PROSTEP demonstrates interlinked Systems in Practice at Deloitte's "Smart Factory"

In Düsseldorf, Deloitte has opened the "Smart Factory", a model factory where customers can experience Industry 4.0 live. The opening was a great success and underscores the high level of interest shown in end-to-end digitalization. In the context of digitalizing product development, Deloitte demonstrates, in addition to many other use cases, how the processes along the V-model for software-defined, mechatronic product development can be interlinked in a heterogeneous IT system landscape. 

The model factory is intended for all industries involved in the development and production of cyber-physical systems and are faced with the need to integrate a large number of stakeholders inside and outside the company and to efficiently link collaboration between different specialist departments.

PROSTEP and Deloitte worked closely together on developing the end-to-end engineering process chain, bringing together both Deloitte's process know-how and PROSTEP's PLM integration know-how. PROSTEP's time-tested OpenPDM solution, which is part of our digital thread platform, provides the basis for the integration solution. It offers standard connectors to all leading PLM, ALM and ERP systems, thus minimizing integration and maintenance costs.

"We chose PROSTEP as our partner because the company has decades of experience integrating heterogeneous system landscapes in regulated industries. Our two companies operate in a large number of different industries such as the automotive, defense, aerospace, medical technology, plant engineering and shipbuilding industries. We complement each other perfectly," says Tino Krüger, Partner Product Strategy & Lifecycle Management at Deloitte.

The integrated IT system landscape facilitates seamless collaboration in system development, which means that different specialist departments can achieve the highest possible level of quality and efficiency in their preferred expert systems. It also helps shorten development cycles and meet compliance requirements relating to traceability, such as those required by A-SPICE, CSMS standards and MDR.

The use cases are based on typical development processes along the V-model that are frequently used in practice and which are equally suitable for conventional waterfall style and for agilely organized project work.

In our use case, the stakeholders' requirements are initially recorded in PTC Codebeamer and transferred to Dassault Systèmes' Catia Magic Cyber Systems Engineer (formerly Cameo Systems Modeler) for the purpose of modeling the system architecture and deriving additional functional and system requirements. The artifacts created in this way are continuously exchanged between the systems via the bidirectional interface until a specific level of maturity is reached. The complete requirements package is then passed on to Siemens Teamcenter for further development. Resulting and changing traces are retained.

Other system combinations are possible at any time and can be implemented quickly thanks to the standard connectors. The use cases can be expanded without difficulty and customer or industry-specific processes can easily be adapted.

A major advantage of the implemented use cases is that the automated data interfaces make collaboration across domain boundaries easier, as Peter Pfalzgraf, Partner Manager at PROSTEP, explains. "The solution ensures consistent data statuses in the connected IT systems and guarantees cross-system traceability. It thus makes a contribution to speeding up the development of complex systems, which involves collaboration between multiple specialist departments."

Please contact us if you are interested in a demo of the use cases using your own specific requirements.