New product management system guides and connects users through the entire workflow process
“For every CAD user,” estimates Richard Allen, SolidWorks Corp. Global Product Manager of PDM Solutions, “there are one to three supporting personnel involved in purchasing, sales, marketing or the like.” He explains that industry maturation is leading to more organizations using product management systems like SolidWorks’ PDMWorks® Enterprise 2008, which facilitates and standardizes the sharing and routing of information—virtually automating the product development process and beyond, thus reducing the risk for human error and modernizing the traditional paper approval route.
PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 features the managing of bills of material (BOMs), replication of data across sites, foreign language support, data connectivity, platform support and performance. Fully integrated with SolidWorks® 3-D CAD software, Enterprise 2008 helps geographically dispersed engineering organizations securely manage engineering information, leverage existing designs, connect global teams, streamline workflow, audit documents and search intensively.
According to SolidWorks, PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 offers:
- Better control and management of BOMs. This software supports the creation, editing, viewing and management of BOMs. Organizations can now customize BOMs for each department, route them for approvals and enable multiple reviewers to edit them without installing SolidWorks software. BOMs can now include units of measure for non-modeled items (like glue) and can also display part thumbnails when a user hovers a mouse over an item listed in the BOM.
- Improved replication across multiple sites. Enterprise features faster, more powerful replication of design files across organizations. It optionally replicates only the latest version of design files for less processing-intensive downloads, which enables design engineers to easily find the current version of any part or project, eliminating confusion and errors.
- Foreign language support. This version nearly doubles support for native languages. The product enables documents in multiple languages to reside on a single server, simplifying the connection of design engineers globally. Supported languages include English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish, Japanese, Swedish, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Korean, Russian, Czech and Brazilian Portuguese.
- Performance improvement. PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 has enhanced performance in deleting, accessing, moving and rewriting files, as well as clearing caches. Search is faster due to Microsoft Indexing Service support and richer now that searches from the SolidWorks software interface retrieve materials from the PDMWorks Enterprise vault.
- Data connectivity to external systems. The software provides out-of-the-box tools to facilitate data sharing with external systems. This capability reduces time, errors and expense of duplicative manual entry to help automate workflows.
For example, a design engineer can send an XML-formatted BOM to an ERP system, initiating ordering, purchasing, approval and manufacturing planning automatically upon drawing release. Likewise, PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 can import data through the same process, enabling engineers to manage costs at the design level by automatically calculating material costs as they work.
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Allen mentions, “A large percentage of users print BOMs and retype them into an ERP system.” When the software automates the process, imagine how much time can be saved. Allen continues saying that PDMWorks can integrate with all ERP systems because data filters through a neutral site and can be changed into various formats, such as XML, Excel, ascii, CSV, etc.
“PDMWorks Enterprise is the ideal way for distributed engineering organizations to manage their product data for powerful, productive collaboration,” according to Jeff Ray, SolidWorks CEO. “The result is smoother coordination and better products arriving more quickly to market with new efficiencies at every step.”