Cadalyst - July 2008 - (Page 38)

plmstrategies By Kenneth Wong Rewriting the Rules of PDM A look at T3 Energy’s rule-based product data management. D riving through the Lone Star State along Freeway 288, just before you come across the Old Spanish Trail, you’ll pass a couple of elongated, single-story structures. They’re part of the Houston headquarters of T3 Energy Services, which supplies well-control equipment for the oil and gas industry. In 2000, after its mergers with Cor-Val and Preferred Industries, the company took on the name T3. That change marked the beginning of a decade of unprecedented expansion. T3 went on to acquire eight more businesses throughout the next eight years. And as the firm grew, so did its product portfolio. Danny Wolfe, T3’s engineering manager for pressurecontrol products, saw his CAD database swell with each new acquisition. At last count, he had six remote databases distributed between Houma, Louisiana, and Alberta, Canada — without an enterprise system that could integrate them into a unified whole. Because some of the new companies T3 acquired were former competitors, Wolfe judged correctly that some duplicate parts and products were lurking in the CAD archives he’d inherited. The setup would give most IT managers heartburn. T3’s relief came from the Buckeye State in the north, via a consulting firm based in Stow, Ohio. Razorleaf, which specializes in what it calls rule-based product data management (PDM), proposed a custom solution built on Dassault Systemes’ ENOVIA SmarTeam collaborative PDM software. Figure 1. T3 uses ENOVIA SmarTeam to control access to all engineering documents, such as the BOM shown here. uses ENOVIA SmarTeam as its item master hub because it makes the most sense for its business. Engineering is centralized across locations, but manufacturing and operations are localized. So federating information in ERP, while centralizing engineering content in PDM, was actually a natural fit.” This system ensures that, even though each business unit has its own installation of ERP, all units are extracting the sourcing, shipping, and maintenance requirements generated from the same product data housed in SmarTeam. A Single Source Beneath the security layers and the programming languages, T3’s system operates on one simple rule: Make sure all business units are using the same technical data at all times. “Our ERP [enterprise resource planning] system is individual to each business unit,” explained Wolfe. “It’s the same software, but it won’t go across all business units. So SmarTeam becomes the hub for the item masters that feed the ERP data.” Jonathan Scott, a principal consultant with Razorleaf, said, “Although there are Dassault Systemes, ENOVIA SmarTeam some www.3ds.com/products/enovia logistical Razorleaf challenges www.razorleaf.com to centralSolidWorks izing T3’s www.solidworks.com ERP sysT3 Energy Services tem, the www.t3energyservices.com company 38 Smart IP Management The other use of ENOVIA SmarTeam is to monitor access to T3’s intellectual property (IP) (figure 1). Now that all product data exists digitally, it’s far easier to literally walk away with IP. So what’s to prevent an unscrupulous contractor or employee from smuggling out T3’s patent-pending designs for the Torque Reduction Manual Operator or the Hydraulic Double-Acting Actuator on a USB drive? “With SmarTeam, all our IP is vaulted,” said Wolfe, “so you can’t download it to a portable drive.” Because all the transactions are recorded, if someone makes unauthorized printouts of a certain design file, that too will show up in a report, providing a digital trail that an IT manager can follow to locate the violator. In the future, by combining ENOVIA SmarTeam’s datamanagement features and Adobe’s digital-rights management (DRM) components, T3 plans to further refine its access control. “The next step is to look at how we send our documents out to the vendors, suppliers, and contractors,” Wolfe explained. “We may, for instance, disable www.cadalyst.com cadalyst July 2008 http://www.3ds.com/products/enovia http://www.razorleaf.com http://www.solidworks.com http://www.t3energyservices.com http://www.cadalyst.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Cadalyst - July 2008

Cadalyst - July 2008 Editor’s Window CAD Central FIRST Robotic Beasts Draw Students to Engineering Power! Speed! Action! — Mighty Mobile Workstations are Packed and Ready for Adventure! Vico Virtual Construction Suite 2008 AMD ATI FireGL V8600 and FireGL V8650 — 1-GB and 2-GB Graphics Cards Gaining Independence and Influence The Current State of MCAD Rewriting the Rules of PDM BIM Goes Residential CAD Cartoon Issue Indexes Pleasures of Customization

Cadalyst - July 2008

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