OSRAM Continental is headquartered in Munich and maintains a presence in nine countries worldwide. With a workforce of 1,500, the joint venture develops, manufactures and markets solutions for front and rear lights, individually controllable interior lighting, and innovative projection systems that provide greater driving safety and comfort. Product development is distributed across Europe, America and Asia. In line with its general cloud strategy, the company decided to use OpenDXM GlobalX from the cloud because the SaaS solution could be implemented globally very quickly. All the locations access the highly secure cloud infrastructure provided by the DARZ data center in Darmstadt directly via the Internet.
OpenDXM GlobalX is a SaaS solution with multi-client capability. However, OSRAM Continental uses it as a single-tenant application to be able to exchange large amounts of CAD data with automotive OEMs via the OFTP2 protocol. PROSTEP therefore integrated an external OFTP application, which can only be used in combination with a private cloud or a separate instance of the application, in the data exchange service for the customer. The PLM experts also expanded the cloud application to allow the customer to freely define the size of the WebSpaces for individual users and groups of users within the scope of the overall storage quota.
Approximately 250 internal and almost 100 external users are currently registered as exchange partners at OSRAM Continental. In addition to the engineers from R&D, employees from other departments are also sending and receiving sensitive data securely via the cloud platform. All key data exchange functions are available to them in an intuitive HTML5-based web interface, which is easy to use even for occasional users. Employees who like working with MS Outlook and use it extensively can initiate data exchange directly from their e-mail program.
As Catalina Man, Team Lead IT Operations at OSRAM Contintental, says, the SaaS solution can be scaled up or down depending on the number of users. She and her team are responsible for providing support to OpenDXM GlobalX users at OSRAM Continental, among other things. "The key advantage of the solution is its flexibility, which makes it possible to respond rapidly to new requirements. PROSTEP implements these requirements very quickly, which is crucial to the success of our collaboration."
