Product category:
PLM and collaboration software
News Release from: MatrixOne | Subject: Library Central
Edited by the Engineeringtalk Editorial
Team on 18 January 2006
Business application accelerates
development
Matrix One releases Library Central business process application that helps accelerate product development and delivery through knowledge reuse.
Matrix One has released Library Central, a business process application that helps companies accelerate product development and delivery through knowledge reuse, letting them leverage their company's intellectual property for cost savings and efficiency improvements in development projects Library Central is intended to transform existing information collected in a company's PDM/PLM system, classifying and organising data to create a knowledge base tailored to an organisation's business environments and products
Because of the ease and flexibility involved in defining the knowledge library, or catalogue of product data, it can quickly and easily adapt to a company's changing business needs.
Sam Zawaideh, Senior Vice President for Matrix One, said: "Companies need to develop ways to cut costs from the product development process while at the same time improving overall efficiency".
"One of the keys to achieving these aggressive goals is through the creation of a system for product content, or knowledge reuse".
Library Central provides companies with the infrastructure required to catalogue, find and manage reusable product content data throughout the enterprise, making product developments more cost-effective and reliable, as the data being reused has already been validated and used on an earlier project.
Product development teams can use a single enterprise-wide reuse catalogue to search a company's reusable product content.
A company's reuse librarian can manage the library of reusable product data and its taxonomy within Library Central.
The classification hierarchy can be tailored to the company's business or product needs and managed in a live system, without having to change the underlying database schema or modifying the PLM system.
Reusable attributes can be defined, applied consistently across classes and inherited from class to sub-class, reducing the effort needed to create and maintain the classification system.
Because the maintenance effort is low, the systems are flexible and easily refined.
The inclusion of a search capability makes it easy for companies to locate product content based on complex sets of reuse criteria.
It compares the results, where the best available content is identified instead of the first adequate content encountered, identifying differences to allow for quick and easy sorting and ranking.
Non-engineering data can either be classified in the same classification system alongside engineering data or in a company's own libraries, using a bookshelf and document organisation.
This allows teams outside of engineering to add their own content to the overall product knowledge.
The same content can be simultaneously organised, browsed and searched by different role-specific definitions.
Users in each role can find product data as they had classified it from their own context and point-of-view but still from within the same common product database.
The library automatically keeps track of where product data is used or reused and can display where it is referenced with a single mouse click.
Contracts, business requirements and other relevant legal documents can be defined and directly linked to the product content reuse data within the PLM system, enabling component usage to be automatically tracked so that payments are correctly made, reports automatically generated, approvals automated and compliance maintained.
Users can subscribe to automatic notifications for key events such as content being added to the library or changes made to classified items.
Automatic updates and notifications help ensure that all teams no matter where they are located can make decisions based on the up-to-the-minute status of issues and updates, rather than static knowledge captured at the time of reuse.
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