Memberships & Subscriptions for Industrial Users

CIMdata PLM Community

The CIMdata PLM Community provides a valuable membership to our global support program for industrial companies that want to maximize the benefits they receive from Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). CIMdata has assembled a group of leading industrial companies into a consortium to help collectively address current PLM–related challenges by identifying the top PLM market issues to be researched collaboratively with CIMdata. This membership enables your organization to make more informed business decisions by providing timely and valuable information, insights and advice, while networking with companies with similar challenges about PLM and its use within industry. Annual membership in this program facilitates an ongoing working relationship with CIMdata that strengthens and enhances the value of our support for your team. The CIMdata PLM Community provides:

• Access to ongoing research, analyses, insights, and advice.
• Participation in the identification of the top industry–specific PLM topic areas that will direct related CIMdata research.
• Participation in CIMdata PLM Certificate programs at reduced rates.
• Access to specific CIMdata PLM Knowledge Council deliverables.
• Current information on industry news and trends.
• Access to CIMdata’s PLM experts.
• An interactive and collaborative environment for accessing and sharing PLM related processes and technology–oriented best practices used by similar industrial participants.
• Other benefits from participating in the CIMdata–sponsored global PLM Community, an active group that includes both leading industrial companies and providers of PLM solutions from around the world.

Industrial Consortium Membership

CIMdata has assembled a group of leading industrial companies into a consortium to help collectively address current PLM–related challenges by identifying the top PLM market issues to be researched collaboratively with CIMdata. This membership enables your organization to make more informed business decisions by providing timely and valuable information, insights and advice, while networking with companies with similar challenges about PLM and its use within industry. Annual membership in this program facilitates an ongoing working relationship with CIMdata that strengthens and enhances the value of our support for your team.

The CIMdata PLM Industry Consortium membership provides ongoing, subscription–based research and analyses delivered through reports, interactive work sessions and collaborative meetings, and remote consultations with CIMdata experts. Other Key Benefits can include:

• Common Practices & Issues: Enabling cross–industry PLM–related best practice collaboration with organizations from around the world
• Special Initiatives: Focusing on initiatives important to the group, such as benchmarking, process re–engineering, technology implementation, information sharing, and lessons learned analysis.
• CIMdatas Research: Improving the capacity and expertise of the members by providing timely information from CIMdata’s PLM Community and targeted research topics defined by the Consortium members.
• Larger Voice: Increasing the ability to advocate requirements for the solution providers through Consortium collaboration.
• Networking: Enhancing professional networking, education, and executive peer–to–peer support.
• Resource Sharing: Encouraging the sharing of resources among members (including content, technology, expertise, and funding.)

CIMdata PLM Knowledge Council Membership

CIMdata’s PLM Knowledge Councils focus on in-depth research defining best practices for topics of interest to industrial companies who use PLM to support their ongoing product development business strategies and PLM solution providers interested in understanding and setting their PLM strategies and directions. The resulting research is directed at both industrial organizations and PLM solution providers. It emphasizes strategic as well as practical, tactical options for companies to follow as they further adopt Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). CIMdata currently offers five PLM Knowledge Councils. Council topics are developed from CIMdata’s PLM Community as technology evolves and industry dictates.

Design Creation & Collaboration Knowledge Council

The Design Creation & Collaboration Knowledge Council (DC&C Council) represents the authoritative industry source for the architecture and implementation of digital product modeling and design collaboration technologies, and for their reconciliation in product engineering and manufacturing process planning. Numerous organizations, many of them among the world’s largest manufacturing companies, and an extensive range of PLM solution providers, collaborate with us as equal partners to define an evolving engineering framework for PLM.

The DC&C framework accelerates decision making and improves reliability across the critical engineering processes of product design and modeling, analysis, collaboration, visualization, knowledge engineering, and manufacturing process development. These disciplines serve as springboards for companies to gain competitive advantage. The DC&C Council program applies a structured methodology to the evaluation of new products and processes and to evaluating current projects in client organizations. The DC&C advisory service is designed to help client organizations harness the power of technology and to achieve its bottom-line benefits.

Digital Manufacturing Knowledge Council

While PLM and PDM initiatives have made explosive progress with product development functions, early and full integration with manufacturing has badly lagged. Yet the compounding complexity of today’s production processes raises many challenges for simplifying and streamlining manufacturing processes. The focus of the Digital Manufacturing Knowledge Council is targeted at the entire end-to-end process of designing and building a product.

An important deliverable of the Digital Manufacturing Knowledge Council, the Digital Manufacturing Scorecard captures input from industry leaders and ranks them across broad categories. Participants include high-, medium-, and low-volume producers from the consumer goods and food processing industry, the automotive sector, industrial machinery and other industry segments.

The Digital Manufacturing scorecard seeks to establish a framework of common terminology for integration and optimization of the diverse activities that fragment manufacturing production and design. Complementing that effort, the Electronics Integration Scorecard engages representatives across broad industries since electronic controls are a large part of a wide range of modern products. By implementing the best practices documented in these scorecards and related research reports, companies can transform their business by reducing costs and offering greater product variety.

PLM Integration Knowledge Council

The PLM Integration Knowledge Council (PLMI) researches and evaluates new capabilities and best practices in product and process management, highlights the best, most advanced uses of technologies, and provides a link between the IT infrastructure and the realization of business value. It provides guidance for defining an implementation road map; reducing product and process complexity; reducing cost; adapting product development processes; and harmonizing information and product architectures. The council also serves solution providers and systems integrators in assessing current market issues, in planning the development of successful products and services, and in designing sound product implementation plans.

Under the guidance of collaborative clients, PLMI’s current strategic analysis concentrates on the following critical issues:

• Requirements management
• Data modeling
• Implementation architectures and deployment models (on-premise, open source, cloud)
• PLM in a combined discrete and process product environment
• PLM to manufacturing planning (ERP integration issues)
• PLM to manufacturing execution (MES integration)
• BOM management
• Integration with other solutions

A PLMI Scorecard will guide companies to assess their current PLM maturity and help guide their next steps including how different PLM-enabling solutions be integrated into the overall product development process.

Simulation & Analysis Knowledge Council

The Simulation & Analysis Knowledge Council (S&A Council) supports a simulation framework, an integrated environment that provides tools to manage access to applications, data, and computing resources, including high performance computing. The framework manages the complexity of multi-disciplinary system-level product performance, and integrates with other elements of the PLM environment, including product geometry, test, and requirements.

Knowledge capture, process automation, and data management are necessary elements to support simulation process and data reuse; traceability and quality control; and collaboration for system-level multi-disciplinary product design optimization. The low level of PLM maturity at many companies presents a significant problem in defining, deploying, and integrating a simulation framework.

The S&A Council focuses on simulation-driven design. A detailed scorecard on Simulation Data and Process Management (SDPM) assesses end-user requirements and best practices, analyzing data from users within leading-edge companies. A strategic, high level review and scorecard of the offerings by leading SDPM vendors is also continuously updated. Case studies provide guidance on strategies for the integration of simulation in the product development process, and for successful deployment to overcome organizational resistance to change. S&A also provides highly regarded forums for face-to-face discussions between users and providers.

The S&A Council is open to industrial and solution provider participants, through enterprise sponsorships or individual memberships. More than fifty end users have contributed consistently, and participated in both our PLM Road Map™ conferences and our Design/Simulation workshops over the last eight years.

Systems Engineering Knowledge Council

The Systems Engineering Knowledge Council gathers and benchmarks best practices for integrating data, processes, tools, and people across mechatronics and software domains. It is an industry-wide effort focused on cross-domain product development collaboration, which is necessary to integrate specialties that currently fragment the systems engineering disciplines of embedded controls, software, mechanical, and electronics engineering. Scorecards are provided for embedded software, electronics, and mechanical integration using a forced-ranking approach of maturity levels for a number of criteria. The specific criteria are established collaboratively with input from the Systems Engineering Knowledge Council. Several of the world’s largest manufacturing companies, and a range of PLM solution providers, participate in the effort to define and maintain criteria and priorities for continuous improvement in mechatronics integration.

The Embedded Software scorecard focuses on the integration of embedded software into mechatronics systems. The high level topics in the scorecard include:

• Defining the engineering problem in embedded software
• Collaboration and integration between people and processes
• Embedded software design and engineering solutions
• Embedded software verification and release
• Supporting tools and technologies

Overall, this scorecard successfully captures maturity levels for embedded software integration in mechatronics systems across companies and industries. While rankings generally align with expectations, wide variances appear across nearly all the detailed criteria. This implies that tremendous improvement opportunities exist for low-performing companies. By implementing the best practices documented in the report, companies can transform their business by offering greater product variety at lower cost, higher quality products, and products that meet customer requirements.

The Electronics Integration scorecard engages representatives across broad industries, since electronic controls are a large part of a wide range of modern products. The focus for 2012-13 is the integration of systems engineering methodologies with digital manufacturing for manufacturing design.