Windows and the Web: Leveraging CAD across the enterprise

Manufacturing Engineering, Mar 1999 by Chalmers, Raymond E

Studies say that for every CAD user in a manufacturing enterprise, nine other non-design personnel review or approve the data. Could CAD files and other product engineering data shared seamlessly across an enterprise make for more efficient manufacturing?

Many companies, major CAD suppliers and CAD users alike, are betting millions it's the right way to go. Called the new PDM, for product development management as opposed to product data or document management, these products extend CAD data to a manufacturing organization's non-design departments such as analysis, tooling development, manufacturing/assembly, quality control, maintenance, and sales/marketing. The goals are quicker design development and more streamlined production.

The players and their products include Windchill from Parametric Technology Corp. (Waltham, MA), ENOVIAvpm from IBM and Dassault Systemes (Charlotte, NC), MetaVPDM from SDRC (Cincinnati, OH), ProductVision from Unigraphics Solutions (Maryland Heights, MO) and OneSpace from CoCreate (Fort Collins, CO). Early adopters include Airbus, Lockheed-Martin, and Sony.

Although a variety of datasharing solutions are available, from product viewing software able to download large data sets to PCs, to enterprise-wide solutions like the products just mentioned, the foundations for such a setup include Windows and the Internet. "Increasingly, organizations want to standardize as much of their work as possible on common platforms, particularly Windows platforms," says Alan Roberts, technical consultant at Hewlett Packard's Advanced Technology Center (Bellevue, WA), and a specialist in UNIX/NT interoperability "It simplifies file exchange, systems administration, e-mail, and many other aspects of working together and sharing information."

And software providers are recognizing the network for sharing design data and developing products is the Internet and corporate intranets. Parametric Technology is positioning its Windchill software as a pure Web/intranet/Java application from top to bottom, not simply a Web-enabled front-end but a "true Web-centric architecture," says James Heppelmann, senior vice president of PTC's Windchill division. "Traditional client/server systems are difficult to deploy, hard to use, costly to maintain, and unable to meet a global company's evolving business needs. By embracing the Web computing model, Windchill offers dramatic improvements in implementation, scalability, ease of use, manageability, and flexibility compared to traditional client/server systems."

Three elements make up Windchill: Windchill Applications, a browser-based "product information home page," Windchill Information Modeler, Web-native tools for internal IT staff, and Windchill Foundation, a Web-centric technology platform for hosting application development.

End-users in engineering, sales, or other departments, begin by viewing the company's product information home page. From there, users can navigate to work areas and product information via applets, hyperlinks or search engines. IT staff use Windchill Information Modeler to create the Java applets for end users. The Windchill Foundation, transparent to users, is a three-tier technology platform: an Oracle 8 database foundation, Java object servers as middleware, and a Web browser on top.

Such a combination lets companies use the Web to virtually knit together disparate systems and have them behave as a unified whole. The product information home page can be used for managing and distributing CAD files from Pro/ENGINEER or other CAD systems as well as document management in Microsoft Office. Each component is autonomous, yet the unified "virtual" system can hyperlink across disparate systems and even use Web-based search engines for unstructured queries across multiple products. Capturing and integrating legacy data into an overall Web-based information strategy can happen with Windchill since it includes object-oriented API (application programming interfaces) and supports CORBA (common object request broker architecture) and OLE (object linking and embedding) technologies for sharing data.

"Increasingly we're not talking about vaulting CAD files anymore," Heppelmann says. "Vaulting's important, but all the leverage you get out of that vault when you understand a product's complete definition and evolution is key. It's all about product definition and configuration management now. A full product definition contains much more than geometry."

UNIX/NT Interoperability

A manufacturing organization's legacy data likely resides in UNIX-based systems. Late last year, IBM and Dassault Sytemes announced CATIA Version 5, reengineered for both Windows NT and UNIX platforms. Existing CATIA UNIX customers get a single system image that can capture existing engineering knowledge and use it in PC-based product development. Rewritten to incorporate standards and programming methodologies including STEP, OpenGL, C++, Java, and OLE, facilitating with Windows NT and Microsoft Office is now native. "The issue facing users is a world where NT and UNIX are employed by different companies in the product development pipeline," says Frank Lerchenmueller, vice president of IBM's Worldwide Engineering Solutions unit. "Today users must integrate product data from different environments for office, engineering, and other types of applications."