CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
20 April 2011
Events News
ProSTEP iViP Symposium 2011; The Network Promotes Open Systems and Supports Outstanding Scientists
Ulrich Ahle, with Siemens IT Solutions and Services and Member of the ProSTEP iViP Board of Management, was able to welcome over 450 participants from 13 nations at the 14th ProSTEP iViP Symposium 2011. With this number the event – which was sponsored by the BMW Group and CONTACT Software – matched the record results of 2008. Neither participants nor speakers shied away from hot-button issues, addressing for example the question of openness for PLM-Software. Also, the ProSTEP iViP Scientific Award was introduced at the symposium for the first time.
22 IT and service providers, and therewith 15 percent more than last year, used the accompanying exhibition for presenting their range of services. For two days 40 lectures were on the agenda at the BMW World in Munich, to be selected from three parallel sessions. Two topics became the central theme of the entire event: the complexity of the products and of the processes of their creation has apparently reached a peak level, making the search for simple and continuously usable solutions capable to be integrated as urgent as never before. Implementing the necessary openness of the systems applied is now becoming a matter of concrete steps.
Karl Erich Probst, Senior Vice President and CIO at the host BMW, held the opening speech of the Symposium concluding with a piece of information grabbing everybody’s attention. He announced the formation of a ProSTEP iViP project group, which will be working on the definition of a „Codex of PLM Openness“. The goal will be the manufacturers of standard software committing to a codex, giving high priority to real openness, interoperability and flexibility when it comes to system selection.
Karl-Heinz Zachries, founder and General Manager of CONTACT Software in Bremen, added in his keynote another piece of news pertaining to the same issue: due to an antitrust law appeal by CONTACT in Brussels, the EU commission became active and is now questioning users and hearing some providers to follow up on the accusation, that there might be attempts with unfair means to shield proprietary systems in such a way, that their data cannot be used and managed effectively by external systems. With the recently introduced concept of workspaces CONTACT itself has presented an approach that „allows for the chaos of creative product development in heterogeneous environments and manages the results effectively“, as stated by Karl-Heinz Zachries. A software module independent from the own PDM solution ensures in the background that the data is synchronized with the project. Agile, Teamcenter or SAP can be embedded into the synchronization.
Being open – for Prof. Dieter Spath, Director of the Fraunhofer IAO and Vice President of the German National Academy of Science and Engineering acatech, these words mean much more than just open systems: „If we want to continue playing an important role in the global market, we have to think out of the box. We need radical innovation with respect to products as well as business models! With everything we do“, says Prof. Dieter Spath, „we have to take along the people, which means continuing education just-in-time, not with a huge delay as was the case with using the Internet.“
Therewith the bridge was built to go into more detail under this year’s motto „Agile Collaboration & Managing Complexity“. The Scientific Track – successfully introduced last year – continued on the second day with five lecture blocks. The scientific part included in addition for the first time a BMBF block, presenting the final results of two successful projects sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF): ADiFa, a project that developed a user protocol for process harmonization in the Digital Factory, working closely with the ProSTEP iViP project „Digital Manufacturing“ (cf. PDJ 02/2010); and ISYPROM, providing solutions for model-based process and system design for the acceleration of innovation.
The Scientific Track started with a presentation by Dr. Florian Gerhardt, who is with BMW today and was the winner of the ProSTEP iViP Scientific Award granted for the first time during the evening event in the restaurant ‘Augustiner Keller’. This year the prize was offered inside the ProSTEP iViP Association for scientists of Member Group 3. As of next year the call for papers will be posted internationally. This way, the Association wants to support young scientists in the area of virtual product creation. Diploma or master theses will be endowed with 1.000 Euros, dissertations with 4.000 Euros. Anne Brinkmann received the prize for the master thesis, which she completed at the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology. Anne Brinkmann, who is now with Audi, says: “Especially in the area of Engineering, which is increasingly lacking experts, such an encouragement is very important.”
A glimpse into the future of IT application in the engineering of aircraft construction at Airbus permitted the closing keynote of the symposium. “80 percent of the IT environment is unnecessary” was the assessment made by the head of development Anders Romare, who – based on longtime experiences at Volvo - set himself the target to standardize within the next years to one single PLM platform. He closed the circle to the opening speeches by stating: “We will avoid proprietary solutions and formats and build upon openness and standards, where we can.”
The 15th ProSTEP iViP Symposium is scheduled for the second week of May 2012 and will be sponsored by Airbus and PTC.
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