Product data for smart management

Tom Shelley reports on latest enhancements to what continue to be the UK's favourite CAD software packages Developments in and around the UK's most widely used suites of engineering CAD software appear to be particularly concentrating on the smoother handling of centralised data. This is despite the fact that most design offices still make little or no organised effort to keep proper track of who is working on what part of a design, which version it has got to, and when and where it might have been changed and by whom. "70 per cent of our customers use no data control at all," commented Dr Andrew Anagnost, senior director product management for Autodesk Manufacturing Solutions Division at a recent seminar for a small group of journalists. Bill Schmitt, product line director data management, commented, "Even customers who have bought big PDM systems often don't have very good integration with different Autodesk products." Autodesk's approach is to try to make data management - the company says it is following a deliberate path of avoiding the use of acronyms such as EDM, PDM or PLM - a lot easier and more closely connected to the different engineering applications it produces. Dr Anagnost said that a "Common Vault" is soon to be included in all manufacturing products - AutoCAD Mechanical, AutoCAD Electrical and Autodesk Inventor and functionality will subsequently be continuously expanded and enhanced. Bill Schmitt told those present that the facility is presently limited to check in and check out, version control and data re-use by different Autodesk applications. In future, it will allow non CAD access, provide release and engineering change order management plus a link to ERP. In July, the company will introduce an API to interface to other applications based on Microsoft's .net platform. The vault is built on a partial Microsoft SQL database limited to 2GB of metadata, suitable for up to 10 or 20 users. Customers will be able to upgrade to full SQL quite easily if they wish to. "Autodesk Streamline and .DWF collaboration completes the solution" Schmitt concluded. An extension of the .DWF facility provisionally called DWFM will have an XML extension to provide web collaboration tools that will include bills of materials (BOMs) as well as drawings and 3D models. Based on the PDX data exchange standard originally developed for electronic industries, this is presently defined, but not published, but should begin to be rolled out to customers later in the year. Autodesk Pointers * New 'Common Vault' will improve data re-use within the AutoCad Mechanical/AutoCad Electrical/Inventor environment. * The facility is to be considerably extended to embrace most of the functionality currently associated with PDM systems, although Autodesk does not like to use this acronym * New smart facilities are being added to Autodesk software, particularly Inventor, which is expected to enter the knowledge based engineering arena some time in 2005