Mission

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Mission

The prostep ivip Association is an international association that has its headquarter in Darmstadt, one of Germany’s top location for science and research. The association 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 has set itself the task of

providing optimal support for cross-enterprise and cross-domain communication and collaboration
making a significant contribution to optimizing the value added chain in the product creation process,
driving the development of open, vendor-neutral PLM standards forward,
securing the participation of key global players, whose representatives are personally involved to a great extent,
and ensuring the interoperability and quality of software solutions for the product creation process through the development of standards.

Foundation

The association was founded in 1993, when leading IT managers at BMW, 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), which was intended to ensure manufacturing industry’s independence from CAD software vendors. Since 2003, integrated virtual product creation (iViP) has been one of the association’s foremost topics and has today been established as an important instrument for shortening the processes leading up to the launch of a product.

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.