Recipe for Flexible Design Collaboration at Black & Decker
By Louise Elliott

Black & Decker tries ImpactXoft’s Instant Participation inside CATIA

Black & Decker produces two product lines aimed at two different groups of end-users: Black & Decker consumer electronics and personal power tools and DeWalt industrial tools. The Baltimore-based company has manufacturing operations in 10 countries and design operations in four. These dispersed operations mean that staff work across many time zones, making it difficult for them to work together and communicate with suppliers that are equally widespread.

All these people need to communicate and collaborate effectively, so Black & Decker’s CAD Support department looked for collaboration tools that work with their chosen MCAD system, CATIA Version 5. The timing could not have been better. The team discovered that Dassault Systemes, which develops CATIA, working with new MCAD player ImpactXoft (IX), planned to embed IX functional modeling and collaboration into CATIA.

Features and Functions Associated

“The combined product didn’t exist in 2002, when we started to consider the collaborative capabilities,” says Patti Terry, Black & Decker’s CAD Support manager. Therefore, starting in spring 2003, Terry’s team investigated the new collaborative system using standalone IXSpeeD. The actual deployment, however, will use IX incorporated into CATIA V5 Rev 13.

Terry, another colleague in CAD Support, and a member of the industrial design team worked together to try out the system. Terry says that IX proved easy to learn. In operation, she says, “users have a workbench area on the screen and text to explain icons used for modeling. IX has no feature tree, but does have an organizer that groups features independently of history. When we’re collaborating, we can see the team, can assign or review tasks, and send design data to other team members. It works like email, but on receipt, the design change can be merged into the receiving model.”

The Black & Decker team found that because all the design data in IX is associated with the feature and function, fewer files and drafts need to be created, “and conceptual design goes quickly. Integration with CATIA V5 gives us versatility we didn’t have before,” Terry adds.

For example, most of Black & Decker’s products have plastic housings—making the ability to design moldable shells very important. “The shelling feature in IX works very well for us. It enables variation of wall thicknesses and other details,” she says. “The functional model is geared toward molded shells, and works better for us than CATIA. We expect capabilities of both to be complementary for our purposes.”

Leveraging Networks

IX uses peer-to-peer architecture that takes advantage of networked software. This means that, “when people want to share data, they don’t send a whole CAD file—but rather a ‘recipe’ that makes it possible to pull up the file at the other end,” Terry says. The small file size speeds up the process.

According to Stefano Malnati, vice president of Product Management and Business Development for San Jose-based IX, the recipe consists of a “functional definition” of part of a design that an engineer wants to change. The engineer making the change picks the relevant part of the design to share, and the change shows up in a recipient’s collaboration inbox, where it can be merged directly into the existing version of the design. Any collaborative project starts with an agreed design baseline, and the system saves all of the various iterations generated until the team decides on the next baseline.

The concept of functional definition is specific to IX vocabulary and the organization of the CAD program. Instead of managing the design process by means of a feature tree and design history, the program offers tools that define shape features—such as the core, shell, and cavity of a mold. Users can see the presentational feature and choose to add incremental features that remain associated to the original feature rather than reflected in a list of historical activities. To modify a feature, the user clicks on it to bring it up.

“Designs can thus be created in any order and changed in any order,” says Malnati. Black & Decker will use the collaborative tools to share data and create recipes for both IX SPeeD’s functional modeling and standard CATIA designs. “We’ve tested the system across both programs,” Terry says, “and we can have a hybrid mix that uses both kinds of modeling. We can also save functional models in CATIA.”

Like other collaboration systems, IX Instant Participation enables the roles of different users to be defined up front. Different groups within the company need to input and use design data. In addition to the design engineers and industrial engineers who tested the system, “others need to view designs for different purposes; manufacturers need to see them; and analysts need design files to go into other interfaces,” she says.

Because IX Instant Participation can be used either synchronously or asynchronously, it enables a 24-hour work and communication day, Terry reports. “Sharing and merging design data occurs at the push of a button.”

How Instant Collaboration Works

The IX Instant Collaboration interface sits on the screen just below the design menu icons. It consists of a window that can be used for tracking changes and collaborative chat, with a number of different menu picks beneath it. These read: Inbox, Outbox, Sent items, Trash Bin, To Do, Chat, Activities, Members, Project, and Reconcile.

The system organizes all collaborative activities by project, and saves all changes to the project until the creation of the new baseline. A user making a change first chooses “Share” from a collaboration menu. This brings up a query asking with whom to share. The user chooses, and this action sends the change recipe to the chosen person’s inbox. The recipient right-clicks on the inbox, which then opens the file and merges the change into his copy of the design.

The recipient may receive the recipe while he’s at work, or may find it waiting in the inbox later on. Participants can use the various tools to discuss changes and future work.

When the time comes to accept changes, participants can see all the changes that have been exchanged, and then decide which to use. The system knows who originated each change, who received it, and what was done with it. To reconcile the iterations, the collaboration leader uses the Reconcile tool to validate the design and choose the version that will form the next baseline.

Terry points out that data management needs to be addressed when working collaboratively. “We will need to work out how to manage all this data - after going through the process of making changes and reconciling the design. Revision tracking needs to be agreed upon and approved—but we haven’t come far enough along with the process to have an answer yet.”

Malnati believes that data management will not present problems. He says, “In the CAA V5 environment, IX works in an integrated way with both SMARTEAM and ENOVIA. “ He adds that as a standalone program, IX is complementary to PDM, even homegrown systems.

The first stages of integration of IX within CATIA appeared in Rev. 12, released last fall. Black & Decker will begin implementation with Rev. 13, due in the spring of 2004.

Contributing Editor Louise Elliott is a freelance writer based in California. Offer her feedback on this article through de-feedback@helmers.com.