Engineering Supply Chain Data Exchange

International TechneGroup Incorporated
White Paper April, 2003
ENGINEERING SUPPLY CHAIN
DATA EXCHANGE John Gray Manager, Supply Chain Integration Solutions

1Contents
. Introduction
. Integration Challenges
. Proposed Solutions
. DEXcenterT
. Case Study: Xerox
. Conclusion
. About ITI

Introduction
As today's market place becomes more global, Original Equipment Manufacturers
(OEM) are faced with increased competition, shorter product life cycles, and higher
customer expectations all resulting in strong financial pressures. Organizations are
challenged to lower costs, improve quality, and bring better products to market faster.
Realizing they cannot accomplish this entirely within their own organization, OEMs are
outsourcing not just manufacturing but product development activities. Instead of
designing products internally and then contracting for manufacture, companies are
collaborating on product design.

This new collaborative engineering supply chain has raised the importance of
engineering product data and introduced complex requirements for product data
exchange. With frequent design changes, it is imperative that this valuable engineering
product data be exchanged quickly and efficiently while protecting corporate assets.
Many companies are struggling to achieve this seamless and effective data
interoperability. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reports that
the North American automotive industry alone wastes more than $1 billion each year
because of the inability to freely share and reuse product data. It is safe to say that this
represents only a tip of the global product data exchange iceberg. This paper will
examine some of the issues and ways that companies are solving them.

2Engineering Supply Chain Challenges
Lower costs, better quality, and faster time to market are all compelling reasons for
manufacturing companies to scrutinize and reform their engineering supply chain. With
a downturn in the economy, it seems every company has mandated reductions in costs
while raising quality and automating processes. In short, do more with less.
Engineering and manufacturing managers are told to become "model centric" to "reuse
product data" to "integrate engineering processes" and to "collaborate with partners and
suppliers". With such a broad task at hand, many struggle with where to begin.

Certainly the top challenge in collaborating between engineering organizations is the
multitude of CAD (Computer-Aided Design), CAM (Computer-Aided Manufacturing),
CAE (Computer-Aided Engineering) and other PLM (Product Lifecycle Management)
systems in use - each with its own proprietary and incompatible data formats. With
hundreds or thousands of partners, just keeping track of the requirements for each
partner and ensuring the right data is delivered to them is difficult. Frequent mistakes
result in repeated efforts.

Getting data to a partner in a usable form can also be problematic. Data must
frequently be translated to the compatible proprietary formats of the collaborative
partner. Whether direct translators or neutral formats such as IGES and STEP are
utilized, partners often report they spend substantial time and effort making CAD
models usable. Anytime a model is changed, errors and quality issues can be
introduced. Compounding the problem even more is the reluctance of suppliers to
share these problems with their customers. Instead they pass this non-value added
rework effort back to their customers as increased cost with longer delivery times.

Yet another substantial challenge is the actual data exchange process. When data
must be translated to another format, i... [download for more]