Longview Advisors Publishes 2008 Collaboration & Interoperability Market Report

Longview Advisors has released their 2008 Collaboration & Interoperability Market Report. The Report includes results and analysis from Longview’s fourth annual Collaboration & Interoperability best practices survey, along with articles on related industry topics. The Report is free to the public.

The free annual publication compiles results from Longview’s survey, containing responses from 538 manufacturing professionals in subjects like data exchange practices, preferred platforms and formats, 3D data handling and deployment processes, tool requirements matching, CAD translation effectiveness and other related topics. The publication marks the fourth consecutive survey by Longview Advisors, and the largest such survey ever conducted.

For the first time this year, the Report also includes a collection of invited papers examining the latest trends, issues, and technologies in collaboration and interoperability.

“One of the most revealing facts uncovered in our survey is that 61 percent of respondents report that their typical engineer spends between three and ten hours each week repairing CAD data they receive from others,” says David Prawel, CEO of Longview Advisors. “To make matters worse, only 33 percent of respondents report using data translation software tools to aid in this problem, despite the fact that 45 percent of respondents claim their data translation tools work perfectly well, automatically, better than 75 percent of the time! Clearly, engineers are fixing data problems manually, instead of engineering better products. Managers really need to start looking at the incredible waste this represents, especially in light of all those lean initiatives out there, and invest in software tools to do the job.

“Another very interesting fact the survey uncovered is that 17 percent of respondents send or receive more than 10,000 data files each month,” Prawel continues. “Imagine the time that could be saved if 15 minutes could be shaved from every one of these transactions.”