[转] Accord via Lightweight 3D

Accord via Lightweight 3D: Part 1
Written by David Prawel and Wolfgang Geist, June 2006

Collaboration is key to global manufacturing success. Lightweight 3D data makes it happen.

PLM is an intriguing vision indeed. Marketing departments worldwide buzz with the latest claims of the virtues and value of their software and the brave new world of productivity and profit enabled by the PLM vision. But successful PLM has proven elusive. Not only are the processes embodied in the vision highly complex, but successful PLM depends in large part on effective communication and collaboration, which is proving quite hard for manufacturers to do well.

A recent survey of 650 manufacturing executives by Industry Week highlights the mission-critical nature of collaboration. A full 62% of purchasing executives listed supplier collaboration as the most effective contributor to increased profitability and reduced cost. More than 97% of product development executives selected collaboration with customers as the most effective strategy for meeting customer requirements and bringing innovative products to market. And, more than 35% chose collaboration with customers as the key strategy to reducing product development time to market. It is interesting that these business objectives match exactly those touted for PLM. Coincidence? Not so.

Effective collaboration is one of the keys to winning in the business of manufacturing and innovation. Enterprise PLM and PDM business processes are built on 3D product data. And it remains extremely difficult for the various constituents of a modern manufacturing value chain to share product data. Little wonder then that collaboration is so difficult to get right.

Built for CAD Users, Not Everyone

Much has been written about problems sharing CAD data. Studies have estimated that billions of dollars each year are wasted in the automotive business alone due to poor CAD data interoperability. A large portion of the blame goes to geometry problems relating to the CAD modelers themselves. CAD translation software provides many good solutions to these problems, including capability to search out problematic geometry and topology, and automatically repair it. Spatial Corp. takes a slightly different approach by providing software libraries that are built into solutions by other software vendors.

International standards like IGES and STEP have emerged to help alleviate interoperability problems, but these standards are often limited in scope and slow to evolve. International standardization committees, such as ISO (International Standards Organization) or Germany’s DIN, need years to define and approve standards and therefore lag behind many industrial needs.

An additional limitation of existing solutions is that they are built for CAD people. Many interoperability problems have nothing to do with CAD models themselves, but present a huge impediment to effective collaboration. People can’t work together if they can’t access and share their product data.

A typical manufacturing organization has many professionals in the value chain that could make use of their company’s 3D product data assets, but simply can’t work with the data. The 3D data is often available in their PDM system, but the tools either aren’t available or aren’t usable by people who aren’t trained in CAD. CAD software is too complex and too expensive for these non-CAD professionals to use.

In a recent study, Daratech Inc. showed the impact of 3D-product data generation in downstream engineering and manufacturing processes. The company found that a single 3D CAD authoring tool may generate 3D data that could be used by more than 100 additional users in the enterprise. These numbers are likely much higher if one accounts for the extended enterprise, such as suppliers and customers.

Manufacturers spend a lot of money creating valuable 3D product data assets, but the clear advantages of using 3D can’t be realized if the data isn’t available to anyone who could benefit from it.

Many multi-format CAD model "viewers" are available to help non-CAD professionals access and use their 3D product data. Actify and Informative Graphics, for example, provide multi-format viewing products that enable non-CAD users to access, view, and mark up dozens of 3D formats.

In addition to the 3D format and business process problems, many companies have created significant internal barriers to better interoperability and reuse of 3D product data. Some of the biggest of these lie in the business process and have to do with how RFQs are bundled with 3D models and other documents and then submitted, whether an organization’s business processes are mature enough to leverage 3D product data, and so on. Efficient collaboration requires the right data be available to the right people at the right time, in a form they can use.

For example, very few companies have standardized their design methodologies so all designers use the same design principles, making it easier for their models to be shared and understood by their fellow designers and engineers. Most companies have experienced CAD designers who have developed their favorite best practices, but investigation always reveals 50 best practices for every 50 designers.

The C-Level Needs to Lead

Corporate managers must exert more leadership to solve this problem. They need to take a page or two from Toyota’s Production System, and understand that one of the biggest reasons Toyota is doing so well today is because it standardized its complete operation. This allows Toyota to then continuously improve its operations and enables its people to work together more effectively.

Also, Delphi Steering developed and standardized its design methodology. Delphi now makes its design methodology available to third parties in the form of training and certification programs, much like how Six Sigma methodology is available from different service providers worldwide.

Another strategy for improving collaboration is making the data more broadly available and useful to more people in the organization. New formats are now available that greatly expand the availability of 3D product data throughout the extended engineering factory, value chain, and supply chain.

In Part 2 of this article we will take a look at some of the new formats and individual solutions that unlock collaboration throughout the enterprise and extended enterprise. The solutions and formats we intend to discuss will come from such companies as Adobe Systems, Autodesk, Dassault Systemes, and UGS Corp.





Accord via Lightweight 3D, Part 2
Written by David Prawel and Wolfgang Geist, July 2006

Lightweight 3D data opens the lines to global manufacturing success through efficient communication and collaboration.

In Part 1 of this article, we looked at how the vision of PLM suffers from a critical lack of effective communication and collaboration functionality throughout the complete enterprise and extended enterprise, including suppliers and customers. The root cause of the problem is that PLM and PDM evolved out of 3D product data and it is simply too expensive and too impractical to deploy CAD systems on the desktop of every user within an enterprise and throughout the supply chain. In this second part of the article, we turn our attention to four lightweight 3D data collaboration and communication solutions that bring 3D data to users within and without an enterprise.

Adobe and Intel with U3D

Adobe and Intel have a strong position in this area. Adobe recently announced Acrobat 3D, which enables 3D CAD models to be integrated into its widely used Acrobat products. Adobe plans to capitalize on its success with the PDF format in the broader marketplace (who can argue with tens of millions of users  or Adobe’s knowledge of how to create a de facto standard?). They and Intel are key sponsors and driving forces behind the 3DIF Consortium, which appears to have settled on U3D (Universal 3D) as an industrial standard.

Adobe leverages the U3D format in Acrobat 3D, using 3D authoring technology from Right Hemisphere. Users of the free Adobe Reader 7.0 are able to view 3D PDF files. Licensing Acrobat 3D (less than $900) will enable PDF users to mark up, annotate, and animate 3D models in PDFs, along with embedding them in editable PDF forms. Toolkits are available from companies like Right Hemisphere that help third-party developers create and embed 3D PDF capabilities into existing applications. Right Hemisphere also provides plug-ins for end users that automate the process of publishing interactive 3D PDF files without programming. In April, Adobe acquired TTF, a French producer of CAD data translation and modeling software, ensuring better CAD data import capabilities for Acrobat 3D, and highlighting Adobe’s seriousness about this market.

UGS and the JT Open Consortium

UGS is likewise serious about its collaborative format, JT. JT has been in the market for many years, and has been repositioned as an open standard for CAD data exchange. It has gained momentum, even among CAD users who don’t use software from UGS. UGS is the main sponsor of the JT format, and initiated the JT Open Consortium to help proliferate the format in the market.

JT is very flexible and scalable, enabling it to suit a broad range of applications. It can handle geometry with different tessellation levels, manage large assemblies and meta-data such as textures, PMI data like GD&T, and 3D comments. JT2Go, a free JT viewer, provides functionality similar to other 3D CAD viewers. And toolkits are available to help third-party developers embed JT into existing applications. JT is a very good choice for a broad range of applications, but as it increases in scope, it also grows in footprint. It may not be long before it ceases to serve the needs of the "lightweight, ease to share" viewing market demand.

Microsoft and Dassault Systemes—3DXML

In November 2004 Microsoft and Dassault Systemes signed a strategic cooperation agreement setting the stage for another lightweight and common 3D data format called 3DXML, which is supported in CATIA V5R15. This joint effort shows that both software companies assume XML will become the future standard for 3D product data exchange.

In summer 2004, Dassault Systemes selected XVL from Lattice Technology as the 3D geometry representation within 3Dwithin 3DXML. XVL provides very highly compressed 3D modeling capabilities, support of many CAD formats, and compatibility with XML and XML Schemas. 3DXML is intended for non-CAD users in downstream functions, such as purchasing, maintenance, training, and documentation, but currently enjoys only limited third-party support.

Autodesk and DWF

Autodesk enjoys the largest installed base in the CAD market. It released DWF (Design Web Format) several years ago, enabling Autodesk and competitive CAD users to translate 3D data with free DWF writers and visualize the data with free DWF viewers, which have been available for many years. DWF has primarily supported CAD users collaborating with CAD users. But this may be about to change. In late May, Autodesk released Autodesk Design Review, a new design review workflow tool that purports to make it easier for non-CAD users of DWF or DWG to participate in round-trip collaborative processes and projects (click here for a review of Design Review 2007). Also of note, UGS and Autodesk recently announced cooperation aimed at mutual support of their JT Direct and DWF formats. It remains to be seen what will come of this partnership.

McKinsey & Co. recently completed a global survey in which executives identified innovation and the free flow of information to be the primary forces behind the rapid pace of change in global business. Executives cited innovation in product, services, and business models as the single factor that most influenced the rate of change. The second most common response was greater ease in obtaining information and developing knowledge.

There are many issues limiting our ability to collaborate better and make the PLM vision more of a reality. And there are many existing and emerging solutions. But one thing appears clear and consistent—global manufacturers have to get it right, before their competitors do.

Other 3D Formats

In addition to the well-known 3D-CAD formats there is a variety of additional 3D data formats in use in manufacturing. Here are just a few examples:
• Mesh-formats for the preparation of virtual reality applications and CAE-simulations, e.g. HyperMesh from Altair Engineering
• STL-data for rapid prototyping and for reverse engineering and quality control applications
• DWG as proprietary 3D-format widely used in the Autodesk user community
• OpenGL Inventor, OpenGL Performer, or OpenGL Flight in virtual reality-applications
• JPG, BMP, AVI, PNG, TIFF in multimedia and for document processing
• JT, XVL, U3D, 3D —DP &WG

Author:
David Prawel is the founder and president of Longview Advisors Inc., a consulting firm serving manufacturers. His career spans 25 years in high-tech businesses and he has published many articles covering 3D MCAD, product design, and related subjects. Wolfgang Geist is general manager of Conweb GmbH, a European provider of products, solutions, and services aimed at the reuse and downstream application of heterogeneous 3D product data. Send your comments about this article through e-mail by clicking here. Please reference "Lightweight Data," July 2006" in your message.

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