CONTACT wins Turkish Top 500 company

Alloy wheel specialist CMS will be managed together with project partner KPEC

Bremen, 18 May 2011 – CONTACT Software GmbH has acquired one of Turkey's Top 500 companies and one of Europe's leading manufacturers of alloy wheels as a new customer. CMS AG employs a staff of more than 1,150 people and will produce more than 4.75 million wheel rims in 2011, approximately 95 percent of which will be exported abroad. In Izmir, the first new applications for the CIM DATABASE Product Data and Product Lifecycle Management (PDM/PLM) are being put into productive operation. The focus of the starting phase will be the project management and the administration of the Catia V5 data and documents for the development projects. In further steps support for the entire product development process will be put in focus to sustain the growth of the of the enterprise group.

A Turkish application environment comprising CIM DATABASE 2.9.8 has been implemented on the Microsoft SQL server for CMS. CONTACT completed the system´s launch in cooperation with its project partner KPEC: an engineering service provider, who specialises in the automotive industry and who also has an engineering bureau in Turkey, in addition to various other company sites. Newly available application components include CONTACT Workspaces for collaborative product development and CAD data management, CIM DATABASE OfficeLink, and a comprehensive project management structure with templates, tasks, checklists, quality gates etc., as well as the relevant roles and rights for access and editing. CMS will further implement the CIM DATABASE PowerReports to perform various tasks, in particular the risk evaluation of the entire project portfolio.

By using the Scrum process model in the implementation of the company-specific requirements, the PLM team has applied a method that is well-known in agile software development. "Taking the preconfigured CIM DATABASE standards as an example, you get a really good impression of all the possible options", explains CMS project leader, Umut Ilikkan. "For this reason, we didn't draw up a detailed specification. Instead we worked step by step, in close cooperation with CONTACT, to decide how to best develop our own solution. This approach also helped to noticeably expedite the development process". In general, such methods also tend to increase the rate of user acceptance; in the case of CMS, this is demonstrated by the fact that the new system has been given its own name: EFES [1].

"To ensure the innovative ability of CMS, it is of vital importance to us that our designers and engineers receive optimum support in their work", emphasises Ali Öktem, Leader of Research & Development for the consortium. "However, with the creation of EFES, we have developed the basis for a Product Lifecycle Management system that could be of equal benefit to other core divisions within the company".

The next CIM DATABASE deployment phase will provide additional users with access to the advantages of the new PDM/PLM platform. This stage will involve the automatic export of neutral document formats based on CONTACT's Document Conversion Server DCS, as well as support for 3D Viewing of CAD models. The solution will then be rolled out to all employees of the company's core divisions: Development, Project Management, Quality Assurance, Planning, Sales and Procurement.

[1] Ephesus (Turkish Efes) was one of the largest and most important cities of the Roman Empire and the seat of the proconsul. The archaeological site, which lies on the Aegean Sea and is located 70 km south of Izmir, is today one of Turkey's main tourist attractions.