Emerson goes for collaborative engineering standard

Emerson, the global $15.5 billion high tech and industrial products and services company, has got round the classic spoiler of collaboration – engineering documents created on disparate CAD/CAM platforms – by enabling enterprise-wide standard reading, visualisation and redlining via Cimmetry Systems AutoVue system. Emerson has 60-plus divisions, 120,000 employees, and operates from 380 manufacturing locations. With the system in place, Emerson says it can now share engineering-related documents internally, as well as with customers and suppliers, much faster and less expensively. Says Randall Ledford, Emerson chief technology officer, “AutoVue will enable us to bring our products to market faster, better using technology to share more information about our engineering projects with more stakeholders throughout the development process. “The system will foster collaboration and help us realise more efficiencies.” Suppliers, partners and customers will be able to view and mark-up everything – 3D CAD parts and assemblies, 2D CAD drawings, EDA layouts and schematics, scanned and raster documents, vector files, office documents and graphics. Among hundreds of formats supported are Solid Edge, Unigraphics, Catia, Pro/E, SolidWorks, AutoCAD, MicroStation, HPGL, Gerber, Microsoft Office, Visio, PDF and TIFF. It will handle systems including document management, product lifecycle management (PLM), product data management (PDM), and ERP, directly and via the Web.