‘Create, Connect, Complete’

This is the new mantra for Autodesk, as it gets aggressive on its collaborative product development. The company recently launched Streamline 5 –its product in the collaborative product range. Nisha Kurian spoke to
Peter Leihn, Autodesk’s marketing manager (manufacturing), South Asia, about the significance of collaboration in the design and manufacturing, and the company’s future plans in this segment. Excerpts:

What is the need for collaborative product development?

Collaboration means working on a single goal. In an engineering environment, collaboration is not something new. What has changed, however, is the speed with which things are being delivered. Sharing up-to-date data is critical now. With engineering standards being different across the world owing to the variance in time zones and languages, we need to introduce technology into collaboration.

How is your company incorporating CPD?

Autodesk is focusing on building collaborative products that allow users to unlock the value in their data. They are secure and reliable services that make it easy for user groups to share personalized design data across the extended manufacturing team in formats that are relevant to each individual team member. We are working on the philosophy of create, connect and complete.

Under the ‘create’ category comes Autodesk 2004, which is a 3D tool and Autodesk Inventor, which is also a 3D tool but far more sophisticated. It is under ‘connect’ that collaboration happens. Finally, in ‘category’ consultation and customization of software for different applications takes place. 

What all products are available in the CPD range?

We recently launched the new version of Autodesk Streamline, which is basically an Internet server, where we host customers’ data. Autodesk Streamline 5 builds on Autodesk Streamline 4 enabling users to unlock the value of digital design data and discover the power of collaboration to increase productivity. It extends the benefits of collaboration beyond the manufacturer to suppliers, customers, and trading partners, ensuring that data maintains its value throughout the product lifecycle. This enables the product to market faster by providing instant access to design data across the entire supply chain.

Streamline helps users in the sense that they can connect with their project team anytime, regardless of organizational or geographical boundaries. Further, in this category we have Autodesk Vault software, which is a data management system integrated with Autodesk Inventor 7 software.

How can CPD help in the outsourcing sector? 

Outsourcing is driving CPD today. For outsourcing to work, there should be intelligence in collaboration of tools. With market pressures increasing continuously, most manufacturers outsource significantly, thus making this practice key to any manufacturing process. Hence, it is imperative that the latest product data be shared in real time with the entire team of outsourcing parties in the relevant forms.

NISHA KURIAN (CNS, Chennai)