| Abstract: | PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 offers features in the area of BOM management designed to improve the productivity of global design teams. |
On the heels of releasing a major upgrade to its SolidWorks CAD platform this summer, SolidWorks Corp. tended to its Product Data Management (PDM) line, rolling out a new version of its high-end offering that aims to improve the productivity of global design teams.
Headlining the new PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 upgrade are a host of new features relating to bill of materials (BOM) management, as well as improved replication across multiple sites, data connectivity enhancements, and performance boosts, among other capabilities.
SolidWorks executives said the 2008 release — the second major upgrade to the platform since the company's May 2006 acquisition of the Conisio PDM tool from Swedish developer CS Scandinavia AB — would position PDMWorks Enterprise more competitively in the PDM arena, where SolidWorks has lagged companies such as PTC and Dassault.
"We're not known for PDM, because we're relatively early in the game offering a powerful PDM tool," acknowledged Rich Allen, SolidWorks' product manager for PDM products, in an interview with Managing Automation. "With the acquisition of Conisio and this release, we aim to be a more significant player, if not the mainstream player for SolidWorks files," he said, adding that PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 supports multiple CAD file formats. In addition to PDMWorks Enterprise, SolidWorks offers PDMWorks Workgroup, embedded in the SolidWorks CAD tool, which provides less-sophisticated PDM capabilities for smaller installations.
Central to the new PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 release, which is designed to help global engineering organizations better collaborate, leverage existing designs, and audit documents with SolidWorks' noted ease of use, are new BOM management features. Specifically, PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 has been enhanced to allow engineering to better share information with other functions, such as manufacturing, quality assurance, and purchasing, officials said. For example, with the new release, organizations working on an assembly can now customize BOMs for individual departments, routing them for approvals and allowing multiple reviewers to edit them without having to install SolidWorks software. In addition, BOMs can now include units of measure for non-modeled items, such as glue, and display part thumbnails when a user mouses over an item listed in the BOM, a feature similar to one found in the SolidWorks 2008 CAD tool.
"Customers have been asking for more power and control in managing BOMs because it seems to be one of most important methods of communicating between engineering and different departments," Allen said.
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The upgrade also features more powerful replication of design files across distributed organizations, a capability that lends itself to global collaboration. Optionally, users can replicate only the latest version of the design files for faster, less processing-intensive downloads. New search capabilities help engineers more easily find the current versions of any part or project, eliminating errors.
Also included in the release are out-of-the-box tools for simplifying data connectivity to other enterprise systems, including manufacturing resource planning (MRP) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), via XML files. Improved data connectivity reduces time and error associated with duplicative manual entry and helps automate workflows, the company said. For example, with these new features, a design engineer could send an XML-formatted BOM to an ERP system, automatically initiating ordering, purchasing, approval, and manufacturing planning upon release of the drawing. Likewise, PDMWorks Enterprise 2008 can import data through that same process, officials noted.
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