ProSTEP iViP Association - PDTnet Project

Increased challenges for suppliers and manufacturers in the automotive industry require the implementation of process-oriented and technical standards for product data communication. Today, companies in the manufacturing industry are forced to cooperate flexible with various partners in changing customer-/supplier-roles in an international scope.

Each relationship between development partners demands harmonization of organization-spanning processes, data formats and implementation methods. This emphasizes the relevance of standards in networked collaboration.

New working techniques and workflows within the product development processes require increasing support of engineering tasks through CAx tools. The thereby generated product-describing data, has to be used continuously.

Traditional modes of operation and business processes within the product development process are subject to a revolutionary change through novel communication technologies, especially in connection with the internet.

Within the scope of the PDTnet project particularly the following, commonly met problems were addressed:

	Scarcely harmonized processes hinder cross-organizational cooperation.
	The implementation of customer-specific requirements (so-called “bilateral optimization”) leads to further segmentation and thus a loss of synergy, especially at the supplier.
	Aged data and systems constrain the enforcement of new technologies.
	Competing standards decelerate decisions and increase their price.
	Organizational insecurities hamper the consequent use of technology, e.g. questions on data reliability, security aspects regarding the Internet, measures for data quality. A relocation of business processes to a network infrastructure poses great demands on the continuity of data and on data quality.
	A relocation of business processes to a network infrastructure poses great demands on the continuity of data and on data quality.
	The availability of know-how to master digital business processes is not distributed very well: well-informed experts in major enterprises meet contact persons from small- and medium-sized companies, whose core competence is not focussed on the area of information technology.

Thus the integration task of product data technology has grown in the last years. And it became more complex. A data standard (like e.g. STEP ISO 10303) can only part of the solution. A look at the processes, that generate or process these data is still necessary. As well as the provision and use of appropriate implementation methods. The integration task can only be solved through the pragmatic consolidation of different standardization approaches and solutions, in particular regarding time and cost aspects.

The PDTnet project was started on May 1, 2000:

	Duration: 3 years and 3 months
	Volume of financing: 5,68 Million Euro
	21 project partners
	sponsored by the German Ministry of Economics and Labour
	Project partners: Behr, Bertrandt, BMW, Boschg, Continental Teves, DaimlerChrysler, Delphi, Dräxlmaier, EDS, HuF, IBM, Ingenieurteam, Jonhon Controls, Keiper, Küster, PROSTEP, Rücker, Scania, T-Systems, Volkswagen and the VDA

The project was set up in:

	Application projects in two scenarios
	3 working groups
	cooperation with working groups of the ProSTEP iViP Association, VDA and VDMA
	Communication with the ENX^® Organisation
	Flyer to the PDTnet project close

Central scenario of the PDTnet project was the neutral, system-independent product data communication between automobile manufacturers and suppliers based on the standard ISO 10303 STEP AP214 and existing Internet-technology (XML).

The development work was triggered by the application projects performed by the industry partners. In order to ensure the transferability of the results the application projects were classified in two topic center integration scenarios:

	Scenario 1 - PDM Data Exchange : Product data exchange between partners with different PDM systems More information
	Scenario 2 - PDM Web Integration : Access to the PDM system of the development partner via Internet based on standardized protocols, Integration of the Client access on the partner PDM system with a consistent data administration within the own PDM system. This includes different PDM systems within a company as well as external PDM systems. More information

The results of the PDTnet project are maintained and enhanced by the ProSTEP iViP Association. Thus the “PLM Web Services”, developed by the Association and accepted as a standard through the Object Management Group (OMG), are based on the solutions elaborated within the PDTnet project.

The complete final documentation is available on the Websites of the Association.

Any questions regarding the project?

Turn to: pdtnet-contact@prostep.com.

PDTnet Project - Product Data Technology and Communication in an OEM and Supplier Network