Collaboration with customers, suppliers, and partners worldwide has become a standard business practice in the manufacturing industry. It offers business benefits of lower cost resources, around the clock engineering, and availability of unique expertise. It also introduces many new challenges including:

• Security
• Accountability
• Regulatory compliance
• Timeliness
• Resources
• Frequent updates
• Multi-CAD environments
• Business Process Integration

Even with effective point solutions, collaboration between companies is a complex process, prone to human error and delays. Moreover, when a project depends on regular, repeatable data exchanges that are failing, these delays can quickly build up and eat into overhead. This can very quickly erase the business advantages a company would expect to gain through global collaboration.

Beyond, email, FTP, and Home Grown Collaboration

Many global organizations use ad hoc processes and exchange product data via email, over FTP sites, or through in-house created collaboration frameworks. Such methods may be inefficient and pose inherent risks.

IT Resources: Developing and maintaining custom in house applications can be costly especially when ongoing changes are required to keep it current.

Engineering Resources: For most companies, data exchange is not their expertise. Having designers and engineers focus on product improvement instead of exchange logistics lets your talented engineering staff focus on creating better products.

Design Errors: If suppliers or partners receive the wrong data or work with improperly prepared or translated CAD models, unauthorized changes may introduce costly problems downstream in terms of re-work, re-mastering, re-tooling, scrapped product and even recalls.

Time to Market Delays: A largely manual process involving many people greatly impedes fast exchange with critical path suppliers and partners. Poorly prepared or translated models similarly introduce delays. If most exchanges take days instead of minutes, your time to market for new product introduction is probably impacted.

Security Issues: Typical data exchange methods utilizing email or FTP are not secure.

Traceability: Commonly used ad hoc processes do not provide traceability to ensure and later verify the right data is being used.

Non-Customizable: Each recipient of product data may have unique requirements for CAD data format and content to be most effective. By forcing your suppliers and partners to receive CAD data the same way, you may be limiting their ability to work most effectively with you.

Understanding a CAD Data Collaboration Process

Manufacturers are exchanging thousands of models per month. For a successful partnership, it is imperative that ITI TranscenData immerse ourselves in your process and get answers to questions such as the following:

• Are the designers and analysts in your organization getting the right data?
• Are designers and analysts receiving the right versions of the data?
• How long do engineers wait to receive data and under what time constraints?
• Is the data set in the right format and if not, how much rework or quality analysis is required?
• Should designers and analysts compare or verify the received data to ensure data integrity?
• How usable is the data and what percentage of the data is re-mastered for downstream use?
• Should recipients cross-check received data for unauthorized changes?

DEXcenter : Data Exchange Automation

DEXcenter, allows global product data collaboration to be fast, efficient, and reliable while maintaining security and accountability. Some aspects of this framework include:

Flexibility: It is common for an organization to use ITI's Supplier CAD Data Collaboration solution as an overlay or replacement for their current systems. Many adopt our data exchange solutions because they can achieve significant results and return on investment without impacting hard decisions that have been made on existing PLM systems.

Security: The collaboration infrastructure provides multiple levels of security to protect proprietary corporate assets. This includes private, secure access, encrypted transmission, and layered firewall security. DEXcenter is frequently used to provide a secure buffer between internal proprietary PLM systems and external suppliers, partners, and customers.

Accountability: DEXcenter captures each transaction so there is always a record of exactly what data was sent, to whom it was sent, and when it was sent.

Regulatory Compliance: ITI's product data collaboration solution can be configured to ensure regulatory compliance procedures are followed and to provide traceability.

Timeliness: The standardized web infrastructure is available to any authorized user with a web browser anytime of the day. The streamlined automated procedures reduce the number of people who must be involved in an exchange. Clients report exchanges which once took days are now completed accurately, securely, and reliably in a matterof minutes.

Resources: Typical manual processes in corporations involve many people including those with skills in high demand. The automated processes of a web accessible framework eliminate the need for highly skilled engineers and designs to spend their time performing largely repetitive, non-value added activities thus freeing them to concentrate on making better products. Computer resources are better utilized through concentrating processing to dedicated servers that provide high availability while minimizing software license requirements.

Frequent Updates: The nature of collaborative engineering is one of change. Thus electronic data is not exchanged just once but many times throughout the product lifecycle. This increases the importance of having a solid and reliable infrastructure to support the level of collaboration activity effectively. ITI TranscenData's collaboration infrastructure provides a scalable solution to meet this requirement.

Multi-CAD Environment: Collaboration partners typically utilize a variety of engineering tools. To exchange data effectively, data provided to partners or received from them should be immediately usable without requiring extensive manual rework or preparation. The CAD Data Exchange Automation aspect of DEXcenter provides robust functionality to provide fast, efficient, and reliable translation between CAD applications that can be configured to meet individual partner requirements.

Business Process Integration: Unique corporate business processes must often be included when exchanging data for collaboration. This may include integration with a PLM system, an approval process, special CAD data processing, or proprietary transmission methods. DEXcenter open architecture supports customization to include these processes automatically. Additionally, ITI TranscenData's PLM Integration Solutions team has a great deal of experience in understanding and executing integration processes.

Proficiency : Feature beased exchange & Data exchange

The Proficiency supplier delivery solution enables feature-based, native CAD files to meet product delivery requirements. The solution integrates with all major PLM solutions, complete with automated batch exchange, business logic driven rules and audit and verification reports.

You can cost effectively deliver designs that meet your customer specifications while protecting your intellectual property. As a supplier you can bid on opportunities based on your design expertise without concern to specific product data delivery requirements and not limited by their CAD system. With the ability to load balance designers you are able to reduce down time and improve productivity.

Sharing product knowledge information between design partners, the prime, the customer, different departments or divisions within a company or with manufacturing is essential for successful design collaboration. Proficiency solutions provide automated results across the full spectrum of translation detail: from JT or STEP to native, feature-base CAD files. This allows you to meet required delivery formats while also providing the appropriate level of detail throughout the design and manufacturing processes. The result is more effective design collaboration, reduced time associated with manual translations, improved workflows and processes, more time for innovation, faster time-to-market and higher product quality.