CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
29 April 2008
Events News
ProSTEP iViP Symposium - Full to the Brim: with Topics, Participants and Ideas
A record high in terms of participants posted the eleventh ProSTEP iViP Symposium themed “Vitality of Standards – Service Orientation for Dynamic Enterprises“ on April 9 and 10, 2008 in Berlin. Extending the program, offering theme sessions for the first time on selected topics as e.g. security or mechatronic and opening up to other departments and industry segments was what contributed to this success. Main sponsors were Microsoft and Continental.
A week prior to the convention the registration site on the Internet announced: Fully booked! More than 450 participants – an increase of 25 percent – from 146 companies and organizations in 16 countries came and attended all in all 43 lectures –32 last year– in three parallel sessions. The four workshops on topics like service oriented architecture (SOA) or requirements management were used intensively. The number of IT vendors and service providers in the accompanying exhibition jumped from 21 to 27.
Guus Dekkers, CIO of the Automotive Divisions at Continental, reported in his keynote first-hand on one of the biggest mergers in the automotive supply industry which in 2007 made of Siemens VDO and Continental one group with a business volume of more than 25 billions Euro and 140,000 employees. Guus Dekkers summed up aptly what is preoccupying the entire industry and is concerning almost anybody directly or indirectly: „50 percent of the savings and synergy effects expected after mergers are only made possible by IT even though they cannot be attained exclusively that way. Yet 75 percent of the integration problems arising in context with a merger are pertaining to the integration of IT. “Guus Dekkers recommends: first harmonizing the data, then the functions. No religious wars. No monster project but rather less perfect, still effective interim solutions. Making sure that business can go on. At Continental the new structure was implemented in four months.
In his plenum lecture Santiago Cabezas, Mentor Graphics, took up the subject mechatronics and EES. Focus of his presentation was the project ECAD/MCAD Collaboration which was lead-managed by Mentor Graphics in the ProSTEP iViP Association three years ago and reached an important milestone by presenting the ProSTEP iViP Recommendation PSI 5. According to Santiago Cabezas first business applications based on PSI 5 will be available before the end of the year.
Whether the focus was on global mergers, distributed development networks or interdisciplinary cooperation – the question of how to master the wide spectrum of different processes dominated all the other topics regardless of their focus, areas of application and technical disciplines. Remarkably the focus was very seldom on CAD but rather on PDM and PLM. There were never so many solutions presented dealing with company-specific approaches to the description, organization and control of processes. And yet it was often the unfamiliar vision of another sector that supplied particularly inspiring ideas. Thus the topic ‘insight into other industries’ featuring the shipbuilding, aviation and medical engineering industries was well received.
The search for the next generation of technological and organisational approaches continues. The keynote of Alfred Katzenbach, Director of IT Management Research and Development at Daimler AG and Chairman of the ProSTEP iViP association was titled: ‘Engineering IT Goes SOA’. Alfred Katzenbach: “We are not working on a SOA-project at Daimler. We are formulating guidelines and are building a framework that future projects should adhere to. “The challenge is to confine ourselves to what is achievable. At Daimler we are planning work stations as ‘Common Engineering Clients’ for 15 different roles. Then an Engineering Service Bus delivers services, that provide input from different systems for each specific role, e.g. for a designer of an entire vehicle, to the work station. A first prototype will be rolled out before the end of 2008. Daimler is convinced that SOA is no hype but an important goal on a long way – with an initial step now taken.
The closing keynote speaker was Professor Martin Eigner, University of Kaiserslautern and Member of the ProSTEP iViP Board: The lead project ‚Integrated Virtual Product Creation (iViP)’ from 1998 – the Association owes part of its name to this project – virtually calls for a follow-up project. It should combine all approaches developed so far to a single comprehensive research approach. “ With this major project – working title is ‚Holistic Optimization of Product Creation (HOPE)’ – the usage of Engineering IT should be extended to small and medium sized companies: „The optimization of processes can only be successful if it doesn’t get stuck between large volume manufacturers and their smaller partners because there modern methods are not or hardly supported.“
Two great future perspectives prevailed in the end of the most successful symposium since the ProSTEP iViP Association was founded 15 years ago. The activities will grow into different directions: reaching new industries, addressing new subjects, finding and pursuing new approaches.
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