In today’s manufacturing environment, accelerating product development cycles can be your single greatest competitive advantage. The biggest obstacle? Manual processes that keep valuable design data out of the hands of the key players who need it most, including manufacturing, purchasing, and external suppliers. Some manufacturers turn to product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions. However, not all manufacturers want the hassle of the end-to-end process reengineering demanded by PLM. That’s where Autodesk has taken a practical approach to data management.

Smarter Business Decisions Start with Smarter Data Management

Because the Autodesk data management solution is modular, you can implement it at your own pace, without disrupting business processes. With better data management, you can ensure design reuse and maximize your return on investment in design data. Use design data across the manufacturing process to drive smarter business decisions by all team members. Automate the key processes that determine product design and manufacturing. And achieve maximum product visibility and collaboration with suppliers and customers. As a result, development cycles speed up and products get to market faster.

Data Management for All

Whether you’re in product design, sales, or manufacturing, you can benefit from Autodesk data management by keeping valuable design data in the hands of key players.

• Engineering and Design—Eliminate work-in-progress problems like wasting time searching for and re-creating designs already completed. Instead, quickly find specific components or whole designs to reuse and share. Autodesk® Vault enables you to store designs in a single, secure location for easy sharing and prevents the unauthorized modification of design files, making overwrites a thing of the past.
• Manufacturing and Purchasing—Are the designs you manufacture accurate and approved? Autodesk® Productstream™software helps the extended team be more efficient by ensuring that engineering changes are properly routed and approved and that bills of materials are managed and accurate before a product enters the manufacturing phase. In addition, it provides your extended team access to the latest engineering data by linking directly into many popular enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing resource planning (MRP) systems, helping you improve planning and forecasting while reducing manual data-entry errors.
• Customers and Suppliers—Use the Autodesk Streamline® online project collaboration service with the Autodesk® DWF™ (Design Web Format™) file format to automate and simplify the sharing of design data and product information with customers. Autodesk Streamline helps you achieve maximum project visibility and collaboration by more tightly integrating you with your customers and suppliers. The DWF format delivers compact and secure files, ensuring the retention of rich design data and allowing quick review, markup, and round-tripping of changes without the original creation software. That means faster design iterations and better productivity.

Whatever your role in the design and manufacturing process, the Autodesk data management solution addresses crucial business issues, helping your team collaborate more effectively, use design data better, and get the job done faster.