Technology Update
New, Easily Understandable Data Exchange Concept
Submitted by Anne-Marie Michiels, Dassault Systemes
Committed to harnessing the latest technologies for the benefit of its customers, SMARTEAM is ambitiously integrating Web-enabled technologies to create efficient, collaborative B2B processes. SmartBriefcaseTM technology is a particularly impressive example of SMARTEAM's Web-centric technological innovation.
Extraordinarily powerful and uniquely flexible, SmartBriefcase technology serves as the technological foundation of a variety of current and future SMARTEAM applications. In applying SmartBriefcase technology, for example, to a company's core intellectual property (as in its SmartBOMTM product www.mysmartbom.com), SMARTEAM clearly demonstrates the application of R&D innovation to mission-critical business benefits.
SmartBriefcase is a family of products, each of which allows customers to package data in a self-extracting, standalone, executable file for various business processes such as data exchange with suppliers, outsourcing, documentation and more.
Based upon SMARTEAM's open, XML-based iXFTM format, SmartBriefcase enables companies to efficiently and securely exchange data with supply chain partners over the web, without the need for harmonized software applications between the parties. Automatically packaged by the sender, and accessed through embedded executable files by the receiver, SmartBriefcase-based solutions include the product-related data, metadata and associated files required to accomplish a task - drawings, part data, part numbers, conventions and business rules.
SmartBriefcase is the ultimate solution for external participants within a workflow, enabling anyone to work offline from the PDM system, receiving and returning data regardless of time and location. In this manner, supply chain partners can collaborate around product data without actually being connected to the primary database, with the ability to synchronize the data back when a connection is available.
SmartBriefcase provides the ability to work on common data, facilitating better communication with product development and supply chain process participants, such as outsourced designers, suppliers, sub-contractors and customers. A company defines its working practices within the briefcase, then the supplier feeds data back in the predetermined format.
SmartBriefcase Benefits
Smart Briefcase enables companies to work on PDM-based data, without time or location limitations, in order to:
- Collaborate more effectively with supply chain partners
- Respond more quickly and with greater success to ad hoc business opportunities
- Reduce time-to-market and time-to-volume
- Speed turn around cycle, at both design and change phases
- Avoid keying errors and misfiling
- Have better-controlled and faster communication
- Keep track of changes in an easy and convenient way
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Dassault Systems and IBM Expand Partnership by Adding SMARTEAM Solutions to Product Lifecycle Management Portfolio
Submitted by Anne-Marie Michiels, Dassault Systemes
SMARTEAM Links Collaborative PDM and e-Supply Chain Support for Manufacturing Industries
On June 19, 2001, Dassault and IBM announced that IBM will sell the SMARTEAM product suite as part of its worldwide PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) portfolio. Developed by SMARTEAM Corp., a subsidiary of Dassault Systemes, SMARTEAM links collaborative Product Data Management (PDM) and e-Supply Chain support into a single Web and Windows solution for manufacturing industries.
Capturing enterprise intellectual property at its source, SMARTEAM drives product knowledge throughout the product lifecycle, enabling collaboration across multiple sites, suppliers and customers. Fast to implement, SMARTEAM provides seamless integration with CATIA Version 5 and various other CAD systems such as SolidWorks, SolidEdge, AutoCAD and Mechanical Desktop, as well as gateways with other enterprise PDM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
Complementing the ENOVIA Solutions, which cover large-scale product and process end-to-end development, the SMARTEAM portfolio now sold by IBM will further enhance IBM and Dassault Systemes' presence among manufacturers and their supply chains, specifically in the fabrication & assembly, electrical & electronics, plant design and management and consumer goods industries, as well as departmental and supply chain installations in automotive, aerospace and shipbuilding industries. The agreement adds a world-class distribution and support channel to SMARTEAM, and will enable enhanced deployment capability and customer support worldwide.
"IBM's PLM portfolio is unparalleled in the collaborative product design industry," said Ed Petrozelli, General Manager, IBM Product Lifecycle Management. "We offer the best-of-breed solutions for companies of all sizes in any industry and matched with our hardware, middleware and services IBM is tough to beat."
Bernard Charles, President of Dassault Systemes, said, "We are constantly looking at broadening our PLM product offering to help IBM and their partners expand into new markets. SMARTEAM complements the strengths of our ENOVIA Solutions which are targeted at global enterprises by providing extremely simple collaborative solutions to all the actors throughout the product lifecycle, making product information easily available to an audience of technical and non technical persons including customers, suppliers and sales personnel."
SMARTEAM has pioneered fundamental changes in the Product Data Management market, utilizing Windows and Internet-based technologies to bring the benefits of e-collaboration to manufacturing enterprises of all sizes. SMARTEAM is now ranked by CIMdata to be one of the top 10 worldwide cPDm (collaborative Product Definition management) technology solutions in the $2.86 billion worldwide cPDm market.
"The addition of the SMARTEAM suite of products into IBM's PLM portfolio is a solid move. The SMARTEAM products provide an opportunity for IBM to address the needs of a much wider range of situations, by providing technologies targeted at either smaller companies or design groups within larger organizations," said Ed Miller, President of CIMdata, a leading global consulting and research firm. "SMARTEAM suite of products have already been well received by the market, and should strengthen Dassault Systemes and IBM's position as industry investments in these solutions continue to grow rapidly."
SMARTEAM's CEO, Avinoam Nowogrodski said, " The new agreement with IBM is a significant step in our strategy to bring the benefits of rapidly implementable collaborative PDM solutions to broader markets. The full range of SMARTEAM Windows and Web-based products and their integration with CATIA V5 will further enable IBM customers to innovate, shorten time to market, reduce manufacturing costs and improve product value."
"We decided to invest in product lifecycle management solutions to make sure we would not lose business to our competitors," confirmed Gary Kahrau, Vice President, Technology at Stellex Monitor Aerospace. "Even at these early stages of deploying CATIA and SMARTEAM, we have already seen significant savings in new job start-ups and we have reduced our lead time by 25 percent."
Fact Sheet -- SMARTEAM Portfolio
IBM's product lifecycle management (PLM) portfolio of SMARTEAM applications provides rapidly implemented, scalable, customizable and cost-effective Windows and Web-based collaborative product commerce (CPC) solutions for the extended enterprise and the supply chain, allowing manufacturers to share and exchange product information throughout the enterprise and across the supply chain.
Providing best-in-class solutions for the fabrication & assembly, electrical & electronics, consumer goods, plant design and management, as well as departmental and supply chain installations in automotive, aerospace and shipbuilding industries, SMARTEAM's offering is based upon its core solutions, and is organized into three solution families - workgroup, enterprise and e-supply chain solutions:
Core Solutions
SMARTEAM®
SMARTEAM is a leading Windows and web-based business collaboration solution allowing manufacturers to share and exchange product information throughout the enterprise and across the supply chain. A uniquely cost-effective and rapidly implemented PDM solution, SMARTEAM also serves as the core of a CPC enterprise system. SMARTEAM leverages a company's knowledge base by enabling effective information collaboration and improved data flow within an organization.
SmartVault Server
As security is of the highest priority, the SmartVault Server allows you to define vaults and set up security modes for the vaults. In addition, SMARTEAM both implements the vault server process and displays a log of all vault activity.
SMARTEAM is complemented by an entire application suite, which empowers product teams to collaborate on product development information across an enterprise and between manufacturers and their suppliers. SMARTEAM extends accuracy, security and productivity into procurement, manufacturing and throughout the supply chain enabling them to deliver higher quality products to market more quickly and cheaply. All modules work together to assure that the correct information efficiently reaches the necessary people throughout the extended enterprise, enabling true business collaboration.
Workgroup Solutions
Specific industries require specific tools to be competitive. In the manufacturing industry, CAD products have provided that competitive edge. SMARTEAM's Workgroup Solutions extend the capability of today's leading CAD products to help reduce time-to-market and increase Return on Investment (ROI). Tight integration into Windows, CAD, and office software, has enabled SMARTEAM to develop a new PDM methodology, called "in process". Via this methodology, you no longer have to leave your regular design environment to manage your data - the management simply becomes part of the normal design process. Because all key features, such as search, locate and life cycle/revision control operations, have been intuitively designed and are located inside the design application, you don't have to spend extra time re-keying your data.
SMARTEAM offers lower-priced workgroup level "Plug-In" products that integrate to a single CAD application. As a company's data management needs grow beyond the single CAD environment, or beyond the workgroup, there is a smooth migration to the full SMARTEAM product. Additional CAD integrations are developed by SMARTEAM Partners.
SmartEdge®: fully integrated, easy-to-use, customizable drawing, document and product data management tool for users of Solid Edge®.
SmartDesk®: designed to give AutoCAD and Mechanical Desktop (MDT) users the tools to create, edit, view, control, and annotate AutoCAD, MDT and office type documents.
SmartExpressTM: specifically designed to give SolidWorks users the tools to manage, create, edit, and annotate their designs and related documents, such as office or any other type of file.
SmartInventorTM: seamlessly integrated, affordable, Windows based drawing and document management plug-in for users of Autodesk Inventor.
CATIA TeamPDM: developed by Dassault Systemes, CATIA V5 users benefit from the full power of SMARTEAM's PDM functionality within a seamlessly integrated environment.
Enterprise Solutions
The Enterprise Solutions family extends SMARTEAM's capabilities beyond product design and engineering departments across the entire enterprise, including manufacturing, purchasing, marketing, and sales. Driving product information and business processes across multiple remote enterprise departments, SMARTEAM leverages the company's core intellectual property to enhance overall efficiency and innovation. Engineers can use SMARTEAM to manage their CAD data, marketing people can use it to access designs and specifications for creating proposals, and purchasing can tap into information about materials and purchased parts.
The SMARTEAM Enterprise Solutions include the following products:
SmartFlow®: gives you the power to streamline business processes by linking people, information and applications together. SmartFlow is a workflow automation application providing control of engineering change processes, and expediting them by managing project workflow, tracking project status and automatically routing work from one stage to the next.
SmartWeb®: enables secure remote access to the SMARTEAM project database from standard Internet browsers. With SmartWeb, users can perform advanced searches, quickly preview documents without actually opening the application that created them. No matter where they are, design team members can always have access to information and be involved in the product development and review process. SmartWeb is also an ideal application for corporate Intranets.
SmartGatewayTM: is an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) server, which 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. SmartGateway is initially focused on ERP application integration, due to market demand, with adapters available to the following ERP systems: SAPTM, OracleTM Applications and J.D. EdwardsTM.
Smart Multi-siteTM: an asynchronous PDM solution designed for the distributed environment enabling dispersed team members to efficiently collaborate on product development across distributed organizations, maintaining data integrity and high performance at all sites.
SMARTEAM Hub Server: for installations with multiple SMARTEAM server applications, the SMARTEAM Hub Server is offered which includes the SmartVault, SmartWeb, SmartFlow and SmartGateway server components.
e-Supply Chain Solutions
SMARTEAM's e-Supply Chain solutions enable organizations to turn product designs and documents into universal formats, and collaborate on them with dispersed users across the Internet. Through innovative product information exchange solutions, SMARTEAM facilitates effective and timely work with supplier networks and customers, as well as within the enterprise, dramatically reducing time-to-market.
The SMARTEAM e-Supply Chain Solutions include the following products:
SmartBOMTM: A revolutionary, easy-to-use B2B solution, enabling electronic BOM creation and collaboration within the enterprise and across the supply chain, for efficient product life cycle management. SmartBOM streamlines the process related to the creation and change of the Bill of Materials within the enterprise and throughout the supply chain in a secured and comprehensive manner. SmartBOM is a lightweight, XML-based, executable application that provides a simple, yet powerful mechanism for BOM information exchange between virtual teams. Based on SmartBriefcase technology, SmartBOM enables the extraction of a BOM, packages it with all relevant documents for transfer and input by supply chain partners, compares and consolidates multiple BOMs, and synchronizes them all back into the SMARTEAM system.
mySMARTEAMTM: A collaborative product portal enabling an easy, secure and efficient collaboration on product/project data and process management within the extended enterprise and across the supply chain.
mySmartPublishTM: An easy-to-use B2B Application Service Provision (ASP) solution enabling users to publish documents, drawings and other product files to a secure web page to share vital information and collaborate easily on product development.
mySmartMeetingTM: A powerful real-time communication service allowing businesses to enhance collaboration and simplify communication by conducting on-line interactive meetings, and sharing information live over the Internet. With mySmartMeeting you can collaborate on ANY desktop content (including drawings, Bill of Material and more), with anyone you choose in real-time, and get instant feedback from all participants. You can hold global design, engineering and change control board meetings on-line, while recording the entire process for follow-up and audit trail, and much more.
SMARTEAM products are fully object-oriented and are designed and built exclusively for the Windows environment (Windows® 95/98/2000 and Windows NT) and Java platform. SMARTEAM's philosophy is to achieve unparalleled performance and scalability using state of the art Windows based technologies. These include support for COM, DCOM, SOAP, OLE and ActiveX, which facilitate easy integration with other OLE and Windows compatible applications and solutions, as well as Java Beans, XML, HTML and HTTP, which facilitate building collaborative distributed environments. The client/server architecture supports most popular relational databases, including Oracle®, Microsoft SQL Server, and InpriseTM's InterBase.
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Dassault Systemes and IBM announce the latest ENOVIA Solutions for 3D collaborative Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)
Submitted by Anne-Marie Michiels, Dassault Systemes
New and enhanced capabilities extend its leadership position in delivering innovation-focused enterprise solutions
On 26 June 2001, IBM and Dassault Systemes announced ENOVIA Portal Solutions and Lifecycle Solutions Version 5 Release 7 (V5R7) and ENOVIAVPM Version 1 Release 5. Reinforcing the scope of IBM and Dassault Systemes' comprehensive portfolio of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) offerings, ENOVIA solutions, now in wide-scale deployment at major automotive, aerospace, shipbuilding and industrial machinery companies and their respective supply chains worldwide, have been further extended to incorporate new innovative capabilities for collaborative product development management.
ENOVIA's decision support and lifecycle management solutions are based on an exclusive, open Product, Process, and Resource model (PPR) that manages knowledge-rich enterprise data created throughout the development process. Extending well beyond traditional product data management, PPR enables continuous, dynamic simulation of product performance and manages the effects of change on the product, its processes and resources. It gives all actors within the product lifecycle and across the extended enterprise the information needed to optimize design, supply chain, production and maintenance decisions, dramatically reducing development cycles and increasing innovation, and thus accelerating time-to-market.
Joel Lemke, chief executive officer, ENOVIA Corp., said, "Being introduced concurrently with CATIA V5R7, we are synchronizing the new releases of our PLM product lines and demonstrating our ability to respond quickly to customer and marketplace demands. Our solutions are now being deployed at a record pace in companies of all sizes, as well as their suppliers, as core elements of their mission critical processes. Today's announcement reaffirms our commitment to our customers' needs for continuous process improvement across their extended enterprises."
ENOVIAVPM, which continues as the industry's premier solution for virtual product development management, facilitates greater innovation in highly complex product development environments. Today's announcement extends the ENOVIAVPM PPR model and delivers enhanced multi-site support for global collaboration and additional industry-standard data exchange methods. Additionally, CATIA V5R7 users can now exploit ENOVIAVPM's embedded best practices for data and configuration management.
ENOVIA Portal Solutions address engineers and non-engineers alike to make 3D and other enterprise PLM data available through easy-to-use web-based products. This release adds a valuable new DMU Engineering Analysis Review product for advanced assembly synthesis. ENOVIA Portal also extends the reach of ENOVIAVPM to enterprise users with web-centric business reporting capabilities and to CATIA V5 Windows NT users, providing access to its powerful configured DMU and data management functions.
ENOVIA Life Cycle Applications (LCA) extends its product life cycle coverage with the ability to manage requirements via the PPR hub. These new capabilities enable the management of requirements from early concept to product delivery, thus improving customer satisfaction with the right products at competitive costs. Additionally, enhancements based on customer feedback from early ENOVIA LCA installations strengthen the best practices supported for key industries.
ENOVIA Solutions come with an open and comprehensive set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) allowing easy product customization. Using Component Application Architecture (CAA) Rapid Application Development Environment (RADE) tools, including new functions in support of JAVA applications, through the exploitation of IBM's Websphere suite of products, JAVA and C++ developers can optimize enterprise integration through advanced federation and application integration capabilities.
Said Ed Petrozelli, general manager, IBM Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), "Our customers tell us that our PLM strategy and implementation are right in line with their own business strategies, with a strong emphasis on extended enterprise collaboration and business process innovation. We are convinced that our customer's business initiatives, in terms of increased innovation, reduced operating costs and more reliable time-to-market planning, will be met with the ready-to-use best practices built into ENOVIA Solutions."
Bruce Jenkins, executive vice president, Datatech, Inc. agreed by saying, "The e-business revolution has increased both the opportunity and challenge facing global manufacturing industry. To compete today, companies need maximum leverage over the resources and competencies spread across their value chains. These new ENOVIA products advance users' ability to apply all the assets of the extended enterprise to boost innovation and quality, shorten time-to-revenue, and deliver more customer value across the product lifecycle."
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