Today, more than 1,300 of the world’s most innovative enterprises have chosen PRO.FILE for their product data management and product lifecycle management needs.
CAD data management ensures safe, structured storage of complex information. It’s not just a flat filing system, but a sophisticated way to organize data, drawings, and information, making it safe instantly retrievable on demand throughout your organization. This allows your organization to efficiently handle technically sophisticated products and ensure a short time to market.
A fully integrated, bi-directional solution for MCAD and ECAD data management.
Making this knowledge available across the enterprise is one of the key pillars of CAD data management.
CAD models are the life’s blood of a manufacturing organization. CAD models and their related data and documents encapsulate a company’s product knowledge, design, and engineering expertise.
A company’s product knowledge lives in its CAD models and related data and documents. This design and engineering knowledge must be available throughout the enterprise. With the integration of CAD, ERP and PLM, employees from all departments can access all information with the proper permissions. All data, whether it is CAD models, drawings, manufacturing and assembly drawings, NC programs, item master data or documents with images and calculation tables, are securely stored in the PRO.FILE data vault. This ensures that all product data is always current, correct, and consistent across departmental lines.
Consistent bills of materials are the key to efficient manufacturing processes. Consequently, they should have the same structure in both the ERP system and the CAD/PDM/PLM ecosystem. Why? Because this prevents duplicates from being created in the first place. Automatically synchronizing item master data, bills of materials, and project data between the design and production departments and the business side is key. By maintaining consistency in their shared documents and ensuring automatic synchronization between the different IT systems, businesses can avoid re-work and eliminate unnecessary costs.
PRO.FILE, placed as the interface between both IT systems, automatically transfers the bills of materials from the CAD system to the ERP system. This makes it possible to automatically synchronize them – analogous to the item master data – if they are available in different forms as engineering BOMs, single-level BOMs and summarized BOMs. PRO.FILE becomes a central data hub that serves the master data management needs of development, procurement, production, sales, and service departments.
Maximizing Your ERP Investment
Maximize your investment in your ERP system by providing a seamless end-to-end solution
Ingtegrates with most major ERP solutions including…..
The multitude of product-centric documents created alongside manufacturing workflows are usually managed separately. For example, CAD data generated during product development is stored in a PDM or File system. Quality and Production data and documents have their own data management, as do CRM applications that facilitate communication with the customer. This disjointed experience is a sure-fire recipe for conflicts and disruptions.
If the answer is “Yes”, then you understand the challenges when product centric data and documents are stored in different silos across the organization.
Companies that have overcome these challenges have implemented a central product data backbone that provided them with a single source of truth for their product-centric data and documents. They also established a digital thread that connects all information that is relevant to product creation and product management and reflects their dependencies. This is the only way to digitally initiate workflows.
The people involved in the workflow no longer have to piece together their documents from various sources, but are automatically provided with complete and valid information as provided by the product data backbone.
Consistent item master data is essential to guaranteeing seamless and error-free workflows across the company. It also significantly cuts costs. PRO.FILE automatically transfers item master data from development to production planning, production, and purchasing.
Various studies in recent years have shown that the automatic
bidirectional transfer of item master data from the CAD system to the PDM/PLM and ERP system and vice-versa – along with the reduction of duplicates with purchased parts – allows companies to eliminate 10% of new parts every year. Multiply this by the average cost of maintaining a record in the ERP system (creating a supplier, assigning an item number and identifier and coordination processes) and add the costs generated by purchasing, incoming goods inspection, and invoicing – and you’ll understand just how much an average-sized manufacturing company can save.
The ability to quickly search both engineered and purchased parts can significantly reduce the number of new parts generated every year – and reduce product development time.
PRO.FILE empowers you to automate and control the tasks, processes, and projects specific to the application at hand, such as engineering change management.
Actual PLM processes are implemented using pre-configured application packages. They consist of templates, out-of-the-box workflows, cockpits, reports, and menus to operate the different processes. Best practice application packages can help you implement their specific workflows faster.
The ECR review and approval process – CMII Standards
Example ECR Best Practice Application Package based on the CMII Standard
In technical manufacturing environments, these pre-configured best practice application packages provide a great way to drive the evolution of PLM in the enterprise. They enable the end-to-end digitalization of business processes – starting from the simple CAD data management practices to the digital thread that connects ongoing operations with development and governs the feedback of information in a company’s business processes. By iteratively and gradually adding new IT processes through these pre-configured packages, companies are prevented from falling into the “customization trap” that leads to extensive software modifications.
New Product Introduction
Contract Management
