The provider of open PLM and IoT solutions CONTACT Software and the PLM consulting and software house PROSTEP have agreed to cooperate more closely. They want to work together on developing collaboration solutions that can be integrated seamlessly in customers’ CAD and PLM landscapes. The first step involved the development of PROSTEP’s OpenPDM CIM Database connector, which provides support for different collaboration scenarios.
It is companies working in larger development networks with heterogeneous CAx and PLM solutions in particular that are faced with the challenge of having to coordinate their processes across different systems. By combining their know-how in the areas IT, processes and methods, CONTACT Software and PROSTEP are able to offer custom collaboration solutions. These solutions provide support for more efficient collaboration in joint ventures or following mergers and acquisitions in particular.
Like PROSTEP, CONTACT Software is a major advocate for open system architectures, which makes it easier to combine the two companies’ technologies. Using its CONTACT Elements platform, the PLM and IoT software vendor develops solutions for the product engineering process and digital transformation that are used in a variety of industries. Examples include CIM Database PLM and Project Office, a project management solution.
As a vendor-neutral consulting and software house, PROSTEP contributes its decades of experience and its standards-based solutions for PLM integration and collaboration to the cooperation. The OpenPDM CIM Database connector is another element in the PROSTEP product suite that supports collaboration in heterogeneous PLM landscapes.
In most of today’s PLM systems, support for the product lifecycle ends at company boundaries despite the fact that the development, production and operation of the products are distributed across a global ecosystem, as CONTACT’s managing director, Karl-Heinz Zachries, comments: “Our cooperation with PROSTEP paves the way for end-to-end digitalization of cross-company collaboration processes.”
