DIGITAL THREAD|||Collaboration
24 DE| Technology for Optimal Engineering Design August 2019 /// DigitalEngineering247.com
given its need to manage hundreds of highly variable bills of
materials (BOMs) for clients, opted out of an off-the-shelf
PLM approach in favor of building its own sophisticated
configuration system, bolstered with Slack, which serves as a
centralized communications channel for projects.
Integration with its core enterprise system is accom-
plished through Slack notifications, which notify engineers
when a party needs to sign off on something or if there’s a
new engineering change request entered into the system.
“Right now it doesn’t matter that it’s not a core capability
of our [configuration management] system,” Formella says.
“Slack specifically notifies people that they have tasks they
need to complete ... and lets everyone participate in the con-
text of the specific product they are building.”
The downside: There can be information overload if peo-
ple aren’t precise about creating channels and including the
appropriate parties. “Sometimes it’s like drinking from a fire
hose—people participating in many projects will have a lot of
information to digest,” Formella explains.
Siemens PLM Software is seeing growing demand for
social collaboration capabilities from its engineering com-
munity in search of flexible and spontaneous communica-
tions beyond the prescribed workflows supported by a PLM
system, according to Lewis. A survey conducted at its recent
user conference pegged adoption of such systems in the ball-
park of 20%, Lewis estimates, primarily among software de-
velopment teams that are actively embracing agile practices.
“The very nature of agile requires software development
teams to embrace more ad hoc, flexible collaboration plat-
forms, but it’s starting to pick up the pace among hardwaredevelopment teams as well,”
Lewis says.
Rather than build its own in-
ternal capabilities, Siemens PLM
Software is working on a new
collaboration service that has inte-
grations between Teamcenter and
Slack and Microsoft Teams to be
released later this year, Lewis says.
The capabilities will work on both
ends of the tool chain, allowing
users to query Teamcenter PLM
from Slack or Teams without leav-
ing the collaboration hub to find
out the current status of parts, for
example, or to have access to a
conversation stream that might be
relevant to an engineering change
request managed by PLM.
“It will help users make faster decisions with up-to-date
information,” Lewis says. “A lot of PLM vendors are trying
to build their own collaboration capabilities, but from our
perspective, that doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
That’s not the case for Dassault Systèmes, which has
steadily been folding a number of internally built collabo-
ration capabilities into its 3DEXPERIENCE platform to
make product and design collaboration “frictionless” and
free from information silos, says Rekha Kamat, 3DEXPERI-
ENCE platform business development executive for the firm.
Specifically, Dassault is buttressing the 3DEXPERIENCE
platform with social collaboration apps that allow the full
spectrum of users to communicate and share ideas in context,
with the same access controls and authorizations supported
by the enterprise security model—a practice that is not fully
embraced by standalone collaboration hubs, she contends.
As part of the 3DEXPERIENCE Social Collaboration Ser-
vices, Dassault Systèmes offers 3DSWYM, a tool for creating
communities to share expertise through blogs and real-time
conversations, along with 3DMessaging for instant collabora-
tion and 3DDrive, a way to securely share documents and 3D
files in the cloud that is design-aware, so it understands the
relationship between linked files. 3DPlay allows design col-
laborators to experiment with 3D objects, including the ability
to drag, rotate or lift models via browser-based visualization.
“This provides a way where communication is contex-
tualized in the same enterprise environment, with the same
security model and access controls,” Kamat says. “If you want
to come back and find out who came up with an idea among
a series of stakeholders, you can find it—there’s a complete
digital thread.”
Moreover, users don’t have to go back and search for spe-
cific conversations—the Social Collaboration Services allow
them to subscribe to areas or projects of interest so they willAutodesk Forge is intended to enable a light interactive
experience that’s tracked and managed securely by
Fusion Lifecycle. Image courtesy of Autodesk.DE_0819_Social_PLM_Beth.indd 24 7/11/19 10:47 AM