Microsoft's .Net for Engineering - Total Product Delivery
By Ken Vesprille D.H. Brown Associates

In design engineering, the Web's disruptive effect on the established way of doing business promises to lower the transaction cost of company-to-company interactions, opening new potential for inter-enterprise collaboration and outsourcing. Today, organizations seeking a competitive advantage look toward more global, integrated solutions as they explore increasingly effective ways to create market-driven products and reduce design and manufacturing costs. The impact of Web technology on their product-development processes and the overall company's bottom line now reaches into the corporate boardroom where the search continues for balanced, effective strategies to meet the challenge.

Microsoft jumps into this fast-moving environment with its .Net infrastructure initiative providing a Web-application and services platform targeting the needs of product-development engineers and the software application and system developers who supply their specialized tools. Whether your IT infrastructure is Microsoft, UNIX, or a heterogeneous mix of both environments, the .NET initiative will impact your every day way of doing business. The Fall COE 2001 General Session presentation, Microsoft's .NET for Engineering - Total Product Delivery, will expound on engineering process requirements and the impact of .NET.

Microsoft's .Net vision seeks to "empower discrete design and manufacturing enterprises to leverage the full power of the web - any time, any place, on any device." The core Microsoft .Net platform brings an array of server and client (including application empowered Rich Client) capabilities together with a suite of framework technologies and development tools for the creation of callable web services. The foundational capabilities offered by .Net's Web Services will allow independent software vendors (ISVs) to focus on their unique expertise to package and deliver web-enabled capabilities directly to design engineers or for use in combination by higher-level software systems. Both individual engineers and ISVs would selectively invoke the best-of-breed solutions and blend these service and support components into a full web-enabled product-development and e-commerce experience.

Efforts across the entire engineering world are moving digital interaction of the full product development and commerce process out across the extended supply-chain and into the direct customer base. Web-based architectures spur this shift of focus and level the playing field. Leading engineering organizations push for closely coupled inter-enterprise product design through visual collaboration. Manufacturing seeks to drive workflow and procurement across a global supply-chain with business-to-business (B2B) exchanges and Enterprise Requirements Planning (ERP) integration. Corporate marketing and sales look to import a greater share of engineering's intellectual-design property and synthesize a diverse collection of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions to bring their products to worldwide markets.

The issues underlying Total Product Delivery are daunting, however. In today's design engineering/product-development environment, enabling information mobility, increasing product-modeling completeness, and opening up supply-chain marketplaces are major challenges. Aspirations include enabling previously untouched inter-enterprise processes, expanding the Internet platform to accommodate a rapidly-expanding suite of solutions, and restructuring technology adoption through broader accessibility, lower cost of ownership, and compressed learning curves. Extended enterprise solutions are, in fact, emerging - from product concept to delivery.

Microsoft's .Net targets a comprehensive support solution - providing systems, network, and web-centric services for this fast changing environment. Working in partnership with leading design-engineering application providers, Microsoft's focus on engineering looks to leverage Microsoft's broad .Net technology infrastructure. Microsoft plans to spring board its long market and operating-system presence with newly targeted capabilities, core services, and technology standards for product-development and collaboration processes.

Today the complexity of a corporate enterprise's product-development process from initial concept through delivery is characterized at three levels:

• The Design, Validation, and Manufacturing base that encompasses product modeling, simulation, analysis, tooling, manufacturing, and assembly.

• A Product Definition, Synthesis, and Workflow level managing multiple product configurations, workflow, change control, and Bills of Material.

• The emerging Enterprise Objectives, Capabilities, and Constraints level seeking to manage overall corporate business goals, sales, marketing, facilities, resource management, and financial profitability.

Total Product Delivery looks to integrate the flow of intelligent data within a virtual environment across and between all three levels. The vision goes further, extending the challenge outward across multiple enterprises at each of the three levels in the product-development process as companies seek to interact more effectively together with their supply-chain partners.

As the corporate enterprise interacts with a supply-chain that has parallel, yet different, design, validation, and manufacturing processes and tools, a total product delivery solution must support collaborative interaction across those disparate environments. Higher within the enterprise, Product Data and Information Management (PDM/PIM) solutions must help transform engineering possibilities into product reality. Coordinated suites of Product Definition applications need to document and clarify the perspectives of various specialists. A "total" solution facilitates teamwork and decision-making in development collaborations, by communicating the relevance of new work and new changes to cross-functional teams. Bill of Material (BOM) release and change management remain the top Product Definition applications, with ERP integration a key, emerging requirement.

Companies want to increasingly link suppliers and partners into product-definition processes to leverage outside expertise, shift internal investment, and optimize performance. In a total product delivery environment, product-definition applications must support data access and application sharing via the web. B2B application collaboration remains a priority with approaches ranging from point-to-point links to hosted hubs.

Companies seeking to implement an any time, any where, on any device infrastructure face five daunting challenges: Intelligent Data Interchange, Effective Communication, Agile Scalability, Pragmatic Deployment, and Ready Accessibility. Microsoft's .Net focus on engineering targets tangible solutions to confront each of these challenges.

.Net's framework technology and development tools will allow ISVs to seamlessly web-enable their applications. By providing XML web services to manage and protect information and interactions between applications, devices, and other utilities, Microsoft's Web Services enables ISVs to offer a wealth of competing data and application capabilities over the web, such as contact information, task and time-management tools, notifications, application settings, and application access. They will share, combine, and leverage these common services automatically on behalf of their solutions. Design-engineering users will then be afforded the ability to mix and match best-of-breed solutions across their internal and supply-chain processes.

The .Net infrastructure vision places the engineer at the center of a universe of integrated toolsets. In a collaborative-design session, field data for a product's performance collected and managed by Product Support could be readily assessed, synthesized, and shared with supply-chain engineers to investigate product strengths and weaknesses. By invoking specialized Web Services applications over the Internet, simulation and analysis results can be used to reinforce intelligent decision making. Possible design changes would be smoothly transfered into the workflow with integrated access to change-control and BOM management across the extended enterprise.

In the past decade, Microsoft's impact on the Engineering Desktop bridged design-engineering organizations into a virtual-development environment within corporate walls. Microsoft's .Net promises to build a path outward for engineering into a global Total product Delivery world.

To hear more about this topic, please come and Dr. Vesprille present at the next COE Conference, October 1-3, 2001, at the Coronado Springs Resort in Orlando, Florida.

D.H. Brown Associates, Ins. (DHBA) is a leading IT research firm. This paper was published by DHBA's service in Product Commerce. For more information, please visit the D.H. Brown Web site: www.dhba.com.