Author: Jérémy Bonvoisin

What is Material Data Management?

When someone asks me something about Material Data Management, I always counter by asking what exactly is meant by “material”. This may not be the answer the other person expects at that moment, but it saves us both long minutes of confusion and talking past each other. The reason: not all materials are the same.

About the ambiguity of language

As a Frenchman in Germany, I am used to the fact that ambiguity leads to misunderstandings. Some expressions cannot be translated one-to-one from one language to another – at least not in such a way that it is immediately clear to everyone what is meant. A well-known example is the word “Gemütlichkeit”. The term only exists in German. More insidious, however, are the so-called false friends: word pairs such as “gift” in English and “Gift” in German. They look the same, but the meaning is fundamentally different. Even as an experienced polyglot, one is not protected from this. For example, my French interlocutors may seem irritated when I say that something has “irrité” me, meaning that something has surprised me. However, they understand this to mean that I have got some kind of skin rash out of sheer annoyance.

What can lead to funny and even sometimes slightly embarrassing situations in everyday life often causes inefficiency in the working world. To find examples, we don’t even have to look in an international context: Even within a German-speaking organization, not everyone necessarily speaks the same language. This is not due to the strong dialects in many places, but to the disciplinary nature of the language: Different people with different qualifications or expertise can understand different things by the same word.

And that brings me to the topic of this article. More precisely, to the multilingual mesh and the interdisciplinary ambiguity of the word “material”, whose galactic confusion around the terminology I would like to resolve.

Material is not equal to material

Enterprise software is a lot about managing materials and their data. There are great solutions for this. They are called Materials Management or Materials Data Management or even Master Material Data Management. The names sound very similar and are often used synonymously in practice. Yet they refer to completely different things. Freely following the motto “material is equal to material”, it is overlooked that the word can have a different meaning for different disciplines and things are lumped together that have little to do with each other. Confusion and misunderstanding are guaranteed.

Differences within the disciplines

In production logistics or material requirements planning, a material is a logistical unit, a resource that is needed for some value-adding process. Goods that can be purchased, such as a screw, a flange, a spindle, a tire, and so on. The art of sensibly procuring, moving and storing materials is called “Materialwirtschaft” in German and Materials Management in English.

In the context of product development, materials in this sense do not play a role. Development is not interested in the hood and where it is stored, but only in its description. To put it in the language of information technology: Development defines classes, production logistics manages instances of these classes. However, the concept of material reappears here as well, because in linguistic usage, items, parts, and assemblies are readily called materials. The reason for this is that they become materials in the sense of production logistics at the interface between PLM and ERP. This gives rise to misleading terms such as Material Management or Material Data Management. It would be more correct to speak of Master Data Management in the sense of parts master management.

In engineering (including design and simulation), the word material describes the physical composition of an object in the sense of materials science or materials technology: i.e., whether an object is made of wood, PA66, Inconel, or GFRP, for example. This is obvious. The management of all information about materials and their properties is called Material Data Management. Confusingly, the acronym MDM also stands for Master Data Management, which is not particularly conducive to sharpening the terms.

Different disciplines, different meanings of the word material

Conclusion

The confusion is great. PLM solutions that are tailored to the respective disciplines provide a remedy. They serve the different requirements optimally and thus ensure better collaboration overall. With Master Data Management as a core PDM function, all parts master data can be kept consistent and managed efficiently. Modern Material Data Management stores all information on materials and serves as a reference for the entire product development process. Material Compliance helps document the quality-checked delivery of regulated materials and precursors and ensures that only approved substances are processed. With interfaces to ERP systems, digital materials (in the sense of development) then also easily make the step into the physical world and become materials in the sense of production logistics.

Of describing and showing in product development

“I notice you don’t really understand what I’m talking about. Wait a minute, I’ll show you.” Often communication fails when people are forced to describe things instead of showing them. Because they are either out of reach or because they simply don’t exist in real life. Like products that are still in the development stage. That’s why designers are downright DIY experts. With a product idea in mind, they quickly build a prototype with cardboard and glue. In this way, they succeed in showing what is difficult to put into words. This is exactly what efficient product development processes need and can be achieved through deeper integration of 3D visualization functions into the PLM system.

A picture is worth a thousand words

The value added by images over pure text is something we take for granted these days in a multimedia world. On Instagram and elsewhere, text only underscores what has already been captured in the image. But how much of this self-evidence has arrived in the IT systems that support the work of manufacturing companies? In my perception, describing is still more important than showing: The majority of the screens contain characters, words, tables and sentences.

Since the spread of CAD systems, especially in PLM applications, there has been no shortage of images. Hardly any product is manufactured before it has been designed in advance as a (3D) image. The 3D model is a natural tool in product development and in times of increasing product individualization an ideal tool for communication around the product. From chairs to electric cars: across all industries, products can be individually configured online and viewed in 3D before they are ordered and produced.

Why does enterprise software still remain so text-heavy?

CAD software licenses are expensive. Companies therefore often only equip a few workstations with it. In addition, CAD software as proprietary file formats cannot be easily opened by other programs. Thus, access to 3D geometries remains limited to an exclusive club.

If this hurdle is overcome, for example with neutral 3D viewers, the question of how 3D geometry and text can best be combined with the operating UIs of the enterprise software still remains. Beyond the fanciful visions of the future concerning data handling with VR/AR à la Minority Report, there is still a lack of concepts in reality for combining information from 3D models and databases in a uniform operating pattern.

So, where do we go next?

The first step is to bring 3D geometries into the UI alongside the usual textual content. In addition to displaying and rotating, a basic function is the ability to navigate inside the model in order to view individual components in detail by selectively showing and hiding them. Functions such as entering, saving and sharing annotations on the 3D model are also helpful for effective communication within the team. Furthermore, additional Digital Mock Up (DMU) calculation functions can support certain decision-making processes. Such as a neighborhood search to analyze the impact of an engineering change. Or a model comparison to subsequently understand the scope of this change.

In the second step, geometric and textual information must be combined in the UI. This creates an integrated user interface that offers added value in terms of content. Moreover, how would it be if the 3D model in PLM applications no longer served as an illustration of the parts list but, conversely, the parts master data enriched the 3D geometries? Or if tables and textual hyperlinks are abolished and a real geometric or spatial navigation is available? Or if users can visually browse the parts inventory like in a warehouse instead of tracking down numbers in a list? Or, or, or.

We have become so accustomed to working with strings in information technology (I’m thinking of command lines, relational databases, hyperlinks and so on) that other operating patterns seem unthinkable. Here it is time to rethink and unleash the visual power of 3D geometry to communicate quickly and accurately in business processes.

In my German-language webcast on October 7, 2021, you will learn how to make 3D visualization and inspection functionality accessible to all PLM users throughout the product lifecycle and ensure seamless integration of geometric and PLM data – in one interface, without having to jump to expensive standalone viewers.