Members of AdCoMS Technology Project Use ENOVIA to Implement Innovative Configuration Management Best Practices

Advanced Configuration Management System (AdCoMS) members have selected ENOVIAvpm, and IBM Engineering Solutions services to implement innovative Configuration Management capabilities that have been presented to more than 200 attendees from the Aerospace and Automotive industries during the CM Europe conference in Manchester (United Kingdom) from February 15 to February 17, 2000.

Torino (Italy) February 21, 2000--AdCoMS, a three-year ESPRIT development project, is a forum for close collaboration between four major European aircraft manufacturers (Alenia, British Aerospace, CASA, Dasa), their strategic IT service providers (IBM, Computer Science Corporation, Katchewski and Partners) and Leeds University. AdCoMS partners worked together to define new principles for Advanced Configuration Management. They delivered their conclusions as a set of best practices documented in reports, and have implemented a pilot demonstrator on ENOVIAvpm as a proof-of-concept to their innovations to be tested inside their companies. This pilot also constitutes the base for future solutions which are now discussed with Dassault Systemes.

The aim of AdCoMS is to solve issues raised when multiple companies located at many sites work together on complex product development with different processes and PDM systems. The project proposes a set of innovative practices that can be implemented to compensate for shortcomings in current working methods and PDM systems.

More specifically, AdCoMS focuses on all product life cycle steps, from initial concept phase to in-service phase. It defines how to improve the capability to maintain under control the Configuration Management processes within the extended enterprise focussing on the following areas:

• The implementation of the customer requirements all along product life cycle steps
• The relationships between all the elements of the product in terms of functional or physical "Interface Agreements" established during the product definition cycle
• The capability to perform forward and backward navigation to trace item interdependencies.

<p/>

Dr. Bernardino Chiavola, AdCoMS project manager, Alenia, explained, "We chose ENOVIAvpm after an extensive evaluation of product's functions, and of the capabilities of IBM Engineering Services to implement new AdCoMS concepts very quickly."