The Answer to Open CAD
Bill Abramson

I have noticed that Open CAD is now a hot and very fashionable issue. Of course I believe that this has been a challenge that enterprises have been facing for years. A key ingredient to this problem and a reason for its escalation is that PLM application developers have been developing (and bringing to market) some incredibly innovative and powerful solutions. It’s like walking through a fantastic French bakery and being faced with the dilemma as to which choice to make. Now, it seems that when we deploy these tools, which seem to provide the individual functional areas in our organization with powerful point capabilities, that there are serious compatibility issues … they do not play together. What are we going to do? Do we employ translators? Translators have their own problems. How accurate are the translations? Who will certify the accuracy of the translations? Who will bear the costs of these translations? Perhaps a more practical solution is to require PLM system developers to provide software interfaces that will enable the most significant applications to comfortably integrate with the major PLM systems. Will the development of these interfaces add to the cost of the PLM applications on which we have become dependent? We pay twice … once for the point solution and once for the interface. How will the development organizations keep in ‘lock step’ to coordinate their respective releases? When we have a heterogeneous environment, do we complicate our challenges to certify and deploy new functional and maintenance releases?

So, at this point are you asking; “Bill, what is the point you are trying to make?” My point is that perhaps the real answer to open CAD is to deploy a homogeneous environment. Have you asked some of the tough questions such as:

• How valuable are the individual point solutions?
• Does the value that they bring to the individual functional areas justify the costs and impacts to the global product development effort?
• Have we evaluated the risk factors and benefits when we made the decisions to institute a heterogeneous environment?
• What would it have cost our enterprises if we had made the homogeneous decision? What have been the impacts? Would it have severely damaged our competitive advantages?

Are these issues that are worth serious discussions? Don’t we have a responsibility to constantly review our decisions in this area? Perhaps homogeneous works for some and heterogeneous is required by others?