Unifying the design process: in today's global economy, competitive advantage is measured by how quickly and efficiently a company can implement a design concept.(CAD)

This Part 2 of a two-part series continues to look at the emerging tools that help design and manage data through a product's life cycle.

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It is innovation and unique design attributes that separate one manufacturer from another. The ability to effectively collaborate and communicate throughout the design process adds exponential value to downstream manufacturing functions. These capabilities also extend a company's intellectual property by communicating subtle design features. This is true for any number of manufactured goods--automobiles, bicycles, or consumer electronics.

Presently, manufacturers are gaining a competitive edge by using a number of tools to share 3D CAD data. They are achieving this with technologies from a wide range of vendors, including Dassault, Informative Graphics, Lattice Technology, Okino Computer Graphics, Seemage (recently acquired by Dassault), ITEDO (acquired in 2006 by PTC), Actify, and Immersive Graphics. Those are in addition to the relevant tools from UGS, Adobe, Autodesk, and Right Hemisphere, as detailed last month in the first part of this series.

Dassault

Dassault Systemes is one of the big hitters in the industry. The company partnered with Microsoft in 2004 for the development of 3DXML, an open format based on XML. As Philippe Marecaux, director of Dassault's PLM Competency Center, points out, 3DXML is a key component of Dassault's overall strategy, and the company sees 3D as a means to bridge all the sharing of data by its different design communities.

Just recently, Dassault made several interesting announcements with the introduction of 3DLive and 3DVia. Both are new solutions that incorporate the collaboration process: 3DLive at the enterprise level, and 3DVia at the consumer level. "3DLive is what we call our collaborate intelligence solution for the entire Dassault product line of Catia, Enovia, and Delmia," notes Lance Murphy, senior product marketing manager for 3DLive. "Interoperability is important, as it is the cornerstone of a design process. The second there is a need for a different system, the process breaks down. We need to start closing the loop and building more support for this idea of a concurrent design process."