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Software 26 MoldMaking Technology November 2015 Integrated CAD/CAM/PDM tracks both major and minor mold base revisions. By Bill Genc P roduct data management (PDM) is the use of software to manage product data created by other software. In its simplest form, it manages the storage and versioning of such data, and records who used or modified the data last. A good PDM solution will do this for all data types. For many companies, PDM is thought to be unobtainable, because they expect such systems to be cumbersome to use and implemen- tation costs to be massive. The reality, however, is that every single manufacturing company needs a PDM system in order to be more profitable. Following is some background on how the outlook on PDM has become so negative. The Data Timeline CAD technology was invented to streamline the engineering process, enabling engineers to work more quickly and to share their designs more easily. Soon after it was developed came its baby brother, known as CAM. CAM software was developed to take the digital design data engineers came up with and turn it into manufacturing infor- mation that machines could understand. CAD and CAM revolu- tionized the world of engineering and manu- facturing, however, this revolution also created a problem: data. Now Product data management may have a bad rap, but making it a priority rather than an afterthought can help make the most of your design and machining information. Managing All That Data that we had all of this digi- tal data, we needed a way to manage it. Thus, the ugly stepchild was born: PDM. PDM products were developed about six to 10 years after the birth of the products for which they were written to manage. So PDM was an afterthought. This is why PDM solutions are considered too cumbersome and expensive to implement. If a PDM product has been devel- oped that late in the game, the level of product integration will be skin-deep, at best, right? How can a product easily manage a solution after the fact like this? Well, it can be done, but at a cost. And that cost is usually in the form of an overly generic user interface that will need to be customized to specific cus- tomer needs with a lot of custom workflows to make the soft- ware work the way it was intended. The result is a hard-to-use, clunky solution. Fully integrated CAD/CAM is built around a PDM core. Images courtesy Missler Software Inc. VIDEO Access video at end of article.