Unifying Data for Manufacturing and Engineering Companies
Manufacturing and/or engineering organizations are continuously challenged to improve time-to-market and reduce costs while delivering leading-edge innovation and exceeding quality expectations. Contributing to these initiatives are the various product lifecycle applications used to create, store, manage and access part and product data:
- Computer Aided Design (CAD)
- Electronic Content Management (ECM)
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
- Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)
Even with a wealth of technology and solution advancements, a major underlying issue remains: that of finding and leveraging disconnected part and product information that exists across the enterprise.
As products and related data progress through lifecycles, different applications are used to treat different or overlapping components of data for the same product. Moreover, part data and information are represented in the form of specifications, drawings, bills of materials, field service manuals, and so on. Users are often unable to answer simple questions such as:
- "In which documents and/or drawings was this product referenced?"
- "If we make this change, what other items do we need to update?"
- "What other designs are related to what I am doing now?"
- "What suppliers have previously spec'd something like this?"
Answering these questions quickly and accurately will no doubt improve such processes as new part introductions, part and design reuse, management of change, and overall design, manufacturing and quality.
Partrieve responds to these challenges by providing a browser-based "single point of access" to data residing in various documents and drawings as well as structured content maintained in enterprise applications.
Partrieve embraces a diverse range of applications as they exist in their current form. This "as-is" approach permits users to find parts and its related data and usage, regardless of where data exists. There is no need to convert, scrub, data warehouse, or create enterprise application integration (EAI) structures. Moreover, since Partrieve's automatically classifies and groups data, there is no need to go through the exercise of pre-organizing data.
Underlying the Partrieve solution are various off-the-shelf application connectors, an "adaptive taxonomy mapping" (ATM) module, and use of proven enterprise search technology. The ATM "normalizes' data accessed from the various linked applications. Rather than reinvent search functionality, Partrieve has tightly integrated and leveraged mature enterprise search-engine technology. Without question, performance and scalability are at the very core of what Partrieve delivers.
Partrieve has been designed from the ground up for performance and scalability. The SOA-based architecture is highly modular, allowing the solution to be deployed in a flexible manner that exploits maximum benefit from available system resources.
Moreover, we have sought to make Partrieve a "transparent" solution. Finding information on the Internet with various commercial search solutions has become a common and nearly ubiquitous activity. Likewise, Partrieve seeks to accomplish the same role within the enterprise. Find data quickly. Act on it. And, simply be more productive.