PROSTEP and BHC share a booth at the prostep ivip Symposium

This year's prostep ivip Symposium, which was held at the MOC Event Center Messe München and attracted some 700 visitors, proved that the traditional meeting of the PLM community is moving with the times and has lost none of its appeal. The board's strategy of opening up the event to new digitalization topics, attracting younger people, approaching companies from other industries and promoting internationalization would appear to be working. The accompanying exhibition was almost fully booked, with 33 software vendors and service providers demonstrating their products and services.

PROSTEP took the opportunity to present our comprehensive range of AI-specific consulting services and solutions to those attending as part of the guided tours through the exhibition. We also figured prominently in the Expert Corner on the use of AI in engineering. The AI experts on the panel came to the conclusion that companies need to increase their level of collaboration and share data if they want to drive AI-related development in engineering forward and be able to make profitable use of it later on. Trusted data spaces that follow the example set by Gaia-X could make collaboration easier.

Collaboration was the dominant theme of both workshops and three presentations, in which our employees flew our flag while at the same time demonstrating our commitment to the work being performed by the prostep ivip Association. In one of the workshops, they explained the standardization status of the Digital Data Package (DDP) and the benefits that combining different standards brings in the context of the digital thread.

JT is one of the standards for seamless collaboration that enjoys great popularity in the automotive industry, particularly with regard to Mercedes-Benz. Participants learned about the new use cases that the standard now supports in one of the presentations in which PROSTEP was involved. Taking Volkswagen as an example, one of our employees also explained how the agile framework SAFe can be used to reconcile the more waterfall-oriented approach taken in systems engineering with the agile methods used in software development.

Participants were also able to find out more about these and other topics at our booth, which attracted a great many visitors this year. This was due not only to the dedicated personnel manning our booth but also, of course, to our eye-catching model of the Mars Rover, which we use as a testbed for the cross-domain linking of MBSE artifacts with our digital thread solution OpenCLM, among other things.

"As numerous presentations at the symposium indicated, companies are taking a close look at the topic digital threads," says PROSTEP CEO Karsten Theis. "But instead of investing time and money in developing their own applications, they should take a look at the solutions available on the market."