Overview  

This book is intended for the user who needs to become quickly familiar with the Supplier Chain Engineering Exchange application. Note that this book applies to the CATIA - ENOVIA Supplier Chain Engineering Exchange 2 and the ENOVIA - VPM Supplier Chain Engineering Exchange applications.

This overview provides the following information:

• Supplier Chain Engineering Exchange in a Nutshell

• Before Reading this Guide

• Getting the Most out of this Guide

• Accessing sample documents

• Conventions Used in this Guide

Supplier Chain Engineering Exchange in a Nutshell

In the industry, suppliers are greatly involved in the design and the manufacturing of goods. Since early design, manufacturers (OEM) need to exchange data with their suppliers. This design and manufacturing process is becoming more and more global in nearly all industries.

• The OEMs need to extract information from their information systems such as CAD documents, assembly structures, drawings and part definitions, to enable suppliers to receive the working context (such as a part of the 3D representation of a car) and/or a set of documents that will be updated.

• The suppliers send the result of their work with updated or new CATIA documents, assembly structures, drawings or applicative data (kinematics, numerical command) to the OEMs.

• The OEMs re-import this data into the corporate information systems.

Many companies use CATIA in collaboration with ENOVIAVPM  or ENOVIA V5 VPM. To ease those exchanges between Suppliers and OEMs, several methodologies are proposed in this context:

• Exchanges using neutral file format such as STEP AP203/AP214 exchanges

• ENOVIA partial replication (for instance ENOVIAVPM  multi-site)

• Supplier connected through a remote connection to their OEMs

• CATIA Native file exchanges

Before Reading this Guide

Before reading this guide, the user should be familiar with the basic Version 5 concepts such as document windows, standard and view toolbars. Therefore it is recommended that you read the Infrastructure User's Guide that describes generic capabilities common to all Version 5 products.

Getting the Most out of this Guide

To get the most of this guide, it is suggested that you start reading the step-by-step Getting Started tutorial.

When you have finished, you can continue with the User Tasks section.

The Customizing section, which explains how to set up the options, will also certainly prove useful.

Accessing sample documents

To perform the scenarios, you will be using sample documents contained in the online/dmnug_X2/samples and online/cfysm_X2/samples folders, where "X2" is either C2 (for a CATIA product), D2 (for a DELMIA product) or E2 (for an ENOVIA product). For more information about sample documents, see Accessing Sample Documents in the Infrastructure User's Guide.

Conventions Used in this Guide

To learn more about the conventions used in this guide, refer to the Conventions section.