(Photo: Siemens website)

Common goal: Optimizing data sharing and reducing costs in a multi-CAD environment

Autodesk and Siemens announced that they have signed an interoperability agreement to help manufacturing companies reduce costs resulting from incompatibility between product development software applications and prevent potential data integrity issues.

Through this agreement, Autodesk and Siemens' PLM software divisions are taking steps to significantly improve compatibility between their software products. With this agreement, the two companies, leaders in the CAD software market, are expected to optimize data sharing and achieve the common goal of reducing costs in multi-CAD environments.

Today, manufacturing companies are under pressure to bring higher-quality products to market faster. At the same time, they face the challenge of increasing efficiency while reducing consumer costs. Most of these companies operate in environments composed of solutions from different CAD software vendors. These multi-CAD environments can exist between departments or between external partners within the supply chain. Consequently, compatibility between CAD software has emerged as a critical issue for design and engineering software users, and ensuring compatibility has become a major challenge for the manufacturing industry.

The interoperability agreement announced this time aims to reduce the overall effort and cost involved in supporting such multi-environments. In particular, by ensuring compatibility between the product families provided by Siemens and Autodesk, significant improvements are expected in various work environments where these software products are used together.

Under the terms of this agreement, both companies will share toolkit technology and exchange end-user software applications to build and market software applications that ensure mutual compatibility.

Lisa Campbell, Vice President of Manufacturing Strategy and Marketing at Autodesk, stated, “Interoperability has been one of the primary challenges customers face across the manufacturing industry. Accordingly, Autodesk has continuously strived to increase the openness of the environment using our technology platform.” She added, “Autodesk understands that customers mix and match products in their workflows, and providing the flexibility they require is our top priority.”

Dr. Stefan Jockusch, Vice President of PLM Software Strategy at Siemens, stated, “Incompatibility between various CAD systems has long been an issue negatively impacting manufacturers worldwide and is a major culprit in increasing production costs for a wide range of products, from automobiles and aircraft to smartphones and golf clubs.” He continued, “Siemens has been making leading efforts to resolve this incompatibility problem and has actively provided open software solutions as part of this initiative. Thanks to these open product families, compatibility has improved significantly, and this agreement marks another positive and important step forward in Siemens’ efforts to enhance openness and interoperability. Through this, we expect to contribute to cost reductions for manufacturers worldwide by fostering company-wide collaboration.”