Digitizing engineering processes – the Munich PLM Symposium 2017

The second Munich PLM Symposium was held at the Munich University of Applied Sciences on  September 13, 2017. According to Prof. Dr. Vahid Salehi “to present the current applications and implementations with regard to digitization in science and industry and to present future potentials of the technologies.”
We at NTT DATA, as founding member of the MPLM Advisory Board, actively helped shape the event. At the booth, our experts from the Innovation & Product Lifecycle Management Competence Center were available for discussions with the around 100 participants.

Whitepaper Autonomous Drive

Our 80 pages in print whitepaper “When the car takes control – A look into the future of autonomous driving” raised special interest. With companies such as Audi, Autoliv, BMW, Dräxlmaier, MAN Truck & Bus, Osram, Porsche, Schaeffler and Volkswagen, some companies that are active in this strategic theme of the automotive industry were among the participants. In his presentation “Driving into Systems Engineering”, Thomas Kriegel from Audi gave a very clear picture of the systems involved, such as Cameras, radar, lidar, sensor fusion and actuators for longitudinal and lateral dynamics.

 

DevOps for PLM

In the presentation “State-of-the-art software engineering for PLM”, Dr. Andreas Nordgren from BMW and Jens Krueger from NTT DATA presented the current challenges and solutions for larger PLM implementation projects.
The introduction of PLM platforms in larger organizations is usually an extensive IT project with a high percentage of configuration and customizing. Even if current programming languages ​​such as Java are used for system extensions, the practices regarding software engineering and IT project management are rarely state-of-the-art. Agile methods, continuous integration or even DevOps are rarely used in practice. The TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of a PLM implementation is mainly determined by maintenance and operating costs (about 70-80%). However, the drivers for these high follow-up costs are already determined during the software development by architecture and design.
Dr. Andreas Nordgren reported on experiences in building a continuous integration pipeline for the PLM platform of the BMW Brilliance Automotive Joint Venture in China. In larger organizations and in longer-running projects, the transfer of code between different organizational units and subcontractors must also be considered. This can be achieved with development guidelines, code reviews, static code quality checks and structured knowledge transfer sessions.

NTT DATA Altemista – Best Practices for DevOps

In the presentation and on our booth, we presented our integrated DevOps platform for Siemens Teamcenter PLM for the first time. NTT DATA Altemista is an Openshift-based cloud platform with integrated development tools including source code management, build management, test automation including static code analysis and deployment. The cloud approach allows simple generation of new environments for development, testing and, if necessary, production with worldwide access.

Conclusion

With good organization and interesting presentations on “Digitization engineering processes”, Prof. Dr. Vahid Salehi has created a provider-independent conference, which serves the networking of PLM experts in southern Germany and beyond. We are looking forward to the Munich PLM Symposium 2018.

Note: cross-post from the NTT DATA blog at http://emea.nttdata.com/blog/en