CIDEON America
Integrating Engineering with SAP

Advances in CAD integration with SAP ERP can be traced back to the late 90s, when customers demanded the availability of drawings in the ERP environment for manufacturing purposes. Today, enterprises in product development and manufacturing domains continue to face challenges related to enabling the digital thread through integration of engineering and authoring solutions meant to streamline their overall business processes. Philadelphia, PA-based SAP development and service partner, CIDEON, specializes in helping companies solve challenges through a combination of services and solutions including SAP Engineering Control Center and interfaces to AutoCAD, Inventor, Solid Edge, Creo, SolidWorks, and EPLAN.

Manufacturing companies operating in a hypercompetitive market need to have the right information available at the right time along with a 360-degree, holistic view of their products. “Our expertise coupled with direct CAD integrations and neutral format processing solutions, Conversion Engine and Output Management, address manufacturing and product development companies' need to Run Live by working in a single, fully integrated system, SAP,” remarks Jennifer Moore, Vice President, CIDEON America. Additional solutions developed and deployed by CIDEON cater to the demands of PLM users including View Manager that provides viewables enriched with up-to-date metadata and Release Migrator, an automated tool that supports easy data upgrade and migration of all files already checked into SAP when native CAD authoring systems release product updates.

With SAP and CIDEON solutions, customers work fully integrated with a single source of truth from engineering through production and procurement, down to maintenance and spare parts support. “This closed loop ensures higher efficiency and accurate data in the business processes,” says Jennifer. In addition, for companies already working with 3Dx as their PLM solution, there is a pressing need to provide and exchange data with their business system; SAP, as well as provide drawings for other logistic processes such as purchasing. “Our V6 xPDM - SAP interface solves these requirements as they enable an automated integration from 3DX to SAP,” says Jennifer.

We address manufacturing and product development companies' need to Run Live by working in a single, fully integrated system, SAP

In a recent project, CIDEON enabled a leading North American ready-to-assemble furniture manufacturer to replace their independent product information system with a single platform. The extensive product information, and the need to utilize Autodesk Inventor’s iPart technology to keep up with product variation, was covered with SAP including the SAP PLM 7 module, direct integrations, and CIDEON’s consulting expertise. “Success is a process and the baseline for successful projects is the team; our team is comprised of our customers, coached by CIDEON, enabled by SAP,” says Jennifer.

With over two decades of PLM, PDM, and CAD experience, CIDEON has the proven know-how to implement end-to-end engineering processes with a high degree of on time, under budget projects. Based on hundreds of successful customer projects to date, the firm has developed a wide range of tools to speed up implementations. As a premier SAP partner, CIDEON has already fulfilled the vendor evaluation parameters in SAP technology of S/4HANA and the Hana Cloud Platform (HCP). “HCP will afford us the opportunity to develop and provide new solutions to our customers,” concludes Jennifer.

In the future, CIDEON wants to make a greater impact in the Nordic region and has recently opened an office in Sweden while extending their footprint in the United States and Asian markets. In addition, based on their experience in multi-discipline engineering processes, the firm has developed a new way of collaborating on design processes. CIDEON collaborated with sister company EPLAN to develop and announce the launch of the mechatronic solution Syngineer, fostering an alliance between engineering staff utilizing authoring systems of mechanical, electrical, and software design disciplines.