Darmstadt, May 2007 - Enhancing engineering networks and setting standards together – that was the slogan for the tenth ProSTEP iViP Symposiums, which took place on 25 and 26 April in Volkswagen's home town of Wolfsburg. It was sponsored by VW and IBM. The slogan not only offered a central theme which ran through the 32 lectures and four workshops. In the way it was organised, the event also demonstrated that the ProSTEP iViP association is seen by industry as a central hub for successful networked collaboration. The record results of 2005 were repeated once again and in some instances exceeded.

At the opening of the symposium, Ulrich Ahle of Siemens Business Services and Member of the Association's Board of Management welcomed 370 participants from 14 countries. This was just about double the number that attended the first event in 1998. The levels of the last few events were thus maintained for the third time in a row. The number of firms contributing specialists to this network even rose further from 120 the previous year to 139, an increase of 16%. With 21 exhibitors, optimum use was made of the available space at CongressPark Wolfsburg in accommodating the stands from IT suppliers and systems integrators. It was noticeable that the participants are becoming younger. The new generation of engineers and IT specialists obviously believe in innovation through interdisciplinary cooperation and standardisation.

The introductory keynote address, given by Dr. Detlev Hoge, Head of Product Data Management at Volkswagen Group, underlined the importance of networked collaboration. No longer are great inventions born of all-rounders and genius inventors; they are born of teams including people from inside the organisation and external partners from across the world. In the face of the flood of data, which is increasing at break-neck pace in society and industry, he formulated the thesis that what distinguishes the leaders in the field from the rest is the way in which a company deals with this data, and how it uses it to generate information and, above all, knowledge. "Whilst data is, for the most part, easy to collect and structure, real information needs analysis and interpretation". Its highest form, knowledge, remains 80% in our heads and "it is only when we talk to one an-other," says Dr. Hoge, "that this intellectual capital can be used."

Buddy Raines, CTO PLM (product lifecycle management), from the Software Group IBM, referred in his key-note speech to a world-wide CEO study that was conducted the previous year. 75% of those questioned quoted cooperation with partners as the most important key for innovation. At the same time, they saw the actual op-portunities for them to establish that kind of collaboration as one of the biggest current deficits.

In response to these challenges, Buddy Raines explained the strategy adopted by IBM, whereby a 'SOA for PLM', that it to say, a service orientated architecture for the integration of PLM building blocks, was introduced at the end of 2006 as a PDIF (Product Development Integration Framework). An approach with which IBM is entering new territory, no longer just as a partner of Dassault Systèmes, but also as a provider of a neutral framework: a significant number of leading software producers and system integrators were already available to be brought on board as strategic partners.

It became clear in numerous other lectures during the course of the two days, that SOA is poised to give new impetus in virtually all areas of applications - from SAP's service-based records management system at Pierburg to the integrative solution, designed to ensure standardised procedures right across 500 to 1,000 different systems at VW as well as across its wholesaler and dealer network. For the moment, however, as most lectures indicated, the scene continues to be dominated by pragmatic, ad-hoc solutions. People were concerned about standardised checks on data quality, better correspondence of data as between the mechanical components and the electronics in the design of wiring harnesses, and the harmonisation of Engineering Change Management between OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and suppliers, to name but a few of the numerous issues raised.

Everyone is talking about process orientation. But does the introduction of IT really come under the definition of a 'clean' process? Or is it the reverse? Member of the Association's Board of Management, Professor Dr. Mar-tin Eigner, of the University of Kaiserlautern, sought to criticise the latter in his keynote speech "Process follows IT?" on the afternoon of the first day, but came to the conclusion that there could be fundamental technological innovations, which permit hitherto unknown procedures or processes. New software tools, he suggested, are needed to be able to go further than simply perfecting the ways in which designs are detailed using CAD. He cited Engineering Morphing, i.e. the process of intuitively, interactively and creatively changing geometries well in advance of defining the details, as an example of something which is about to move out of the realms of theory and become a marketable product. "As an association which includes academics, users and IT manufacturers, we are an institution unique on the world stage. We should take advantage of that in order, together, to foster new developments relevant to the practical needs of industry."

Increasingly, the expertise of the engineer is bound up with a digital world and must be stored as data and communicated worldwide. This need is even more crucial because of the way in which the processes for product development are also being disseminated on an increasing scale. Dr. Hoge had already touched on the question of adequate data security at the beginning, and this theme was taken up again and developed further on the second day in the two concluding keynote speeches by Dr. Uwe von Lukas, Zentrum für Graphische Datenverarbeitung (Centre for Graphical Data Processing) in Rostock and Wilhelm Kerschbaum, Head of IT for Suppliers and Vehicle Project Management for the BMW group.

The event abundantly demonstrated that the association is indisputably alive and is responding appropriately, in its symposia, to the issues of the day. Now perhaps really is the time, as Professor Eigner suggests, to go a step further and break new ground: not only in the direction of standardisation and better use of IT but also in the direction of initiatives and support for innovations in IT itself.