IronCAD, LLC, the Innovative Design Collaboration Solutions Company, recently announced their participation in a new Chinese focused PLM Alliance officially announced by CAXA on December 8th, in Beijing.
CAXA is the market leader and the largest domestic CAD/CAM provider in China. The alliance incorporates over 30 years of combined experience and expertise in CAD/CAM/PDM and related areas from its partners, including Cmodes, CAPPFramework from China, AsiaTek from Taiwan and IronCAD from the U.S. The joint announcement signals an important message to the market. It symbolizes another stage of CAXA's alliance strategy by providing a unified brand name, solution and service to the IT demands of the manufacturing industry.
According to the announcement, the solution is called "CAXA Product Innovation and Collaboration Management Solutions". In particular, Product Innovation includes a series CAD/CAM software packages. Collaboration Management includes product data management (PDM), CAPP data management, production planning solutions with their associated consulting and deployment services and engineering data management (EDM) and personal data management tools. Companies can select one or an integration of multiple solutions and services depending on its own characteristics, requirements and implementation pace.
PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) can be viewed as an extension of CAD/CAM applications. It is part of the IT infrastructure of a company in conjunction with ERP, CRM, SCM and OA. Product is the source of value to a manufacturing company. PLM's role is to create and manage product related data through all stages, including customer requirements, order information, product development, production planning, manufacturing, maintenance service, etc. The objective is to efficiently achieve shorter time to market, assure product quality and reduce costs. Due to the rapid pace of globalization Chinese enterprises are being forced to speed up the adoption rate of IT technology. PLM is fast becoming the new focal point of industry after ERP.
