Web-based PDM system for component sourcing

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Oct 17, 2001

GlobalSpec has created SpecStation, a Web-based Product Data Management (PDM) application for the sourcing of mechanical, electrical and optical components

GlobalSpec has announced a new Web-based application that further strengthens the company's position in the collaborative product commerce market.

Expanding on six years of expertise in developing and implementing a solution for technical product discovery via the Internet, GlobalSpec has created SpecStation, a Web-based Product Data Management (PDM), application for the sourcing of mechanical, electrical and optical components.

SpecStation will integrate with a broad variety of PDM platforms and product sourcing systems and applications.

Until now, the missing link within all of these solutions has been highly searchable, rapidly accessible, easily maintainable and specification-rich product content.

SpecStation provides all of these missing pieces.

An enterprise that includes SpecStation in its overall PDM solution will notice a dramatic improvement in the time that professionals such as engineers, designers, technical buyers and purchasing managers spend searching for components and parts.

The first phase of SpecStation will be integration with PDM solutions.

GlobalSpec's experience has shown that up to 80 percent of the cost commitment associated with new product introduction is determined during the engineering design phase.

Because SpecStation will allow the PDM-enabled design engineer to use time more productively, more design iterations can be performed.

The result will be a better final product, with lower development costs, lower support costs and improved profit margins.

"The ability to access and share product information is crucial for business collaboration to be effective," said John MacKrell, Senior Analyst, CIMdata, a collaborative business consulting and market analysis firm.

"With its extensive content and parametric search capability, SpecStation is among the first comprehensive content solutions that support collaborative product commerce.

It clearly addresses a major issue for companies by presenting their product definition personnel with a resource for strategic sourcing of product content.

Integrating this content into their designs helps companies deliver superior products to the market more quickly than they otherwise could." SpecStation permits seamless integration of component and part content into an enterprise's PDM platform, making all component and part information discovered via SpecStation sharable among all users on the platform.

This integration makes it possible, for example, to match retroactively the search specifications for components found via SpecStation with specific line items in an engineering Bill of Materials (BOM),.

A further benefit of this integration includes the capability to store search results.

This saved-search feature will free the user from continually re-seeking parts that meet a particular need.

A recent study estimates that approximately 27 percent of the time a design engineer spends interacting with a PDM platform is consumed entering parts data.

The ability to enter the data once and re-use it many times will significantly reduce the time associated with this task.

Because SpecStation is fully compatible with GlobalSpec's SpecSearchsm product discovery gateway, users of SpecStation will have seamless access to the SpecSearch database of over 26 million component specifications for more than 590,000 products representing the searchable contents of over 6,000 manufacturers' catalogs.

" Having been practicing engineers ourselves, we know that most of designers typically spend about 20 percent of their time on product searches, and when you look at that percentage across an entire enterprise that's a pretty startling use of high-value human resources, particularly since there is now a better way," said John Schneiter, CEO of GlobalSpec.

"With SpecStation, companies can more readily achieve product data management collaboration with partners, suppliers and customers, and at the same time, dramatically decrease costs and time-to-market by increasing productivity.".