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e-Business Transformation to a Manufacturing Digital Enterprise

Pat Toole, Jr., IBM General Manager, Product Design Management
Joel Lemke, Chief Executive Officer, ENOVIA Corp.

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The Digital Manufacturing Enterprise

A digital manufacturing enterprise is a company that uses information technologies and the Internet, intranets or extranets and other technologies to conceive, design, build, market and sell the most innovative, highest quality, most attractive products to its customers. Within a digital enterprise, information becomes knowledge, supporting a product's entire life cycle, including design, development, procurement, tooling, engineering steps, even maintenance and sales/marketing procedures. This knowledge is available to all participants in the product development cycle. All product designs and process steps are considered and evaluated in a concurrent effort that involves every discipline in the entire company – not just the designers or plant operators. A digital enterprise uses the product creation process for competitive advantage. The product creation process facilitates innovation by encouraging designers and engineers to leverage the digital information available throughout the enterprise to create new, high quality products demanded by new and existing markets.

To summarize, a digital manufacturing enterprise capitalizes on opportunities in four areas:

Digitization: A digital enterprise turns digital information into knowledge by interpreting and utilizing information available throughout the product development process. Designers can understand manufacturability issues; manufacturing engineers can visualize the design early in the process; engineers can predict product performance through virtual simulation studies; marketing, sales and media relations staff can assess and make recommendations that will help promote the product, increase sales and win customer acceptance.

Capital utilization: A digital enterprise creates best practices and leverages them across the entire enterprise. It captures and re-uses product and people knowledge to ensure continual product excellence, quality improvements, and cost reductions. Design "shortcuts" and "tips", and more efficient manufacturing steps can be shared throughout the corporation.

Globalization: A digital enterprise leverages the opportunities of globalization for its supply chain or distribution needs. It utilizes advanced communications technologies including the Internet to distribute the product development process throughout multiple companies, each of which excels at its particular function.

Competition: A digital enterprise uses its product creation process as a competitive weapon. While striving for operational efficiencies, it also realizes the impact that early design decisions have on the corporate bottom line, and structures its design process to optimize product development issues, including product quality, time to market, price, and market demand.

ENOVIA Technology – Enabling the Digital Manufacturing Enterprise

For 18 years IBM and Dassault Systemes have had a strategic relationship, with IBM marketing, selling and servicing Dassault's leading-edge CAD/CAM/CAE software. More recently, the two companies jointly evolved and refined the concept of a digital enterprise for manufacturing companies. The vision calls for a product to be developed, simulated, manufactured and maintained in digital form, entirely in the computer throughout its life cycle. This vision anticipated that a company's product creation process could become its strategic competitive weapon.

A crucial enabling technology to support this digital manufacturing enterprise vision comes from the ENOVIA Corporation, a Dassault Systemes subsidiary. The ENOVIA Corporation was created in 1998 by Dassault Systemes with the express purpose of delivering enterprise capabilities that form the core of the "Digital Enterprise" for manufacturers.

The ENOVIA Solution fuels innovation by providing to all disciplines within the product development process the proper context in which to exploit product information. There are five technology foundations supporting the ENOVIA Digital Enterprise solution:

Digital Enterprise Portal: The ENOVIA Portal solutions allow organizations to create an information portal around their internal or extended operations. Such a portal can be implemented around a specific product’s development, to support a team or organization within the enterprise or for the enterprise as a whole.

The functionality delivered within the portal targets two key capabilities. The first is to provide rapid and flexible deployment. This includes quickly installing, configuring and propagating the application throughout an enterprise, rapidly building custom indexes and links to access a variety of internal applications and databases. The second key capability to support decision making and communication processes. The ENOVIA Portal provides an integrated suite of information manipulation tools such as high to low end 3-D graphic simulation and synthesis applications, web publishing, markup and delivery tools.

Enterprise Life Cycle Applications: ENOVIA Life Cycle Applications implement the methodologies that constitute the "Digital Enterprise". These are best of breed product development methodologies where digital product definitions, associated processes and resources are seamlessly integrated in a manner that promotes iteration, optimization and simulation throughout their life. These methodologies are supported by dedicated functionality tailored for each significant stage of a product’s evolution. This functionality captures a product’s mission, specification and intent. There is capability to define, track, evolve and communicate the conceptual, functional and detail development of a product and the means and methods to simulate, analyze, test, release, produce and maintain it. There is also functionality to integrate multiple individuals, teams, disciplines, organizations and sites into collaborative or segregated communities.

Enterprise Product Process and Resource (PPR) Hub: The PPR Hub is the information backbone for the "Digital Enterprise". The PPR Hub provides a unique information management template that integrates information used to define products, manufacturing and maintenance processes, manufacturing and maintenance resources, specifications and product support deliverables along with other core data that comprise the product life cycle data model. The PPR Hub integrates the associated applications, data models and data elements that constitute or are produced by ENOVIA Life Cycle Applications.

Digital Enterprise Architecture: The ENOVIA Enterprise Architecture addresses the flexibility and scalability required to deploy the "Digital Enterprise" within and beyond the confines of the enterprise. Communication methods, interfaces and other core components of the ENOVIA Enterprise Architecture are based on standards. As an example, ENOVIA applications are developed on an internal data model written in EXPRESS, the ISO standard information modeling language developed as the core of the STEP standard. Direct implementation and utilization of standards minimize the total cost of ownership as it addresses deployment as well as the maintenance of the solution and the data it produces.

Rapid Application Development Environment (RADE): The ENOVIA Rapid Application Development Environment supports rapid and efficient integration to a large variety of applications and systems that will participate in the product creation environment. It allows customers to extend upon native ENOVIA Life Cycle Applications, further enhancing the flexibility and completeness of the integration facilities. This combined capability also ensures forward compatibility from past to future releases of the ENOVIA Digital Enterprise Solutions.

IBM Support – Business Transformation and Services

Software alone, no matter how good, is rarely enough to help a manufacturer become a digital enterprise. Almost always, it takes implementation help and experienced consultants well versed in transforming business processes and strategies to help guide company executives. For example, IBM's technical experts and consultants understand ENOVIA and can implement it in the easiest, most effective manner. These experts view any transformation into a digital enterprise as involving three phases: Internet awareness and web presence, piloting access to core systems and the third and most important, integrating and, if necessary, transforming key processes and applications across the business both internally and externally so they run in a scaleable, available and safe environment.

IBM / Dassault Systemes International Competency Center

To aid the digital enterprise implementation process, IBM Corporation and Dassault Systèmes created the IBM / Dassault Systèmes International Competency Center (IDSICC) located at Dassault Systèmes headquarters in Suresnes, France, with a Geographic Competency Center located in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA. It is the ninth ICC operated by IBM’s Solution Developer Marketing organization and is staffed by a team of highly skilled developers from both IBM and Dassault Systèmes. All have extensive hands-on experience with implementing IBM and Dassault Systèmes Digital Enterprise solutions for customers.

The center’s mission is to provide worldwide technical experience and comprehensive Digital Enterprise system recommendations to customers as well as to IBMers and IBM business partners to address every phase of development from research to implementation and production.

A vital task of the competency center will be the integration of key IBM e-business technologies to implement the Digital Enterprise vision. The center will deliver custom sizing recommendations for IBM’s leading RS/6000, IntelliStation and Netfinity workstations and servers as well as integration of strategic e-business middleware and systems management software such as; Lotus, DFS, DB2 UDB, MQseries, WebSphere, ADSM and Tivoli. Skilled engineers from each of these IBM labs are part of the core staff within the center working with customers to provide integration support and total enterprise solution implementation.

The competency center builds on the IBM / Dassault Systèmes partnership and demonstrates IBM’s commitment to deliver leading-edge engineering solutions. The center brings together the vast technical resources of IBM and Dassault Systèmes and provides the knowledge and experience customers need for faster, more cost-effective implementations. Together the combined resources improve the customer’s time-to-benefit and increase the value of their IBM Engineering Solutions built around Dassault Systemes’ Digital Enterprise-enabling CATIA, CATweb and ENOVIA product lines. For more information, visit www.developer.ibm.com/welcome/icc/dassault.html

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