Composer for All Your BOMs
With so many different perspectives on the BOM in today’s organizations, companies have come to expect that different departments will be creating and re-creating content to describe their products. Some will do it with Microsoft Excel, some with Microsoft Word, others with Adobe Illustrator, and others still with an alternative CAD package like AutoCAD. With new tools like 3DVIA Composer, all of this extra effort can be saved. Once metadata is stored in a set of CAD files, 3DVIA Composer lets users slice and dice the content and BOM information in whatever way is relevant for a particular audience, with full associativity for downstream changes. Setting xBOM management in PDM aside, let’s look at how 3DVIA Composer can present very different views of a product’s BOM, visually. Continue Reading
BOM (Bill of Material) management discussions can get really tricky. Just perform a search on the definition of a Bill of Material and you will find a multitude of definitions out on the web. It is likely it even means different things to different people within your organization. A CAD engineer is focused mainly on the physical structure of the product; a manufacturing engineer would be comfortable with a “As Manufactured” view of the product; the Service department may need a view into product BOM when ordering replacement parts, while, Purchasing is concerned with the latest version of BOM to make sure they are ordering the correct components. 
Regulatory compliance of materials and substances used within products is a monumental issue faced by most companies. Your supply base needs to be made aware of the compliance requirements and certify that their products do not exceed threshold levels of specific materials. The issue is compounded as your supply chain gets more and more complex. Different states have different regulations and some have much stricter product material laws than others. It gets even harder if your products are delivered globally, since different countries all have different regulations and different reporting structures. Fortunately, ENOVIA V6 can offer some solutions to these complex problems. 
Microsoft recently introduced a product called PowerPivot. You may have heard about it under it’s code name Gemini. The idea of PowerPivot is simple: allow Microsoft Excel users to quickly filter, analyze and display massive amounts of data and share their findings via SharePoint. PowerPivot allows users to build analytic information by pulling data from various data sources throughout the company. In Microsoft’s words PowerPivot is a “business intelligence application that enables business users to integrate many data sources, including Web data.” 
As you may know, Aras offers standard Project Management, Quality Planning, and Configuration Management solutions for their Innovator product. What you might not know is that there is also a whole community of other open source solutions and projects that are available to download and add to your Innovator environment. These solutions range from integrations to CATIA, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Dynamics to examples of workflow automation. You can find the complete list of solutions by selecting the Projects tab at the top of practically any page on the 
Not too long ago, Dassault Systemes announced integration between 3DVIA Composer and ENOVIA SmarTeam enabling companies to more closely integrate technical publications processes with that of the source data in engineering, namely CAD data. The 3DVIA Composer Integration consists of two pieces; a server component (TS9), and a client component (TC9). Configuration of the integration in a single site SmarTeam environment is straightforward, but there are additional considerations when deploying with ENOVIA SmarTeam Multi-Site. 
Most people have come to expect that search results change from one day to the next. With millions of web pages being created annually, it is not surprising that search results would vary in this way. But many people are surprised to learn that search results can differ from person to person also. If you haven’t been using Google-related services (with a Google account) for some time, you may not be able to witness this yourself, but the effect is documented several places on the Web: Google tailors search results based on the company’s interpretation of your search history. 
