Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

Manufacturing enterprises all over the world attach great importance to the security of their intellectual property (IP), especially the security of their most valuable product design data. These data depend on the complex supply chain ecology, which may include dozens or even hundreds of suppliers and partners who exchange data with it every day. Whether it is primary or secondary suppliers, partners or original equipment manufacturers (OEM), frequent business collaboration brings risks to the data exchange process.

The supply chain of the automobile industry is very complex and globally distributed, and the advantages of enterprises in intellectual property rights are likely to be phased. Enterprises need to keep ahead and will face great challenges. Bringing products to the market as soon as possible is the only way to keep ahead. However, if there is no correct way to achieve security, flow, and standardization, the advantages of the enterprise may no longer exist.

Tier1 and Tier2 vendors need to exchange product data with each host factory and keep the data consistent with their internal PLM/PDM systems, a process that is often manual and time-consuming, ensuring that the data is correct while ensuring the security of the data.

Protecting the secure exchange of product data requires five steps, from the correct configuration of the permissions of the PLM system to the secure and reliable data sending and receiving process, which can greatly improve the security of intellectual property rights and product data.

1. Configure PLM access roles and permissions

Build roles and access rights in the PLM system, control that the designated person can access the filtered specified data, and create a workflow to automatically set the data status. Based on security policy control, only limited state data can be accessed, which can prevent people from sending error status or version of product data to partners. If the security control policy is not set, there is a risk of data leakage in the entire PLM system.

2. Data preprocessing

In the PLM system, configure the data structure and model that meet the requirements of the enterprise, but also need to be able to deal with the heterogeneous data of customers. In the process of data sending and receiving, the automatic conversion between enterprise data standard format and partner data format can greatly improve the efficiency of data exchange.

Enterprises and partners usually have their own customary data formats, naming rules, metadata structures and so on. When defining a business workflow, if the required format and structure can be converted automatically, the possibility of human errors will be minimized, which may lead to security vulnerabilities in supply chain collaboration.

In addition, the automated implementation of this process can free business people from the tedious manual work related to external data sharing, which will save a lot of labor costs for OEM, suppliers and all roles in the supply chain.

3. Create a quality assurance process

Security rights configuration and automated data processing alone are still not enough to meet all the requirements of QA. Enterprises need to build a complete QA process to ensure that security vulnerabilities and errors are caught before data exchange occurs.

There are specialized tools that can detect whether CAD data meets specific customer quality requirements, such as Q-checker for CATIA or CAx Quality Manager for Siemens NX, which can be connected to the PLM system or triggered automatically during the product data exchange process.

In addition, enterprises may also need to conduct pre-security reviews of data other than design drawings. Such a review may automatically extract data content information to determine whether the data is internally sensitive, or it may need to trigger a prefabricated manual approval process to determine whether the data is allowed to be sent externally.

4. Ensure the safety and reliability of the transmission process.

Ensuring the security of the product data transmission process is the most obvious and important step in the whole security policy. How to deal with and exchange product design data with partners in all projects, standardize this process, and be uniformly controlled by the prefabricated security policy of the system. At the same time, eliminate non-regulatory means of fee-compliance exchange, such as mail, FTP, network sharing, and eliminate high-risk data exchange channels.

Ensure data encryption in the process of data transmission, reliable secret key exchange and management strategy, and even data encryption or archive encryption.

In addition, not only the safe outgoing of data, but also the safe reception, storage and check-in of data need to be ensured, for example, automatic antivirus may be needed for the received data.

5. Automation

In fact, most of the core links of the steps are automation. The effective means to minimize the security risk in the process of product data exchange is to automate as many steps as possible.

Human error is the number one threat to the security of enterprise intellectual property rights. Minimizing human interaction in the process of product data exchange will make the whole process more secure.

Automation is essentially a safe choice because it limits the opportunity for human error.

Through the above five steps, Ftrans automobile manufacturing supplier collaboration platform can easily help enterprises to exchange product design data and other knowledge product data with supply chain partners or with branch departments in different places.

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