between separate computer systems. Often, companies will even have several PDM systems that are supposed to facilitate data management but which fail to effectively communicate with one another.

SmarTeam addresses this information-flow bottleneck by enabling open two-way communication between heterogeneous computer systems in a number of ways. Firstly, SmarTeam has made this possible by embedding many of its products with the Interoperable Exchange Format (iXF) standard for sharing information between iXF-enabled systems, essentially creating a common language for interaction between the two. In most cases, this information is in the form of assembly component data (drawings, CAD models, and design files) and content (meta data that describes the design such as revision level, file number, or part name) transferred as a self-describing collection of objects and associated files between two systems.

Compatible with a variety of business data exchange protocols, including Microsoft's BizTalk and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), the XML-based iXF format enables the integration of product data stored in a SmarTeam database with existing legacy systems. In addition, it facilitates the exchange of information between an organization's departments, throughout the extended enterprise and across the supply chain.

Another methodology deployed by SmarTeam to foster Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), is through a clever product called SmartGateway. This application manages the flow of information between SmarTeam and all enterprise applications, including resource planning (ERP), customer relationship Management (CRM), PDM systems and other legacy systems to ensure current product information across all corporate departments, including procurement, sales, customer service. Other technologies used by SmarTeam to facilitate interoperability include extremely flexible integration tools and a variety of import and export utilities.

In terms of information management systems, it's a heterogeneous world out there, within companies and throughout the virtual enterprise. Many types of data management, ERP, Bill of Materials systems are in use, both within companies, and certainly in their supply chains. The iXF-enabled gateway approach allows organizations, especially small and mid-size companies, to affordably capture this information and transfer it electronically between groups and among their suppliers and customers. With this technology, they can get their enterprise under digital control, which is an absolute imperative today as business practices become ever more sophisticated and complex. For companies that choose to remain digitally isolated, however, there's a clear danger since they face the possibility of being forced out of business within several years as they are overtaken by more astute competitors.

Astrium Embraces DELMIA Methodology from Dassault Systemes

Next Step in Aerospace Manufacturer's Move Toward Dassault Systemes 3D PLM

DELMIA Corp., a Dassault Systemes company, announced that its systems are to form part of space manufacturer Astrium's digital product realization strategy. Tightly integrated with its sister product CATIA, DELMIA is to be deployed on the company's new and ongoing programs.

A decade ago, it took many years for a spacecraft to move from the 'drawing board' to the launch pad. The time to market period has now decreased to approximately two years and there is continuing pressure for further reductions despite dramatic increases in the size and complexity of projects. Astrium therefore decided to investigate ways to reduce delivery risk, cycle times, and costs.

With help from leading universities, the DELMIA toolset was evaluated as part of an overall digital design for manufacture initiative. This benchmarking and best practice study focused not only on the various products and their associated process capabilities within the virtual factory or zone, but also on how best to implement the different tools so they could directly improve profitability in the context of product life cycle management. This is known within Astrium as a design anywhere, build anywhere strategy.

Elfed Roberts, Systems Manager at Astrium says, "We knew right from the beginning that we did not want to implement DELMIA's various virtual assembly tools as just a 'point solution'. Though our thoughts on how both Envision and Ergo could be made to work for us altered over the course of the study, as the systems continued to develop, we knew that they could be used to both capture and manage a 'knowledge based' approach as well as affect unambiguous communication. This approach also has the effect of being able to drive standardization and common processes at multiple sites and in multiple countries."

"Telecoms space craft tend to be large one off complex structures with limited opportunities for standardization. With DELMIA, we will be applying kinematics and logistic-type simulations at the highest level, stretching these systems to their limits," says Roberts. "Using universities active in this field has helped us to evolve novel design-for-manufacture solutions. Only by understanding the philosophy that underpins DELMIA and CATIA could we begin to harness their capabilities to maximize the added value potential to Astrium. Everyone has been talking about the benefits of product life cycle management for some time. I am confident that DELMIA will enable us to achieve far higher levels of design maturity much earlier in our programs and hence, mitigate risk more effectively than was previously thought possible."

3D PLM enables customers to optimize their business Processes for Engineering, Manufacturing, Maintenance & Support, by utilizing Collaborative Workspaces to share a common product, process and resource (PPR) model. With PPR, companies can capture, share and reuse Knowledge all along the Product lifecycle. The open CAA V5 (Component Application Architecture) allows extension and integration of this solution within multiple enterprise environments.

Challenges of Collaborative BOM Management

At SMARTEAM R&D we often begin our look at new product or industry areas by examining the challenges or pains they experience. Collaborative BOM management is no different.

Product data may be extremely difficult to find and often out of date. It is not uncommon for people to hand-copy data such as part numbers from multiple lists by going line-by-line through the information and keeping track of where they are by positioning rulers, pencils, and other assorted office items on the sheets. Any momentary distraction, bump of the desk or other disturbance in a busy office could result in a serious mistake such as incorrect part numbers or outdated drawing revision levels, with errors rippling through countless downstream documents and processes from engineering to the shop floor and beyond.

Companies using CAD systems and department-level document management systems often hand-copy the data from one system to another because their databases are incompatible. For example, different disciplines such as mechanical and electronic engineering may try to reconcile data onto one BOM and send it off to production, where manufacturing personnel must manually key appropriate data into a separate enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

These problems with manually-generated BOMs are further compounded by the rapidly-growing complexity of products and the resulting increased part-counts as well as the increased frequency of engineering change orders (ECOs. Companies are also contending with the decentralization and globalization of manufacturing enterprises as they try to manage the collaboration between dispersed production facilities, remote design teams, and supply chain partners.

This all adds up to big headaches for designers, manufacturing engineers, finance departments, and others throughout the enterprise as they scramble to get the product out the door. Inevitably, mistakes are made, costs go up, and schedules slip. This is where SMARTEAM, SmartBOM, and our collaborative BOM management solution can help. More information is available on this product at www.smarteam.com.