The last few years has seen a dramatic increase in the deployment of software and business tools to manage and control the engineering information assets of organisations.

This is according to Bentley Systems which explains that this realisation that high integrity engineering content can be used to improve overall efficiency provided the opportunity for SAP to deliver its product lifecycle management solution.

According to the company, many local and foreign customers deployed mySAP PLM to manage and control amongst other things all of their engineering data and information. In some cases this engineering content was available only in paper format, in others it was available electronically. In all cases processes were followed to establish some form of engineering content baseline that could be used to create the index data required to find engineering content afterwards.

The growth path of the customer base is, however, reaching beyond the ability to simply find engineering content. The next level of value-add is the ability to visualise this content without the need for an original application program to be resident. Conventional wisdom was to create raster view files that can be viewed with a generic visualisation tool. Although it has some merits, this approach underestimates the value to be derived from exploiting the full engineering content and design business process. According to the company, the new paradigm for product or asset engineering and design is to embed and closely link engineering objects within design models to the business resident objects in the SAP solution. It is, furthermore, accepted as a minimum that these design objects can be accessed from the SAP business object, allowing for further interrogation of the engineering model.

Werner Simpson, Next Wave Holdings, CEO, comments: "What is clear is that the business requirement has grown beyond that of unintelligent raster content. Embedded business objects providing connectivity from engineering models to SAP business objects demands the availability and delivery of rich engineering content, reaching far beyond the boundaries of the traditional design office. It is, therefore, clear that a 'one size (visualisation application) fits all' approach is just not practical and cannot deliver high integrity engineering content demanded and expected in an SAP environment."

To this end, Bentley Systems of Exton, Pennsylvania and the Johannesburg based Next Wave Software embarked on a process to develop and deliver to Bentley/SAP customers a suite of software products capable of providing managed, rich engineering content. With a strong focus on internal users of engineering content, the software products will apply to client-server based architecture as well as content delivery to thin clients in a typical portals environment. In both these cases the key features of mySAP PLM is utilised together with the extensive range of Bentley AEC Content Management tools.

According to Bentley, a growing number of local and foreign users of Bentley and SAP are making use of the Bentley visualisation tools within their SAP PLM environment.

For more information contact Bentley Systems South Africa, 011 462 5811 or Next Wave Holdings, 011 791 7298, info@next-wavecbs.com