Magna Steyr automates design data exchange across automotive customers

Automotive manufacturing giant Magna Steyr says it has started streamlining design data exchange between customers and suppliers on entirely different systems, by using technologies from IBM and Prostep, and building a flexible service-orientated architecture (SOA). Magna Steyr says it has created dynamic new processes and has already demonstrated their ability to lower costs, improve productivity and thus enhance its competitiveness. Hitherto, the company’s exchange of car- and part-design information was frustrated by the OEMs’ use of individual and proprietary data formats and applications. That meant data-exchange methodologies had to be tailored for each client, leading to multiple implementations. It also prevented process automation, forcing slow, error-prone manual practices. “We had a huge challenge,” says Helmut Ritter, chief engineer for information management at Magna Steyr. “The dramatic reduction in development times throughout the automotive industry now makes it essential for the development partner to connect quickly and efficiently to any PLM [product lifecycle management] system landscape. “Therefore, we saw the critical importance of creating new systems that could surmount our partners’ uses of different data formats and unique data-access interfaces.” The new solution is based on the STEP (Standard for Exchange of Product Model Data) standard, along with PLM services and the emerging WS-BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) standard. To define universal access interfaces for data in STEP formats, Magna Steyr used interfaces recently defined by the automakers’ and software vendors’ ProSTEP iViP association. That played a key role in defining the PLM services interfaces that led to the new standard from the Object Management Group (OMG), now available in the OpenPDM suite from integration specialist Prostep. “OpenPDM provides a universal access interface to design data stored in any brand of PDM system,” explains Bernd Paetzold, Prostep CEO. “It acts as a universal translator... This integration can support internal data exchange processes as well as OEM-supplier collaboration processes.” The software can also be deployed in an SOA as re-usable linked services, and is compatible with IBM WebSphere Process Server business process integration software. Indeed, Magna Steyr used WebSphere to construct its business process workflows. “The deployment of the OpenPDM product on the WebSphere Process Server platform delivers on the standards-based SOA that IBM has advocated for so many years,” comments Janette Beauchamp, general manager, IBM Automotive and Aerospace Industries. “It leverages three standards that are important to the automotive sector: STEP, PLM Services and WS-BPEL –and has enabled the creation of automated business-process workflows that are virtually platform independent.”