PROSTEP AG establishes valuable contacts at the prostep ivip Symposium

With four keynotes, 45 presentations and six workshops, the symposium once again offered a wealth of information on current trends and the challenges posed by digital transformation. However, the bridge spanning the gap between digital transformation and sustainability expressed by the event's motto "Pioneering Digital Transformation for Sustainable Systems" initially remained a narrow one. The agenda was dominated by topics such as the digital thread, the digital twin and model-based systems engineering, with a little bit of digital manufacturing and IoT, and a relatively small amount of ALM, thrown in. The topic artificial intelligence also cropped up in a number of presentations. I would have liked to have seen a greater strategic dimension in the keynotes given by the two main sponsors VW and Siemens Digital Industries Software.

All the participants I spoke to provided extremely positive feedback on the presentations given by start-up companies in the elevator pitches. The Association's board hopes that this will attract a greater number of young companies to the symposium. The Start-Up Award is a valuable addition to the agenda. Interestingly enough, the first prize was won by the company SPREAD, a young software vendor that is pursuing concepts for cross-system data linking that are similar to the ones we are pursuing with OpenCLM. It would appear that we are moving in the right direction with our investment in the digital thread and traceability solution.

OpenCLM was also the PROSTEP solution that generated the greatest amount of interest at our booth. Many of those I spoke to are also interested in the consulting services regarding the integration of ALM and PLM that we provide in collaboration with BHC. This is a gratifying development that indicates that we are now perceived by the market as a competent partner for topics such as model-based systems engineering and software-defined products.

A total of four speakers from PROSTEP and BHC reported at this year's symposium on the progress they are making with their projects. This included, for example, standardization of the digital data package and the definition of best practices for exchanging SysML models between OEMs and suppliers. We also hosted a very interesting workshop on using ontologies to link the data in PLM infrastructures together with Porsche.

Overall, attending the symposium was well worth our while. We attracted a great many visitors to our booth, thanks in no small part to the Mars Rover model, and established good contacts, which will certainly lead to one or the other project in the coming months.