Schott Systeme GmbH receive CAD/CAM award

Schott Systeme GmbH receive CAD/CAM Innovator of the year award for providing company wide time saving IT tools.

Towards the end of January, the annual event of deciding upon the most innovative CAD CAM products for the previous year was undertaken by German based magazine, Hanser CAD CAM.

Seen as an essential guide to new innovations within the industry, the 'Innovator of the Year' awards are given to those companies that strive to develope new areas of CAD and CAM.

Innovation using 'Self Help' IT Tools.

One of the more remarkable winners this year was Schott Systeme GmbH, due to that fact that the award was given for their 'IT Developer Network' concept, concentrating more on providing customers with IT 'Self Help' tools as opposed to just CAD and CAM.

The reason behind this change of focus by Schott Systeme can be attributed to two main reasons.

Already their CAD/CAM software 'Pictures by PC' holds a mature status after 20 years on the market, and the software includes the latest CAD/CAM technologies such as 5 axis simultaneous machining.

However they also identified a real need for companies to increase the efficiency of their every day tasks by providing a range of automated 'Self Help' IT tools.

Software self help tools using 'Dragees'.

Ideal for those enterprises who cannot afford fully integrated systems or expensive external software advisors, these software development aids or 'Dragees' as they are often better known provide a kind of 'IT self help' for all IT and company staff.

The subscription based IT Developer Network gives users instant access to an ever increasing list of useful routines, with one of the first being their 'Info System'.

Where can the most time be saved within everyday common tasks across an entire company?.

The original ideas for the 'Info System' were originally born from this very question.

After consulting some of their customers, it soon became apparent that across an entire company, often most time was lost searching for information.

Sadly the complexity of EDM/PDM systems, and the requirement with these systems to lock information away in databases and vaults have put many people off using such software to catalogue and store information.

Because of this, Schott Systeme took the approach of not altering the original files in any way, but instead attaching attributes and keywords with XMP data.

The Microsoft Index Server then re-indexes all files across the network on a regular basis, and due to no database or vault being used, the original data is left intact and the search times across 500 Gigabytes of information is approximately 5 seconds.

This includes searching through the contents of text documents such as Word and PDF files.

Creating a Knowledge Database - The second customer request was to somehow catalogue bitmaps, especially as large amounts of a companies information is often stored as scanned images of faxed letters, photographs or design sketches for example.

Here Schott Systeme again enabled the attachment of keyword data to the bitmaps with XMP, but also included a number of other tools such as image viewers and the ability to convert multiple bitmaps into pdf documents for storage.

An interesting result of this was not only companies just cataloguing existing information, but they starting to supply the majority of their computer users each with a low cost scanner to scan, store and catalogue other bitmap information that might be useful to the company such as manufacturing standards, technical explanations and research material.

The result in a very short time was a complete knowledge base of information, remembering again the 5 second search time across 500 Gigabytes.

Keeping the cost low - One final requirement was to keep the purchase and more importantly implementation cost low.

For this reason Schott Systeme only charge an annual fee of 1,000 Euros for a ten seat lisence, with the only prerequisite being the purchase of one seat of their 2D CAD software to run background operations as well as providing a source for the creation of vector graphics across the whole company.

Implementation of all the IT Developer Network tools are straight forward, in most cases being simple enough to get running by normal IT staff.

The important thing to remember here is this cost is for the complete IT Developer network tools.

'Bix' Programming Language - The basis for the developer network is the inbuilt 'Bix' programming language.

Since the initial development of their CAD/CAM software over 20 years ago, Schott Systeme GmbH have included a complete programming language called 'Bix' that enabled users to create custom built routines to automate any number of tasks.

Where Bix differs from many programming languages is its total openness and ability to link to and control other Windows based PC software.

Not only can routines be created to automate the CAD/CAM software itself, but in addition 'Bix' can communicate with any software that supplies an interface for data transfer such as ASCII, DDE, OLE, Active X, ODBC or the like.

This has meant the software can provide a means to link almost any two programmes together, helping with the integration of technical and commercial programmes such as ERP, BDE, PPS, CAD/CAM and FEM.

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