Colorful shoes, passion and 100% commitment are what characterize Steven Vettermann, our expert in the field of traceability, a topic that received particular attention during the symposium. In recognition of his valuable work in ensuring the successful development of the Association and the symposium, he was made honorary member by the board. For many years, Vettermann was general manager of the prostep ivip Association and contributed greatly to driving its expansion in Asia.

But Vettermann’s involvement was not limited to accepting this honorary membership. In a humorous “Late Night Innovation Show”, he and other speakers gave participants a better understanding of his favorite topic, traceability, and explained how they can help make the complexity involved easier to manage.

Despite the pandemic, PROSTEP has gained a large number of new customer projects in recent months and steered other projects to a successful conclusion. Some examples of these can be seen on the symposium’s digital platform.

• In his presentation, Frank Brandstetter, accompanied by a speaker representing the customer, explains the reasons for implementing an agile process model in the development of Daimler’s PDM landscape and describes the associated challenges, in particular with regard to harmonizing working methods.
• Carsten Zerbst reports on the implementation of a new toolset for designing complex cruise ships at the MEYER Werft shipyards in Papenburg and Turku, which combines the Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE platform and the CADMATIC shipbuilding software. Our technology works in the background to ensure seamless integration of the system landscape.
• In his presentation on “PLM Cloudification”, Mirko Theiss presents a project for migrating an existing on-premises data supply solution to the cloud. It is based on the new version of our OpenPDM integration platform, which is made available on the AWS cloud stack. This is the first example of a customer using OpenPDM in the cloud.

On the digital platform, we present not only interesting customer projects but also report on our involvement in research projects and the project work performed by the prostep ivip Association. For example, Josip Stjepandic familiarizes participants with a fully automated tool for creating digital twins for production systems, which can be used for the planning and analysis of facilities or for in-process monitoring. The solution was developed as part of the DigiTwin joint project. It is based on the use of 3D scan data, which is analyzed using object recognition and converted into simulation data.

The Association’s working groups have not been idle over the last months, as the presentations from the live event and the contributions available on the platform make clear. Our employees have made a major contribution to these efforts.

• Together with other participants from the DDP project group, Torsten Schmied informs participants about the development status of the digital data package. DDP is a type of metastandard for the exchange of configured, linked engineering data and is intended to permit the creation of a cross-enterprise digital thread.
• Andreas Trautheim and his colleagues from the Project Schedule Management (PSM) project group provide an overview of the progress being made in the field of cross-enterprise project management. The group defines processes, methods and interfaces for schedule management synchronization for companies that use waterfall, agile or hybrid project methodologies.
• The aim of the Production Lifecycle Information Management (PLIM) working group, of which Stefan Just is a member, is to bridge the gap between the heterogeneous data sources involved in production process planning using a generic information model. In another presentation, Just reports on the work of the Additive Manufacturing Interfaces (AMI) project group, which is developing a specific data model and uniform semantics for the transfer of data for additive manufacturing processes.
• The activities carried out by the Integrated Collaboration Framework (ICF) project group are explained by our colleague Tamara Hofmann. Among her other tasks, she is concerned with the development of a cross-domain ontology for interdisciplinary collaboration together with guidelines as to how this shared conceptualization can be implemented in companies.

The presentations from the live event and the specialist contributions in the platform’s on-demand library will be available online to symposium participants until 30 June.