Data management for the smaller guys

Tom Shelley reports on Autodesk's latest offerings and philosophy for the PLM arena Autodesk is firmly targeting its data management offerings at the central elements of the product lifecycle management (PLM) process rather than attempting to cover the whole process. "PLM's been around for a while but has been targeted at the very top of the food chain", declared Robert "Buzz" Kross, the company's vice president of its manufacturing solutions division at a press conference in Prague. "Many companies are in the middle of a four year implementation." Firmly targeting medium sized tier 2 and tier 3 type companies as opposed to automotive majors and aerospace, Kross announced that the company would be concentrating on improving data management in engineering and product design, change management and release to manufacturing, and sourcing and supplier collaboration. To do this, the firm is offering two products. Andrew Anagnost, senior director product management, explained that any customer who buys Inventor, Inventor Professional, AutoCAD Mechanical or AutoCAD Electrical gets Autodesk Vault as part of the package, and the Vault client is available to plain AutoCAD users on subscription. Users have to have a seat of AIS, AIP, ACM or ACE to get the server - one seat is all they need. He told Eureka that, "As customers move from 2D to 3D, they realise they have a data management problem and this creates a need for the Vault even if they did not use it before." This process could take some time since there are still only about 150,000 Inventor users as opposed to around 2 million AutoCAD licences. A greater incentive to change could be increased competitiveness in the increasingly global marketplace and in Anagnost's words, "Customers realising that mistakes can cost them the business." When surveyed, he told Eureka that 80% of the company's customers said that data management was important, but 89% said that they did not have a data management system. 70% said they relied on either Excel or Windows folders, but around 50% said they were considering buying a dedicated data management system within the next 24 months. Excel is of course a powerful tool, and widely used to manage configurations, but apart from using its 'Protect and share facilities', there is no way it can be used for engineering change management or managing the release of drawings. Autodesk Productstream is the BOM and engineering change management tool from Autodesk which includes an automatic publishing capability producing Streamline .DWF files, which are view only, so they can safely be sent outside to external suppliers and customers and received back through firewalls. Prices for Productstream are said to range from "A few hundred dollars per seat to $1500, depending on licence type". The latest versions coming on offer are Vault 4 and Productstream 4 (There will be no Productstream 3) both of which will apparently include notification facilities to let users know changes have occurred. Anagnost told us, "Notification is a critical part of making this work. We have to make it simple to respond. Most users are on information overload." As to exactly what form the notification will take, we, like the users, will have to wait and see. Autodesk Pointers * Autodesk is aiming its data management products at the core design, sourcing, collaboration and change management segments of the PLM process * The new offerings are Autodesk Vault 4 and Autodesk Productstream 4, which will both include a change notification facility