Our benefits

The prostep ivip Association is an international association that has committed itself to developing innovative approaches to solving problems and modern standards for product data management and virtual product creation.

It bundles the interests of manufacturers and suppliers in manufacturing industry as well as IT vendors, in close cooperation with research and science institutes, to provide its members with the long-term competitive advantages that more efficient processes, methods and systems provide.

The association was founded in 1993, when leading IT managers at Bosch, Continental, Daimler, Delphi, Opel, Siemens, Volkswagen and 30 other companies realized that the development of modern processes for efficient product data management was crucial to ensuring the ability of German companies to compete in the global marketplace.

The starting point for this endeavor was the joint development of the STEP data format (ISO 10303). Since 2003, integrated virtual product creation (iViP) has been one of the association’s foremost topics. Until today, the prostep ivip Association remains committed to developing new approaches to end-to-end process, system and data integration for its members and providing digital support for all the phases of the product creation process.