PICs in Review at Spring 2003…Don't Miss It!

By B.J. Fries, COE Vice President - Conference Planning, Process Interest Committees.

So we are headed to the "Big Easy". This will be the third COE conference held in the "Crescent City". New Orleans is such an interesting and diverse city. Street vendors will play you some blues or some jazz. You can ride a streetcar, a riverboat, or on a horse drawn buggy. Louisiana, itself, offers rich history to be explored, in great old southern mansions, and in the French Quarter of New Orleans. One could tour the Super Dome, site of many compelling sports events. Then of course, there is the native cuisine such, as gumbo, crawfish, Cajun shrimp, and of course the obligatory beignets. By far the most important happening in New Orleans in late March and early April is the COE Spring 2003 Conference & TechniFair.

The breakout sessions for this conference once again will follow threads, as did Fall 2002. The scheduling committee, PIC managers and chairpersons, have worked hard to provide a comprehensive yet disciplined schedule which looks to have tremendous value. The featured tracks are as follows:

• Analysis & Simulation
• Data Management & Exchange
• Manufacturing
• Product Definition
• Systems and Applications Administration
• Technology Update
• Training & Education

In addition, this conference will be offering irresistible general session topics as well as a product packed TechniFair. Subject matter covered will include:

• Critical V5 deployment issues discussion.
• Automotive and aerospace testimonials.
• Manufacturing roundtable.
• Dynamic motion and fatigue analysis
• Supplier integration and collaboration
• Best fit using CATCMM
• Knowledge assets in CATIA
• Product modeling processes
• How to model a ship

This just a few of the opportunities offered.

If you have not already, make your plans now to attend. There is not another venue that offers more thorough coverage of Dassault Systemes products anywhere. See you there.

KBE PIC Sessions for the COE Spring 2003 Conference

By Greg Premetz, PIC Committee Chairman: Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE)

For those of you who have a strong interest in Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE), I thought I would provide some background information about the Process Interest Committee Sessions that Mike Paisner and I assembled for this upcoming Conference. Hopefully, this article will help you understand how all of the different sessions relate to one another.

Jean Paul Richter said "Variety of mere nothings gives more pleasure than uniformity of something". Although this emphasizes the importance of variety, it is our goal at every Conference to offer substance in every session that we sponsor. For the Spring Conference, we have a spectrum of sessions that will provide some experience with KBE, as well as some theory behind Knowledge Management.

We currently have scheduled three Industry sessions provided by Users from the automotive and aerospace industries. We have two "How to" sessions provided by two different Vendors. And we have three sessions that will hopefully allow our members to see some of the concepts and issues being explored in the world of Knowledge Management.

For the user sessions, we have colleagues who will be discussing their experiences with various approaches to KBE. They will be illustrating master models, Knowledgeware, and VB automation. One speaker will be providing his company's experiences with the technologies and the resulting issues of Knowledge Management.

For the Vendor sessions, we have two recognized experts who have been at the leading edge of these new technologies. They will be providing us with some "golden nuggets" about using Visual Basic with V5 and on how to create intelligent catalog components. In the aerospace industry we like to say that those on the leading edge tend to catch all of the bird strikes, so here's an opportunity to question these experts for their lessons learned.

Finally, we have scheduled some sessions that I believe have a substantial impact on KBE. I was really excited to see that Bernard Charles will be speaking on Innovation, since this has been one of the major issues within the Knowledge Management community. I personally attended a session at a KM conference where the speaker we have scheduled provided his experiences applying idea management at a large company. I found his understanding of the issues refreshing and felt the member community could greatly benefit from his experiences and vision for innovation.

Understanding knowledge will greatly help us in our efforts to implement KBE. Therefore we have a session scheduled where the concepts of Knowledge Management are being applied directly to the creation of the CAD geometry. These concepts include knowledge half-life, ownership, and granularity. The idea of having the most current, accurate, precise, and authorized knowledge at my workstation while I'm designing intrigues me.

And the last session, that may totally confuse the issue, is on Ontologies. Ontologies are used to create a common vocabulary that allows our machines to understand us. Powerful search engines can only do so much, and typically we can "drill down" to what we need quicker by using a site map. The site map usually represents collections of like concepts. However, everyone seems to have their own way of setting up the collections. Ontology is meant to address these issues and I believe will be helpful for all of us to understand.

You can find the abstracts for these sessions on the COE Web site at
http://www.coe.org/events/03spring/webschedule.cfm

Kvaerner Oilfield Products to Implement $1 Million Product Lifecycle Management Solution from SMARTEAM

Enterprise-wide data management solution to enhance efficiency, quality and innovation at leading manufacturer of undersea oil production systems

SMARTEAM Corporation Ltd., a Dassault Systemes company and leading provider of innovative Product Lifecycle Collaboration solutions, today announced a $1 million deal to provide cutting-edge Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) at Kvaerner Oilfield Products (KOP).

Headquartered in Norway, KOP is a $400 million company with offices in England, Scotland, Brazil, Australia and the U.S. A leading manufacturer of undersea oil production and distribution systems for oil companies worldwide, KOP generates vast quantities of product design data, supply chain information and enterprise resource details. Maintaining current versions of designs and matching them to other relevant business information was becoming a significant challenge.

By using SMARTEAM, KOP will be able to access and manage its data more effectively, facilitate the re-use of designs and drawings, create a single point of reference for engineers, replace its document control system and ultimately make substantial savings in engineering time. These benefits are further expected to have positive impact upon product quality and innovation.

"Since we constantly revisit and modify our designs, the retrieval and updating of files is difficult to manage," said Morten Braass, vice president of Project and Engineering Support at KOP. "We need to know that we are working with the correct designs and without SMARTEAM this has proven very difficult. Also, we need this data to work alongside our other business information. We had all these systems creating supposed knowledge, but they weren't talking to each other. A piece of the jigsaw seemed to be missing."

The initial deployment of SMARTEAM at KOP will likely lead to extending the system across the rest of the Aker Kvaerner Group, so the progress and success of the installation is being monitored carefully by all sides.

"With 38 companies in the Aker Kvaerner Group, this is obviously an important contract for us," said Chris Jones, president of European Operations at SMARTEAM Europe. "This initial deployment creates a real opportunity to prove just how good SMARTEAM is in a controlled and measurable way - at one of the world's largest engineering companies."

About Kvaerner Oilfield Products
Kvaerner Oilfield Products provides a complete range of surface and sub sea solutions for the oil and gas industry from concept screening and design through manufacturing, fabrication and commissioning. KOP's ability as a total system provider is backed by a wide portfolio of products that are maintained for the complete life of field. KOP's capability is available for both new and existing fields either as individual activities or complete packages. Worldwide activities are supported by five regional centers that, in turn, are backed by eight Business Streams. Information about Kvaerner Oilfield Products is available at http://www.kvaerner.com/kop.

IBM and Dassault Systemes Help TECO Electric & Machinery Ltd. Cut Product Design Time by 50%

TECO Electric & Machinery Ltd. (TECO), worldwide industry leading motor manufacturer, IBM, and Dassault Systemes announced that TECO's successful migration to CATIA V5, a core application of IBM's Product Lifecycle Management Portfolio developed by Dassault Systemes, has shortened its product design time by 50 percent over the last year.

For full contents of this press release, consult:
http://www.3ds.com/en/press/index.asp