CONTACT Software Redefines CAD Data Management
Workspaces for radical simpler Collaboration
Bremen, 11th December 2009 – CONTACT Software introduces a fundamentally new architecture for CAD data management and the collaborative and multi-company product development environment. In contrast to the conventional and common PDM/PLM architecture, the WORKSPACES technology assigns product developers key priority as warrantors for a company’s innovation leadership. Designed open from scratch, the architecture simultaneously supports both teamwork within a company and collaboration with external partners and sub-contractors. First pilot applications with customers have been successfully implemented and as of January 2010, the new solution will be generally available.
With its Workspaces concept, CONTACT follows a decisively different approach to conventional, centrally organized ERP and PLM systems. These are considered by many CAD users as being too complex, cumbersome, and hardly user-friendly – with the effect that work-in-progress is kept too long in local storage and is thus not accessible for Concurrent Engineering purposes. Workspaces solve this contradiction between designer’s demands for creative freedom and company’s need for complete and validated data. Integrated with leading CAD systems, the Workspace Manager provides a universal interface with ultimate intuitive and supportive features to synchronize then central repository with user’s local workspaces.
“Depending in the domain and task, users have special and individual requirements. A system’s architecture and the tools based on it must reflect this division of labour in a company. Workspaces allow engineers and teams to organize themselves around their individual needs. Only that warrants satisfied users and only satisfied users ensure high data quality and safe processes” emphasizes Karl Heinz Zachries, managing director of CONTACT Software GmbH.
The open Workspaces architecture at the same time offers exceptional functions supportive to collaboration with partners and sub-contractors. It offers companies with intensively distributed engineering supply chains a key to simple, smooth product data exchange. Here, the focus is on Workspaces in its function as product data container, to be flexibly utilized by the companies according to their specific requirements: as a simple content container, in conjunction with Workspace Manager, or connected to their own PLM and ERP system. Collaboration with third-party companies means simply synchronizing the related Workspaces contents. Again, the open architecture of Workspaces allows varying procedures, to be applied according to demand: Data exchange via e-mail, EDI, peer-to-peer networks, or the use of a portal or an SOA Access Point of the central PLM backbone. Users thereby benefit from dedicated functions based on the open workspaces structure. For example, a delta update will recognize already known models and versions and will assist the user – upon request – in follow-up tasks such as creating a new version within the own PLM system.
„Our Workspaces architecture addresses how developers of complex products can be optimally supported. The puppet-on-a-string picture in the guise of a PLM system will fail”, vows Karl Heinz Zachries. “Designers need easy-to-use, intelligent tools to enhance and not to inhibit their ability to innovative”.
More about features, use cases and benefits of CONTACT workspaces at www.contact.de/pdm-plm-products/workspaces.
