If we look back to the 1980's, engineering organisations strove to improve their product development process by attempting to move sequential engineering processes into more parallel workflows. This methodology was given the name "Concurrent Engineering". Twenty years on, it's surprising to observe that this objective hasn't changed as much as we might have expected. What has changed dramatically is the trend toward operating in the extended enterprise space. Historically companies strove to engineer products (primarily) within discrete locations. Software vendors broadened their product portfolios to minimise data transfer between design, analysis, data management and manufacturing applications, and created numerous proprietary interfaces to other applications. Today, the original objective of concurrency has been exacerbated by the evolution of "Collaborative Engineering", which underlies the current trend to engineer products in disparate locations, amongst numerous partners and between multiple vendors' applications.

Even with the increased complexities of the "extended enterprise", one of the main reasons that we're still facing some of the same problems as we were 20 years ago is the immense hurdle of application integration and product data communication. On a recent visit to Berlin, I was interested to see the current developments from the iVip project (integrated Virtual Product Creation). The project is co-sponsored to the tune of ?25 Million by the German Government, and managed by a team headed by the Frauenhofer Institute for production systems and design technology, Volkswagen AG and Siemens Business Services. The project sets out to create a virtual digital environment for product creation across multiple enterprises and locations.

Although communication between products and a common user interface (as demonstrated within iVip) certainly enhances design "Collaboration", one of the largest hurdles to achieving true collaboration is the transfer of model data. Industry bodies, users and vendors have conferred over many years to set 3D data standards. These work well but in reality these generally transfer design data, not design intent data between applications. To understand why this is important let's take a simple scenario of someone wanting to share a budget spreadsheet with another colleague. In a world without "intent", the user would print the spreadsheet from his computer and fax the print to his colleague. The receiver can analyse and view the data and results. He can create his own spreadsheet on his own pc by developing a new spreadsheet model from the figures supplied with new calculations - very useful. He can also call the sender to find out what formulas were in use and how they were used. Let's now have a look at the "intent" model. The user emails his spreadsheet, along with embedded notes describing the model's form and functions to his colleague. The receiver can look at it, use it as the basis for his own spreadsheet models and even amend it to try what-if scenarios. In the world of 3D modelling and design communication, we are still in the era of the fax.

There are many good reasons why sharing of data at the intent level is difficult; not least amongst these is intellectual property protection. Another obvious problem is that different applications require different types of data to be used. It's difficult, and sometimes impossible, to determine a common superset of attributes as a standard. Again, we have seen hurdles such as these overcome in the past.

Not only are some of the technology hurdles high, but also many software manufacturers believe it is a significant commercial disadvantage to allow users to move data to other software platforms. This is especially true when these products perform engineering tasks that their products can fulfil. They are often keen, (but will avoid disclosing this), to ensure that significant elements of their solution remain proprietary to ensure perpetuation of their applications. We have recently seen that, within the world of ERP, even the largest vendors have been forced to deliver more open interfaces to foreign systems.

CAD vendors currently encourage re-use of their data by using industry standard translators, internet and standalone viewers, and by accessing interactive web sites with downloaded model data and chat facilities. These tools undoubtedly deliver better re-use of existing data, and overcome the issues of remote use, visualisation and discussion. They do not, however, allow for extensive re-use of data in a non-native application. Many contracting companies have no alternative but to invest in multiple applications in order to manage design data from different sources. With this comes the overhead of several product purchases, many user interfaces and extensive re-trainings.

The enormous benefits that can be gained from true enterprise design collaboration will only become apparent when we can use, and more importantly re-use, data from multiple software products, together with the designer's original intent and constraints. To do this we need customers, particularly the large OEMS, to motivate vendors to cooperate in developing more sophisticated standards of application interoperability, so that they can truly take advantage of "Collaborative engineering" benefits.

Allan Behrens
email: allan.behrens@cambashi.com

A version of this article was first published in the April 2002 issue of EAReport

Other Cambashi articles that may be of interest:
Collaboration and the role of the benevolent dictator
Design collaboration - the business issues

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