After the very successful JT events of 2015 in Darmstadt and 2016 in Regensburg, BOSCH has hosted the 3rd prostep ivip JT Day on October 17th in the auditorium of its beautiful R&D Center in Renningen. More than 150 participants from over 60 organizations have joined to celebrate practical user experience of JT along with awesome contributions from BOSCH, BMW, and Honda.

The industry-wide meeting point of the JT community started with a warm welcome into the exhibition area. :em AG, CT CoreTechnologie GmbH, Elysium Europe SARL, Fraunhofer IGD, invenio – Engineering Solutions, ITI – International TechneGroup, KISTERS AG, PROSTEP AG, Siemens Industry Software GmbH, SSC-Services GmbH, TechniaTranscat GmbH, Theorem Solutions and T-Systems GmbH were giving booth presentations of their latest achievements in the application of JT within the engineering and manufacturing PLM landscape.

Rudolf Dotzauer of Continental AG and Dr. Sebastian Handschuh of Daimler AG officially opened the day. The intention was clear: show JT’s significance as powerful, flexible and lightweight data format driving digitalization and give overview of JT as the multidisciplinary 3D Backbone for the Digital Enterprise.

Prof. Alfred Katzenbach took over and moderated well through the user and vendor talks.

Ulrich Schäfer – the Executive Vice President in the corporate sector Information Systems and Services at BOSCH – opened the user talks with an impressive contribution to improving the quality of life with technology. Design thinking and user experience in all environments and products in a connected world are thereby key for BOSCH. They rely on software, sensors, and services innovations besides the traditional hardware developments. To BOSCH, it is fundamental to master the cross-company collaboration challenges in complex supply chains. Consequently, the use of JT and IT-Standards is a major Topic internally throughout the V-Model and in the collaboration chains with OEM and sub-contractors.

Right after the opening keynote, Matthias Karl gave a brilliant talk introducing digitalization with JT at BMW. BMW utilizes JT as a universal product data container along with further IT standards such as STEP AP242 XML and PDF to streamline product design, process validation, and long-term data retention streams. Clearly, the realized implementations result in greater potentials as well as faster and efficient adoption for new areas of use in the supply chain. These areas include new fields of the product emergence process, that have not particularly been in focus yet.

Takao Senko from the Automobile R&D Center of Honda gave a knowledgeable speech on the history of JT at the Japanese automotive OEM. Honda uses JT for long-term archiving of its CATIA 3D data since one decade, with more than a million JT data sets in its EBoM System to date. It has been adopted thank to the high accuracy of its 3D descriptions and the openness of its specification as international Standard. The company is extending the application of JT to various use cases, especially for the easier integration of suppliers, DMU and the verification process of spot welds in the product development and manufacturing of e.g. the Body in White.

A special highlight in the afternoon session have been the vendor talks, where the solutions of almost 20 IT service providers and vendors were presented in 8 Slots. This has been particularly remarkable because the selected vendors on stage have presented the value proposition of JT on behalf of up to 5 competitors including themselves. Aim of the vendor track was to demonstrate multi-vendor, cross-organization and cross-disciplinary collaboration scenarios using JT from requirements specification, through design in context, to additive manufacturing using a representative model: the LEGO Technic Arocs Truck. Here as well, the message was clear: JT is a successful industry interoperability format for the whole life-cycle.

This year, too, a lot of praise was given to the fact that the participants were given a lot of space for discussions in the forum of the 13 exhibiting vendors by means of a redesigned agenda. There was also a lot to see: Lego trucks and VR applications and 3D printers to be amazed – common denominator: JT as the 3D backbone for the digital enterprise.

My special thank to BOSCH particularly to Petra Dlugosz and Fred Eckrich for the professionally organized event from BOSCH’ side. I furthermore want to thank all Speakers, IT Vendors (including NETALLIED Systems GmbH ao previously mentioned), Exhibitors, Guests and of course Stefan Just with the entire JT WF/IF teams, especially, to have perfectly align all the ingredients to make this a great event for the JT community.

I am looking forward to seeing you in 2018 again at the 4th JT Day. In the meantime, please have a look at the prostep ivip event page, you’ll be able to download the various presentations of this 3rd JT Day from there very soon.

I kindly invite you to join us on April 18th and 19th at the prostep ivip Symposium 2018 for an update – with BMW and Cenit in Munich.