Q&A: Autodesk exec on the push for product life-cycle management

Jaikumar Vijayan   Today’s Top Stories   or  Other Project Management Stories  

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June 16, 2005 (Computerworld) -- Autodesk Inc., the $1.2 billion San Rafael, Calif.-based vendor known for its line of mechanical CAD software for small and medium-size businesses, has recently begun pushing into the product life-cycle management (PLM) market. The company has started shipping new engineering data management functions along with its core 3-D authoring tools and in April launched a new tool called Productstream designed to enable manufacturers to share design data across the company.
In this interview, Robert Kross, vice president of Autodesk's manufacturing solutions division, talks about how the company's tools are designed to help manufacturers implement PLM functionality in a more incremental fashion and at lower cost than products from pure-play PLM vendors. Kross spoke to Computerworld about why the time is right for Autodesk to "democratize" the industry.
What is your Autodesk Vault product all about? It's a classic engineering vault for things like work-in-process management, change management and version management. Instead of selling it as an extra product, we put it inside all of our mechanical products so that everybody who buys one of our CAD products has Vault right there. We made this so well integrated that we have companies that are as small as two engineers using our tools. It's radically different from anything that has been done before.
What about Productstream? Vault is the server application. It lets you manage all this work-in-process information. If you want to release that to the rest of the enterprise, Productstream is the tool that does release management, and turns engineering bills of materials into item masters. It integrates with the ERP environment, and does all those sorts of next steps. We also have a tool called Streamline for the entire supply chain.
How does this strategy help from a customer perspective? First of all it is well integrated. If you buy a PLM tool [from rivals], the first thing you would have to do is integrate it with your authoring tools. Ours comes out of the box built that way, so deployment is really fast. The second thing is we have divided the problem up. We view the work-in-process problem as different from the life-cycle management problem and the supply chain collaboration problem. So we have built different solutions to tackle each problem. So you can deploy this one piece at a time. It's an incremental approach.
What about the cost? I will give you a high-level view of our price list. Our 2-D product is about $2,750, our 3-D design product is about $5,000, and Productstream is about $1,800. Compared to our competitors, we are about a tenth of their cost.
What's driving this strategy from a business standpoint at Autodesk?

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