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.

Our solution creates a hand-shaking process between engineering and resource planning to ensure efficient data integration and delivery

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.

Further discussing the core competencies of MechWorks PDM, Perry elaborates, “MechWorks PDM boasts unmatched security and facilitates selective access to enhance the overall protection of a product’s sensitive information.”

MechWorks PDM has the ability to assign roles to users based on their work designation in product development or resource planning and has options for additional security layers to protect product information of parts for highlyregulated industry sectors. MechWorks PDM also allows organizations to management multiple configurations of a document that facilitates increased visibility and efficiency in family product designs. Concurrently, MechWorks PDM’s open standard architecture allows clients to choose features best-suited to help them overcome their specific challenges.

Apart from MechWorks PDM, Integrated Partner Solutions provides custom services and training regimes to help clients make the most of their data integrations. Under its training portfolio, the company offers standard and custom services to aid clients in effectively leveraging MechWorks PDM with their ERP/SAP data integrations. Integrated Partner Solutions’ custom services include reporting inconsistent data issues between a client’s disconnected ERP/SAP data and their engineering environment, so data scrubbing can take place before fully integrating the disconnected environments. Additionally, these reports also assist users in choosing which set of data to archive, thereby increasing their visibility and ability to manage the data delivery of their product information.

Looking ahead, Integrated Partner Solutions plans to grow its clientele through the expansion of its product and services portfolio, which will allow for the delivery of advanced reporting with higher visibility and more efficient workflows. “We aim to continue developing tighter integration avenues to help our clients seamlessly integrate their engineering product data with ERP/SAP systems focusing on streamlining their core processes,” concludes Perry.