Product data is not visual
Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 8/1/2004 6:00:00 AM
What's the difference between product life-cycle management (PLM) delivered from a CAD vendor as opposed to a pure-play PLM vendor? "CAD vendors are trying desperately to move toward a bill of material-based data model," says Michael Topolovac, co-founder and CEO, Arena Solutions. "Historically, CAD has been file-centric, involving geometries, drawings, and their properties. But management of product-related data is exactly that—a data problem—based around the various attributes that represent a part. PLM must manage the full range of information related to a part, not just geometry, to include supplier information, cost, and specification data. A myriad of parts—just take a resistor, for example—have little or nothing to do with a CAD model."
