Miki Lumnitz’s Weblog

As part of my work you can imagine I am meeting a lot of customers, potential customers, resellers and PLM professionals all over the world. it is always nice to hear what they think about what we in ENOVIA SmarTeam delivers to the PLM market. I have already wrote to you about Technicom review of ENOVIA SmarTeam Engineering Express in my previous post ENOVIA SmarTeam Engineering Express Review by TechniCom.

This time I have the opportunity to give you the view of a PLM professional, Jonathan Scott.

Jonathan is a senior PLM consultant from Razorleaf Corp. and has vast experience in PLM, methodology wise and technically.

So, here is Jonathan’s view… this is what people really think…

Dassault Introduces Engineering Express (SNE)

Those of you keeping up with Dassault’s latest announcements related to ENOVIA SmarTeam have certainly heard of SmarTeam Express. This relatively new offering (first introduced on top of V5R16) is a fresh approach to PDM. Several players in the PDM market have tried to offer watered-down versions of their software in an effort to make it easy to adopt PDM. The trouble has generally been that either a) there is no easy way to get from the junior version of the software to the senior version without rip-and-replace, or b) the junior version is missing really critical capabilities (like an API or a database). For their part, Dassault chose to make their offering a streamlined, not crippled, version of ENOVIA SmarTeam. The difference is obvious; you can do anything with the Express offerings that you can do with good old ENOVIA SmarTeam – the Express version just takes some of the distractions out of the way up front.

Dassault’s first installment of the Express lineup was SDE, or SmarTeam Design Express. SDE is targeted at CAD designers and CAD workgroups, in organizations large and small. The offering is a collection of pre-configured ENOVIA SmarTeam elements, including a focused data model, some great customizations, well-designed Profile Cards, and optimized settings. The “streamlined” part of SDE is that users don’t have to think about (or even see) information in the system not related to CAD work. Project tasks, contacts, bills-of-material, and other advanced system capabilities are turned off, allowing users to focus on revision management and relationship management of CAD data. It’s important to note though that “turned off” implies that these other features can be turned on if and when the time comes.

That brings us to SNE. SNE is SmarTeam Engineering Express (SEE is a Dassault designation for another piece of software, so SNE was selected instead). SNE is built on the same data model as SDE, making it easy for new users of the system to add capabilities by removing or applying various Express behaviors and configuration elements. SNE targets the overall engineering process, as a superset of the CAD design process. If I was to offer a slogan for the combined SDE/SNE package, I would say that it, “manages product data from concept through manufacturing”. That includes change processes, BOMs, CAD data, and related documentation.

The Expresses each ship with a methodology guide describing the answers to not just the “how-to” questions, but also the “why” questions. With this, Dassault is providing a powerful tool, a quick-start approach, and best practices built right into the software. What’s really clever about SNE is the way that it incorporates more than just mechanical design. For instance, SNE includes a process for managing ECAD (electrical CAD) files and BOMs side-by-side with MCAD (mechanical CAD) and software design information. The complete product structure can be managed and manipulated in a revision controlled environment (let’s see ERP do that).

SNE contains an even larger set of useful automations and customizations than SDE. Best of all, the latest versions of these Expresses were designed to work together. So what started as a good idea, “provide a streamlined PDM tool with best practices built-in”, has become even stronger in the second addition to the Express line-up. SNE is available on top of V5R18 (at no additional cost, I should mention). Based on the successes and capabilities of SDE and SNE, I am optimistic about the value of the other Express offerings Dassault has in the works.

You can find the article also in Razorleaf web site: http://www.razorleaf.us/dotnetnuke/Newsletter/June2008/tabid/156/Default.aspx#922