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Autodesk targets CPD market in India
Autodesk is eyeing the emerging market for online collaborative
product development (CPD) services in India. Autodesk’s Streamline 5, launched
here recently, targets the manufacturing sector, which is looking for comprehensive
solutions to manage complexities in online collaboration and to cut costs in
travel, shipping of documents, etc. G Sankaranarayanan reports
For global organisations no one country
or location can be the sole manufacturing base. Right from the conception of
the product design to actual production, each stage involves contributions of
multiple teams from various locations at different time zones.
Leading Indian manufacturing organisations
that are adopting this fast-changing globalised manufacturing scenario have
started looking outside India for setting up their manufacturing bases—even
China seems to be a favourable manufacturing destination.
What the industry needs is a wise strategy
to take maximum advantage of the collaborative medium—the Internet—to enable
its product design team to manage the show and cut costs on account of travel,
shipment of design documents, etc.
Catering to this emerging need and pushing
the frontiers of collaborative technologies is the online collaborative product
development service (OCPDS).
It is estimated that globally around 70
percent of product design and manufacturing processes are outsourced. According
to Giga Group, effective online collaboration reduces errors in product development
and manufacturing process by 50 percent.
The Giga report says that besides the two
indisputable benefits of online collaboration—reduction in travel expenses and
time lost in meetings (in some cases to the extent of 80 percent) and reduction
of production and shipping of design documents (by over 90 percent)—the industry
is also waking up to the fact that online collaboration streamlines project
management and reduces engineering change-order processing time by 85 percent.
The solution
Catering to the manufacturing industry,
Streamline enables its users to store, manage, and share project documents over
the Internet, enhancing team productivity and reducing costs. The Autodesk Streamline
online work environment integrates a secure project hosting service with CAD-related
software, tools, and services from industry leaders. Through Streamline, users
can connect with the project team anytime, regardless of organisational or geographical
boundaries.
"Collaborative products and solutions are
simply those that allow users to unlock the value in their data. They are secure
and reliable services that make it easy for user groups to share personalised
design data across the extended manufacturing team in formats that are relevant
to each individual team member," says Peter Leihn, marketing manager for Autodesk’s
Manufacturing Solutions Division in South Asia Pacific. According to him, there
are the four needs that drive the market growth for collaborative product development
services—the need to reuse and pass on accurate date, to eliminate the cost
of recreating data, to meet shorter time-to-market pressures and to ensure all
parties are accessing the most up-to-date data.
Quoting a Gartner report, which estimates
that 80 percent of a product’s cost is built in during the design and engineering
stage, Leihn says, "This is a clear indicator that product development has immense
potential for improving a company’s profits."
Autodesk Streamline Version 4 released
in October 2002 was the first version offered in India. Version 5 is a new release
incorporating new features. Streamline enables everyone in the supply chain—engineers,
designers, managers, purchasers, vendors, and suppliers — to store, manage,
share, and access project information anytime, anywhere.
The benefits
Highlighting Streamline’s key benefits,
Leihn says that team collaboration is possible early in the design phase, which
reduces the probability for costly design revisions in the later stages of product
development.
"Product Data Management (PDM) vendors
such as Dassault Systemes, MatrixOne, and PTC require companies to re-engineer
processes and employ consultants before they can implement their data management
solutions. The Autodesk Streamline project hosting service is quick, easy, and
much less expensive to implement than solutions offered by PDM vendors," he
says. "Again, conferencing and collaboration tool providers such as CoCreate
and EDS (previously EAI) provide some capabilities similar to Autodesk Streamline;
however, these solutions are expensive and difficult to implement. In addition,
they usually require moving large sets of design data over the Internet rather
than streaming design data on demand," he adds.
Another significant advantage is Streamline’s
compatibility feature. It allows users to publish Autodesk Streamline from PTC’s
Pro/ENGINEER software, regardless of which authoring tool the industry uses.
Autodesk Vault tracks relationships between files in the vault regardless of
their type—Microsoft Word, Excel, AutoCad, FEA, CAM and more.
Hosting service
As Autodesk Streamline is a hosted Web-based
service all data is kept at the company’s secure facility. Therefore very little
re-engineering is required. Users need to download the software once and then
a standard Web browser is used from then on.
To ensure the security of data, Autodesk
hosts the data centre with high security and huge storage capacity for user
organisations on an optional basis.
Leihn says that Streamline is a secure
place to store and manage design and business data. "Every transmission of information
to or from a Streamline site is securely encrypted using secure sockets layer
(SSL) technology. Access to all the data stored on Streamline is password-protected
and administered by controls that are established at the account, project, and
document levels. The services use onsite and offsite redundant servers as well
as onsite, offsite backups. These redundant storage drives ensure better uptime
and access to data."
The important benefits of the hosting service
include enhanced permission control, including a matrix-like interface for assigning
permissions across entire folders and projects; faster login speed and the ability
to clone projects—including files and set up project templates.
"Autodesk sees security as the key to giving
our customers the confidence to trust us with their organisation’s confidential
data and intellectual property. We take this aspect of our service very seriously
and as a result have developed a multi-layer approach to security," says Leihn.
In an effort to extend Streamline’s reach
in a global economy, the entire product has been Unicode-enabled. From the authoring
tools to the back-end servers to the Streamline user interface, the digital
design data and intelligent content is in Unicode format, allowing the data
to be rendered properly in localised operation systems. Some of the benefits
of this feature are that the same data can be rendered in European and Chinese
languages.
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