Shop talk

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"We want so-called concurrent engineering," says Bernhard Zechmann, manager of application strategy for Bertrandt.

"We want to have our different locations work together on one product. [Today] we have locations that are not able to synchronize their data, and they work separately," Zechmann adds.

The company so far has spent nearly $1.8 million on a pilot with Enovia at its core that will take three to five years to roll out. The goal is a process-centric system that creates a set of relationships between the different part designs used to construct a product and manage those relationships within a workflow that includes such steps as release and change management, bill of materials, and data exchange.

"What we are creating is a link between the process and the product," he says.

The robots still might hog all the annual report publicity shots, but the factory of the future will be driven by invisible deployments of software tools such as PLM, reaching out across geographically distributed organizations over industry-standard wired and wireless networks.