CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
8 August 2004
Product News
KollabNet Introduces Knowledge-Capture and Impact-Analysis Add-Ins for MS Office, CAD, PDM and Others
KollabNet now comes with "add-in" toolbars for Microsoft Office, CAD, PDM and other applications that allow impact analysis and the capturing of design rationale. "Now you can grab a requirement in Word or Excel or a CAD program and find out exactly what else will be affected if you change it, or why it was changed by others," said Dr. Joel Orr, KollabNet's VP of business development. "This improvement saves even more time for KollabNet users, streamlining their design process. Of course, shortened design time and less-obtrusive impact analysis translate quickly into fewer errors and higher profits."
Click on any KnowledgeBlock in a DesignMap, select "Who do I affect?", and immediately see the downstream objects that would be affected by a change to the current block. Similarly, select "Who affects me?", and have all the KnowledgeBlocks whose changes affect the current KnowledgeBlock. "One of the many powerful applications of this feature: It increases the efficiency of design-review meetings tremendously," says Orr. "When you can actually find out in real time what impact a change will have, you can make decisions very quickly-and reduce the number of meetings required to complete a design. That's a relief to everyone-engineers don't like meetings!"
"But even more significantly," continues Orr, "KollabNet enables you to discover design errors earlier, rather than later-long before they necessitate a product recall or stopping an assembly line. That means savings of many thousands of dollars."
The new add-ins ensure that impact analysis and rationale capture are only a click away, at any point in the design process. Now anyone involved in the design process-even those who don't have access to a particular application, such as CAD or PDM-can get at all the design information. This means impact analysis will be performed more frequently by design-team members, and they will go down fewer "dead ends" in the design process.
For more information, go to http://www.kollabnet.com/ . To get your questions answered, or to schedule a demo or a pilot project, call 717-560-9580 or write info@kollabnet.com
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