Open data exchange saves time and costs, speeds up efficiency

Late in 1999, EPMT reached a milestone when signing a collaboration agreement with BAE SYSTEMS (previously British Aerospace) to develop and commercialise an advanced IT tool for control system engineers. The finished product, called Visual-iSE, is expected to generate sales of at least NOK 120 million for EPMT.

The goal of the Visual-iSE software is to contribute to a drastic reduction in both the time and money required for product development processes. In the specification phase Visual-iSE will make it easier to simulate and analyse requirements for new vehicle systems.

The European consortium behind the Eurofighter has since long been using EPMT's Express Data Manager software to exchange product data between the four prime contractors of the advanced fighter aircraft. These are situated in four different countries. A new milestone will occur when they deploy this technology in their supply chain.

Different industries, same challenges

"The challenges are the same in many other industries," comments Jorulv Rangnes, managing director of EPM Technology, and continues:

"A majority of todays information is captured electronically but its content is primarily exchanged between proprietary systems in a human-readable and not in a computer-sensible format. Information exchange in such documents is redundant, error-prone and costly. This is only partly solved when a human-readable document is published on the web instead of paper."

Industries that have a good understanding of this situation have identified a large potential in developing and implementing a new IT paradigm based on internationally agreed product data standards. These are documented by a product model, which is a formal and unambiguous (computer-sensible) representation of a real world concept; product or process.

Quicker, less costly

"Main business drivers for the product model approach versus the traditional (document) approach are 100% specification adherence, 50% reduction in lead-time and 25% reduction of cost. In other words, you can make sure the receiver gets exactly the same information as intended by the sender. Things go a lot quicker, and they cost a lot less," explains Rangnes.

To achieve this, the industries have developed industrial data standards such as STEP, POSC and IAI. These are now ready for implementation.

"Since these standards represent a new IT paradigm, they also require new implementation technology. This is where EPM Technology comes in. We possess a unique technology that is designed to implement standard or customised product models. We aim to be number one internationally when it comes to the open-data paradigm of the 21st century!"

The Express Data Manager (EDM) software suite has been developed since 1989 and sold commercially world-wide since 1996. EDM now supports the STEP XML standard. This means that companies using EDM can easily create data-models to be used on all platforms and operating systems, in business-to-business as well as business-to-consumer environments.

EPMT has hundreds of companies around the world using their software.

These are some samples:

Adtranz, American Bureau of Shipping, Bofors, ClassNK -, Det Norske Veritas (DNV), Hägglunds Vehicle, IBM, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), Intergraph Corporation (UK & US), Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries Co. (IHI), Lloyd's Register of Shipping, Lockheed Martin, POSC/CAESAR, Rijkswaaterstaat, Sandvik, Scania, Statoil, BAE Systems, Alenia, CASA, DaimlerChrysler, Toshiba.