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To succeed in the global marketplace, companies in highly competitive fields must be able to form partnerships rapidly. It is becoming less and less viable for a corporation of any size to operate only locally, regionally or even nationally. Business opportunities are global; access is global; competition is global. Canadian companies are not only competing with each other but also with U.S., European, Asian or worldwide enterprises. Survival and prosperity depend on a business’s ability to digitally connect and digitally interact with local and remote opportunities.
Increasingly, firms in the aerospace and defence sectors are turning to electronic commerce alternatives such as electronic data interchange and technical data interchange to make these partnerships more efficient. But for many companies wanting to share the complex technical data output of computer-assisted design (CAD) and computer-assisted manufacturing (CAM), much of the promise of technical data interchange remains unrealized. Technical data, a crucial resource of any enterprise, is often captive to the software system in which it was first created.
The solution to many of these problems can be found by using tools based on an evolving standard called STEP (Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data). Internationally recognized and based on a public data model, an open architecture and shareable data, STEP-conformant software tools enable companies to effectively exchange and share product information with their worldwide partners, customers, subcontractors and suppliers, as well as internally.
STEP is an international standard, which gives it a distinct advantage over company, industry and national standards. As such, a corporation executing product design can transmit all the information required for manufacturing to branch plants or subcontractors anywhere in the world.
The impact of implementing STEP for all manufacturers, large and small, is that costly errors and wasted efforts can be avoided. Not only does STEP implementation impact the "bottom line" directly, it also has a salutary effect on the product delivered and on customer satisfaction. Over the longer term, during the product life cycle, support is simpler, faster and less expensive. These advantages apply not only to the support function, but also to product enhancement. STEP does not accomplish all of these benefits itself but does enable these benefits to be achievable. It is not the only answer but it is an important part of the answer.
Many companies that have implemented STEP have seen significant improvements in the efficiency of their operations. They have reduced design development times by 10 to 40 percent, and realized cost savings of 5 to 30 percent in the management of technical data. In addition to time and cost reduction opportunities, STEP will allow companies to reuse design and manufacturing data long after it was originally created. This is an especially important consideration when developing complex products such as aircraft and ships, which have life cycles of 30 to 40 years or more.
The information contained in this booklet introduces STEP to corporate managers and gives them leads for pursuing the matter further. It was published by Industry Canada in cooperation with CanSTEP of the Integrated Manufaturing Technologies Institute of the National Research Council Canada, to assist Canadian companies seeking to exploit the competitive opportunities presented by electronic commerce.
