In Product Lifecycle Management, classification is used to categorize product information to facilitate the efficient retrieval of the information either for re-use in new product initiatives, or for reference later in the product lifecycle. The ability to quickly locate data for re-use can provide a positive impact on the product development process and is key in reaching product time-to-market and innovation goals.
By enabling companies to manage previously designed, validated and approved product data, classification can help expedite product development, reduced costs, and build design intent and lessons learned into new product initiatives. Furthermore, classification can also be used to enforce security requirements to fulfill regulations like ITAR. Additional benefits of classification are reduced rework, reduced number of part introductions, reduced inventory, more volume discounts and efficient part obsolescence processing.
One of the challenges in classification is that there are many types of users of the product information and different types of classification systems. For example, users of electronic component information may be the designers, librarians, component engineers, suppliers, etc. Popular classification systems used to exchange product information between different partners and their systems include eCl@ss, UNSPSC and the Global Product Classification of GS1. (See figure below)
Therefore, companies using electronic components in their products require the capability of creating multiple classifications for the same electronic components. ENOVIA ECAD POWER'BY solutions allow CAD designers to leverage ENOVIA Classification Manager and its ability to create multiple library classification systems to fit a company’s business needs, functional uses, and products (see the example in the Design with Altium Designer role below). With ENOVIA, companies can apply standard attributes to the library taxonomy for robust parametric searches and comparisons of classified data based on different usage models.
