Why 'collaborator' is still a dirty word

The design-technology industry will be unanimous about the biggest news of the last 12 months. It’s May’s takeover by UGS (formerly Unigraphics Solutions) parent EDS of Ford’s CAD supplier, SDRC (www.mcsolutions.co.uk/news/index.cfm). CAD users may take a different view, but UGS has been an industry pace-setter over the past five years, particularly since it took over Intergraph’s MCAD business in November 1997. A glance at UGS’ own milestones over the past year is a pretty accurate guide to the rest of the CAD industry’s ambitions: increasing reliance on web-based tools to add value to basic CAD functionality; ditto knowledge based tools; and the integration of Internet-based product data management (PDM) into CAD software. Allied to all these is the long overdue development of links between CAD/PDM and manufacturing business planning systems (ERP). And the whole thing, naturally, has spawned yet more initials for confused users to get mouths and minds around. The ERP-aware, web-enabled CAD-PDM combination is now variously referred to as product lifecycle management (PLM), product knowledge management (PKM) or collaborative product commerce (CPC). Niche players abound too. Sales at PDM-only developer MatrixOne have grown to equal the PDM sales of the big players. Alongside these developments there is evidence of a move towards the application service provider (ASP) model and the provision, by the main vendors and players, such as SmarTeam, of cross-departmental workflow tools. Analyst Cambashi also reports that CoCreate and OneSpace have pioneered collaborative design in real time – with supply chain partners able to carry out simultaneous design review – as well as supplied effective workflow and CAD tools. But step back a bit. The top-table CAD choice is now among four: UGS, Autodesk, Dassault/IBM and Parametric Technology (PTC). These billion-dollar-plus companies are utterly focussed on competition with each other for business with Boeing, General Motors and the like. Such customers have huge internal IT resources naturally inclined to take a strong interest in the expensively-developed, Internet-based gewgaws with which UGS and the rest bedeck their products in their desperation to look different. But, as Cambashi’s Nick Ballard told his company’s annual seminar in April (MCS, May 2001, page 22), none of these companies has shown any sign of “joined up sales and marketing” to SMEs. “One size does not fit all, and if joining up the design chain is to work it has to be implemented at the bottom as well, and that’s their biggest challenge. All the players are concentrating on top tiers. All of them have yet to work out how to bring down their technology into the bottom of this design chain.” Vendors should also be aware, he says, that those just becoming 2D CAD users are frightened off by talk about the Internet and collaboration: “It’s become a dialogue of the deaf. People are selling to people who don’t think they have a need.” Slow, slow take-up Cambashi’s is hardly a voice in the wilderness. Geoff Hall, a consultant with long design-technology experience, now runs PDM consultancy Tachbrook. Hall says UK product developers “have not exactly leapt at the IT technologies emerging in the last 10 years. The main problem is that the most comprehensive systems, whether they are for CAD, PDM or CPC (or any of the other TLAs that are really PDM) are just out of budget for the mainstream of UK companies. This is not just because product prices and implementation costs are too high, but the UK suffers from lack of awareness at the top, where budgets and strategies are set.” The result? “The medium sized companies are often forgoing PDM … for cheaper engineering document management products, bespoke CAD add-ons or nothing. Smaller companies are generally not entering into PDM, though many are using CAD management tools from their CAD supplier.” So UK companies aren’t getting the benefits of collaborative engineering? “Collaboration seems to remain a novelty in the UK, where it is becoming common practice in the US ... I think you still have to look hard to find technologies like CPC in action in the UK.” This may be about to change. Large companies are already putting their suppliers under pressure. Doug Brady, managing director of Leeds-based IT vendor Enabled Systems, says the PDM market “is going a bit like the CAD market went”, when big users told small companies they had to accept and provide CAD data in the same format as their customers’ systems. Brady, whose company has set up a free website to provide PDM cost evaluations, says he’s now receiving phone calls from smaller companies – those wanting fewer than 20 to 30 seats. But whereas large companies can afford PDM, many SMEs can’t even consider the 10-day evaluation process at £1,000 a day. “That’s before you make any decisions,” says Brady. “The idea of spending £10,000 just to examine it was a big problem for them.” And, just as it wasn’t possible for a supplier to install one Catia seat for the benefit of one big customer, they can’t install a single seat of SDRC’s Metaphase PDM suite either. Such users could follow the ASP route. CoCreate has pioneered ASP in PDM provision, but Brady notes that CoCreate too is seen as a supplier for large user numbers in big aerospace, automotive and electronics organisations. And, as Brady says, it isn’t easy to compare the cost of ASP against a software license. Users don’t always know how many transactions they need to be involved in. There are project-management alternatives like Buzzsaw.com but Brady says this is “still horrendously expensive.” And though project management tools can schedule events and provide document management, true PDM’s big advantage is version control, making sure every file being worked on is the latest version. Project management systems don’t deal with product structures or track that each part, and each of the parts affected by that part, are kept up to date. Crucially, they don’t allow searches by product classification, so that the number of duplicate parts can be reduced. Brady notes that the cost of adding even one part to an inventory list and holding it there has been put at $2,000. But there’s an even deeper problem than merely the cost of buying PDM. Ballard points out that different surveys show glaring disagreement over the extent of access to, and business use of, the Internet. Depending on whose axe is being ground, you can use one survey to prove conclusively that the UK leads the world in adopting Internet technology (office of the Government’s e-envoy) and another to prove, equally conclusively, that the UK lags by a significant margin (any IT vendor you care to name from Microsoft on). Ballard’s view is that the optimists count a company as ‘using the Internet’ if it has one PC connected to a modem and a phone line, even if anyone who wants to look on the Internet has to walk over to it and wait in a queue. The pessimists only count those who’ve got Internet access from their desks. But however you define collaboration or Internet access, says Ballard, those promoting collaborative design technology assume that all users, big and small, in all sectors have access to “the infrastructure, the networks and so on, to take advantage of these developments. And they don’t, necessarily.” In the design world, being able to move CAD data from point to point is not going to provide the benefits of having access to a network that creates a community of people with a common goal. For Ballard, the starting point is workflow, and the starting point in turn for that is internal. All kinds of people want access to CAD data to make their own work easier and more productive. He talks of the quality assessment manager, who is keenly interested in anything that will stop the wrong drawings going out to subcontractors or the right drawings going out to the wrong subcontractor. Either way, when the parts come back they’re wrong. PDM provides an audit trail so that faults can be tracked down to their source. “Companies have to get their own house in order, otherwise sending information in and out of your business increases the possibility for confusion,” Ballard concludes. Hall says: “There are some excellent PDM products for smaller companies, where a typical implementation will cost around £150,000. Similarly there are some very cost effective collaboration products. But first you have to be aware of the technologies, and key to this is awareness of the positive impact they will have on the business. The result is that the few world-class manufacturers in the UK are competitive with any in the global market.” Standards and interfaces There is hope. IBM, for example, lists Birmingham factory-systems supplier Modular Automation (MAL) as one example of a small company to which it has sold CAD. Another hope is that smaller CAD suppliers like Delcam are working away in the background to help companies make maximum use of the important resource CAD data provides. Lotus Cars is using Delcam’s PowerInspect to provide inspections which check its products against CAD data, not a drawing. One other promising development should be that of ‘PDM enabler’ (PDM-E) interfaces. These are standards-based, stand-alone PDM components, accessible from a PC, which allow users in a supplier company to share data in a PDM application either with a large customer or each other over a network, but without having to buy the full PDM monty. The bad news is that Enabled Systems seems alone in providing PDM-E-compliant products and services in the UK. Even Microsoft’s manufacturing website is mute on the subject, though GM and other large companies are keen to spread the PDM-E message throughout the supplier community. And even PDM-E doesn’t deal with the basic infrastructure problem Ballard’s concerned about. Nor does it change the fact that, 20 years after the IGES initiative, CAD data translation is still an issue, particularly among systems based on dissimilar geometric modellers. So far, no-one appears to have mentioned that one reason for UGS’ fairly painless absorption of Intergraph’s MCAD business after November 1997 was that both companies’ products were built round the same geometric modeller, Parasolids. SDRC’s software uses a proprietary platform, which will make for some interesting years ahead for UGS.