CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

12 December 2007

Implementation Investments

Right Hemisphere 5 Deep Server Software Ships to First Customers Sikorsky Aircraft and Joy Mining Machinery

Announced earlier this year, Right Hemisphere 5 Deep ServerT enterprise software is now generally available and being implemented at a number of leading manufacturers such as Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation and Joy Mining Machinery. Deep Server software provides an automated, unified, and secure enterprise-wide media communication and collaboration environment that anyone can use to improve the quality and speed of decision making among designers, managers, suppliers and customers. The new software release features a media asset management component that can merge and manage product information from disparate enterprise systems, including product data management (PDM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems to fully support a Model Based Definition (MBD) engineering communications strategy. The latest version of Deep Server also includes new and significantly enhanced metadata search and management capabilities as well as a number of other new and enhanced features.

"Improving time to market and the bottom line has not gone away as a critical issue. With intense global competition, achieving these goals can be even more challenging," said Mark Thomas, president, founder and CTO at Right Hemisphere. "Our Deep Server software helps manufacturers achieve these goals across multiple languages and disciplines, inside and outside the organization. It does this by managing and combining data from multiple graphic and non graphic sources for use in communication, collaboration and decision making. Deep Server is the first solution to integrate a company's product media content creation with the real-time product updates and data stores in its engineering and ERP systems. By providing a single data structure for publishing and management, Deep Server saves customers time, reduces errors and improves decision making."

First Customer Deployments

Among the first group of manufacturers to implement Right Hemisphere 5 Deep Server software is Joy Mining Machinery, the world's leading provider of mining equipment and services. "We need to produce our technical publications faster while simultaneously bumping up the quality of these publications," said Dan Armour, manager of technical services at Joy. "Deep Server promises to accelerate our content creation process by automatically reusing existing CAD data. By making it faster and easier to increase the amount of 3D and interactive content in our maintenance training classes, we can also reasonably expect these documents to be much more effective at transferring knowledge to our service personnel and to our customers."

Armour continued, "We're also very interested in Deep Server's ability to publish product graphics and other data, such as product manufacturing information, into a secure 3D Adobe PDF file. Being a global company with offices and customers around the world, this is a particularly attractive option for communicating with our customers and suppliers without potentially compromising intellectual property by sharing actual CAD data."

Right Hemisphere Deep Server 5 software is also helping Sikorsky Aircraft increase its design velocity. According to Dave Cocuzzo, manager of the Engineering Process Transformation Group at Sikorsky, "We're expecting the software to generate lightweight models and 2-D 'drawing views' on demand that can be scrutinized and interacted with down to the part level by our crossfunctional teams. Ultimately, we're looking to further enable the Model Based Definition (MBD) Process by facilitating the enterprise-wide consumption of digital engineering datasets."

New Features in Right Hemisphere 5 Deep Server

Deep Server software integrates with and extends PLM and PDM solutions to enable the re-use of product information across the extended enterprise. With support for over 130 2D and 3D formats, including corporate document standards such as HTML, Adobe® PDF® and Microsoft® Office, Deep Server provides an open environment for enterprise-wide product communication and collaboration that eliminates various inefficiencies and helps manufacturers get products and support materials to market faster.

Right Hemisphere 5 Deep Server features:

•  A new, faster, easier to use graphical user interface called "Deep Search" with better metadata search capabilities; detailed thumbnailing with pop up previews of key information; more granular control over user roles and accessibility; check in and check out for assets; a collections area for users to create temporary workspaces; and more.

•  The ability to merge and edit product metadata from CAD, PDM, and PLM sources into a single database for publishing and management.

•  New and enhanced view and markup graphics functionality such as XYZ markup filtering for improved collaboration; cross-section cutting plane, half and quarter sections; thumbnails of 3D models viewable within Microsoft Explorer; and the ability to calculate model surface areas and volumes.

•  Global instancing support to significantly reduce the size of databases required and allow for easy updating of parts information across different projects and departments.

•  Updated product manufacturing information (PMI) support for CATIA® and JT formats so users can include PMI, geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) data, and associated views directly into 3D files and eliminate the need for separate 2D drawings.

•  Updated and improved PDF file publishing capabilities to make is easier then ever for users to use PDF and HTML as publishing formats for all product graphics and related data.

•  An abundance of new capabilities for authoring and rendering high quality line art illustrations, including a 2D and 3D symbol library; 2D line styles in 3D viewer, 2D vector and raster illustration outputs; easy thrust line creation with animation; illustration support with thick and thin rendering, color fill and more; a 2D alpha tool for creation, removal and manipulation of alpha channels in texture maps; and added drawing tools to improve technical illustration workflows.

•  New file format support for Microsoft 3D XAML, Google SketchUp, Autodesk FiLMBOX, Collada DAE, Silo 3D and WebCGM.

•  Part level revision management to control updates of all downstream usage at a part level and to update assemblies automatically.

•  LDAP support for easy integration with existing system security protocols as well as object level security to apply exactly the right level of access control at any level of a project.

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