Ninth MDMC Meeting

January 2007

MDMC members move to enterprise implementations

The Material Data Management Consortium (MDMC) membership met at the Honeywell Aerospace site in Tempe, AZ, USA, this month to review progress and drive forward the implementation of enterprise materials information management in member organizations.

The MDMC is a collaboration of top aerospace, defense, and energy enterprises that develops best practice in the control, analysis, and application of critical materials data within engineering organizations, guiding development of the GRANTA MI software system to support this process.

In addition to Honeywell, the organizations represented were Rolls-Royce, GE - Aviation, NASA Glenn Research Center, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, AWE, Los Alamos National Laboratories, Concurrent Technologies Corporation, the US Navy, ASM International, and Granta Design. A key theme of the meeting was members moving beyond pilot and initial implementation phases and into multi-site, multinational enterprise programs that are rolling-out access to hundreds of users. The meeting discussed the practical software, system, computer hardware, and communication issues involved in such implementations, and shared experience that is leading to success.

Members also reviewed new developments in the GRANTA MI software that were specified at earlier project meetings, and that are now undergoing final testing before delivery to members. These include:

• advances in tools to link related items of data as they are captured in the central materials database, making it much simpler to track and then explore the pedigree and context for this data,
• analysis and presentational capabilities that make it much easier to review and comprehend very complex data sets.

The meeting also established four member sub-committees to work with Granta Design on the detail of specific development priorities for future software releases. These include new features in data capture, analysis, deployment, maintenance, and the acquisition of third-party reference data.

"This was an extremely positive meeting," comments Dr David Cebon, Managing Director at the Consortium's software provider Granta Design. "Not only did participants express satisfaction with software development and service, but it was great to see long-standing members forging ahead with implementation and use of the system."

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