November 1996.
This paper has its origins in a workshop held at Volvo, Gothenburg in September 1996. The objective of the workshop was to identify the common interests, direction and concerns of major companies using PDM from several different industries.
The companies represented at the workshop were: Volvo, Ford, Boeing, British Aerospace, Daimler Benz, ABB, Ericsson, plus the University of Darmstadt.
The companies involved all recognised that while the emerging STEP standard provides some of what is needed, more positive action is required, particularly with respect to PDM practices.
Open PDM is a response to the needs of companies to manage product data in a way which supports both internal requirements and facilitates partnership with customer and partners, using multiple, different PDM and functional systems.
Open PDM must also:
· Make appropriate use of standards;
· Support future as well as current processes.
The current and future business environment is characterised by:
· partnerships between companies
· concurrent engineering approaches
· globalisation
The effect of these characteristics is that the design, manufacture and use of products typically involves multiple companies with different PDM systems. Therefore PDM systems and the way they are configured and used needs to support data exchange and sharing between companies as well as within a company.
The following barriers exist:
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PDM system differences: The basic way in which a given PDM system holds data may not be compatible with another PDM system. |
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PDM system configuration: PDM systems offer the flexibility to configure them to specific needs. Different companies may configure the same or different systems quite differently. If a company configures their PDM to follow a given process, this may hinder exchange with others as well as hindering change to the process. |
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The nature of the PDM market: The PDM market is young and is both growing and changing fast. There are different architectures (in terms of information, systems and functionality) and the default “out-of-the-box” processes vary between PDM system, as does the way in which the PDM systems are configured for use in a particular situation. PDM vendors are often working with closely customers to develop their products and meet specific customer requirements. The resulting variation in set-up makes exchange of data difficult. |
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Lack of standards: While there are standards available for key functional areas such as Design data, there is a severe lack of standardisation to support necessary parts of the business process. Areas lacking standards are: · Work flow · Project management data · Systems engineering · Security and access control Where there are standards, there is not sufficient linkage between them. The following standards all could be better linked to product data management and standards than at present: · CORBA · The X-n00 family of standards · SGML The existing standards do not support all the functionality inherent in some PDM systems. |
Taken together, these barriers give rise to considerable cost in partnership projects which adds no value.
One business response for large companies is to use their purchasing position to force the use of a given PDM system onto suppliers. However, unlike with CAD systems, the use of the same PDM system does not guarantee exchange will work given the configuration potential of most PDM systems. Therefore a more open approach to PDM is necessary.
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