Integrated Partner Solutions: Enabling Seamless Product Data Integration

Over the last decade, technological advancements have driven the engineering realm into adopting a more digital product development process. Today, manufacturing organizations deploy various “focused” software-driven applications (best-in-class solutions) to manage targeted portions of their overall product lifecycle. Now, as these varied solutions are mostly developed by different companies, data integration has become a critical aspect in aiding manufacturers to link the data from engineering departments with their enterprise resource planning (ERP/SAP) systems. However, as most ERP/SAP solutions do not account for the design changes that occur during the development of a product, organizations struggle to fully document the impact of product revisions directly within their ERP/SAP deployments. Addressing this challenge with their unique data integration services and core product, MechWorks PDM, is Wisconsin-based Integrated Partner Solutions. “Our solution efficiently handles revisions and improves a client’s visibility with respect to their product data, as well as creates a hand-shaking process between engineering and resource planning to ensure efficient data integration and delivery,” says Gene Perry, director at Integrated Partner Solutions.

MechWorks PDM is designed to mitigate issues concerning the engineering data integration of a product’s item-master record and/or its bill-of-materials. Conventionally, engineers had to repetitively enter important details of a product’s attributes—its required material, part number, and more—into their disconnected (PDM/PLM) applications and their ERP/SAP systems. This legacy manual process is cumbersome and does not have an avenue to ensure data changes during product revisions. The manual data manipulation amongst disconnected applications is inefficient and frequently prone to costly errors. With MechWorks PDM’s hand-shaking approach, engineers only have to enter the critical attributes of a product once and data is pushed to the relevant ERP/SAP systems through workflow processes. At the same time, to minimize inaccuracies, Integrated Partner Solutions’ offering allows the organization to configure the specific properties that need to be vertically integrated during the workflow’s approval/rejection process. Similarly, MechWorks PDM enables engineers to seamlessly communicate with ERP/SAP systems and reduce instances of re-entering product data.