Darmstadt, June 2020 – Short-time working and working from home define the daily work routine during the coronavirus pandemic. PROSTEP's OpenDESC team nevertheless continues to provide round-the-clock support to customers when converting, migrating and transferring their CAD and PLM data. PROSTEP is expanding its software environment to meet growing demand for its cloud-based OpenDESC.com service.

Supply chains in the automotive industry and other industries have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. OpenDESC.com ensures that at least the provision of data between OEMs and suppliers continues to function. Customers can use the cloud-based service to not only automatically convert their data and monitor data quality but also to exchange data securely – either automatically via OFTP/OFTP2 over an ENX connection, via our web portal, or manually via the respective automobile manufacturers' supplier portals.

The PROSTEP service team is extremely busy despite, or perhaps because of, the coronavirus crisis. "In addition to a general trend towards using SaaS services, the lockdown has also increased interest in our cloud-based services because companies can use them without having to install additional software or make changes to their existing IT infrastructure," says Peter Pfalzgraf, head of the Products business unit. The software environment has now been further expanded to meet the growing demand, with PROSTEP working together with leading CAx solution vendors such as Dassault Systèmes, Siemens Industry Software and PTC.

Using OpenDESC.com offers customers a number of advantages. They can develop their products independently of the systems stipulated by the OEMs and thus create customer-neutral platforms more easily. They save the costs involved with installing and maintaining a heterogeneous CAD landscape and mapping customer-specific system configurations, which can change from one project to another. PROSTEP guarantees data quality during conversion, data security during transfer and process reliability by logging and archiving the orders.

The OpenDESC team is familiar with all the commonly used CAD/PLM systems, the system configurations of the leading OEMs and their exchange rules. This enables them not only to provide suppliers with optimum support for data conversion and transfer but also assume responsibility for managing all their CAD/PLM landscapes if required. This is a service that companies request for more frequently, especially in the time of the coronavirus, to cope with shortages of system administration staff.