We're looking forward once again this year to the Global Product Data Interoperability Summit (GPDIS) taking place in Phoenix, Arizona. It's an event with a complicated-sounding name but a fairly simple goal: to make the transfer of engineering data more efficient throughout the manufacturing process. We've been a sponsor of the summit for a few years now, and are members in PDES, one of the six Event Partners. We even have our own Andy Beaupré, General Manager Sales & Support, serving as a Track Lead for the conference. We look forward to the productive dialogue initiated by the different topics and speakers (including our own presentation; more on that below).
"How's the weather on Mars?"
With the digital-centric lives we lead — even our doorbells are on the Internet — it's easy to feel like all computers can connect easily and error-free to practically anything. But the truth is that compatibility between systems is an ever-present challenge: witness the catastrophic $325-million failure of the Mars Climate Orbiter, which burned up when entering the red planet's atmosphere. The cause? Incompatible engineering data due to conversion errors between metric and imperial measurements.
Screwing up centimeters and inches may seem like a classic example of governmental red tape bureaucracy. However, this type of challenge — sorting out precise conversions when going between two systems, such as two different CAD systems — presents a host of real-world challenges across public and private sector manufacturing to this day.
The Pull of the Digital Thread
We look forward to giving a presentation to share our perspective on how challenges like this are being addressed. Titled "The Pull of the Digital Thread on Independent Parts Suppliers," we'll be discussing the headwinds that progress is facing that originate from the manufacturing side, incorporating perspectives and experience our customers have shared with us over the years.
After all, there are lots of good reasons that engineering data has to jump through so many different hoops on the way from product design to manufacturing to inspection. Having a multi-system supply chain allows for benefits such as:
- encouraging innovation, versus a monolithic system
- allowing for specialization of process and expertise
- avoiding supply chain vulnerabilities from an over-reliance on a single platform
Finding Shared Solutions
The global marketplace and the drive for greater efficiency from the largest enterprises, along with the continued emergence of AI-driven data accessibility needs are powerful forces in support of interoperability. We continue to innovate in alignment with this movement.
One example is the latest release of our MBD file utilities which incorporated compatibility with the STEP-XML protocol. This is an as-yet-under-utilized variant of the STEP standard which establishes an open standard capable of carrying assembly-level data. Notably, it is structured so that its data can be read by both human and machine readers without a separate API. You can learn more about the STEP-XML format in this blog post.
We look forward to connecting with our peers and colleagues in Phoenix in a few weeks.
