PROSTEP cooperates with Total Materia on Integration Projects

Manufacturing companies today face the challenge of integrating material information into the digital thread of their products at an early stage of development to generally improve product life-cycle management, be able to calculate the ecological footprint and comply with increasingly stringent environmental regulations. This material information is typically managed in specialized databases. One of the world's largest online material databases is that of material management pioneer Total Materia, containing over 540,000 materials with 25 million property attributes, combined with the ability to manage a customers approved, private view of materials information within their organization.

Total Materia, founded in 1999, is headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, with its main development office in Belgrade, Serbia. The company is a global leader in maintenance lifecycle management (MLM). Its online material reference database offers detailed, reliable data on metals, polymers, ceramics, and composites, helping engineers and manufacturers optimize material selection, improve product performance, and ensure regulatory compliance.

Total Materia's customers increasingly value the seamless integration of the MLM platform into their PLM and ERP systems, enabling automatic transformation of material information to digital product data. Thanks to the partnership with PROSTEP, Total Materia can leverage the PROSTEP expertise to create a seamless integration layer between two critical engineering software environments. "It is a perfect fit”, says Neil Bauman, COO from Total Materia. “The PLM integration platform OpenPDM offers proven standard connectors for common PLM and ERP systems. This allows us to avoid reinventing the wheel and deliver much high end to end value of our combined solutions to our customers.”

PROSTEPs integration specialists quickly developed a new connector that makes it possible to connect the Total Materia Integrator database to one or more PLM and/or ERP systems quickly and with a minimum of effort. How the materials database or the materials assignment client interacts with the connected systems can be configured in OpenPDM and does not require any adjustments to the systems. The integration solution can be used as a SaaS offering from the cloud, it can be installed locally, or it can be implemented as a hybrid cloud/on-premises solution. It can also be integrated directly into the most widely used PLM systems.

The new Total Materia connector supports a number of different use cases. Companies can synchronize the materials in their PLM or ERP systems with the materials database, which serves as a single source of truth for the provision of materials data. They can also assign the materials to the parts interactively. Or they can transfer entire BOMs to the materials database, enrich them with materials data, analyze them and search for alternatives and then transfer the results back to the PLM or ERP systems. PROSTEP assumes responsibility for integrating the corresponding use cases. Our approach involves providing ready-made solutions for frequently recurring integration scenarios, which can easily be mapped to existing data models and expanded later if necessary.

PROSTEP will support Total Materia's customers with the PLM and ERP integration of their material databases and recommend the Total Materia-solution to its own customers. "Sustainability is playing an increasingly important role for our customers," says Karsten Theis, CEO of PROSTEP AG. "The partnership with Total Materia allows us to expand our solution portfolio to include the aspect of material lifecycle management and, as a result, provide our customers with even better support in meeting compliance requirements."