Collaborative Engineering with cFolders

Collaborative Engineering with cFolders

This Business Scenario Map emphasizes the benefits of cFolders, the new collaboration platform within SAP PLM Lifecycle Collaboration. It shows how your employees can efficiently share structured information with external partners or suppliers in a global network. The Map describes the benefits of the cFolders as an Internet-based collaboration solution provided by SAP PLM and it illustrates how this solution can help you work more effectively in various business scenarios and during the different stages of your collaboration projects. The target customers of cFolders are industries worldwide who exchange and communicate on complex products, assets, and project information within cross-enterprise processes, to share documents with internal and external business partners.
Show Document Flow
Development Partner 1
Project Owner
Development Partner 2
Create new version of design
Assign design proposal
Release documents for further processing
Receive changes as subscriber and send notification
Initiate online conference and provide feedback
Subscribe to design proposal
Assign partners and share specifiations
Set up cFolders structure for new development
Receive notification and adopt changes to sub-assembly
Assign design proposal for sub-assembly
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Collaborative Engineering with cFolders

In most cross-company business processes, you need to make sure that your external partners or suppliers always have access to up-to-date project information and are involved in a close communication process. SAP PLM cFolders facilitates collaboration for anyone who needs to structure documents and share them with other team members and business partners.

 

cFolders supports two different business scenarios: a collaborative scenario (where team members and partners work together in one collaboration area) and a competitive scenario (for example, in a bidding scenario for publishing project specifications on the World Wide Web, as well as requesting and evaluating the bids received from various suppliers).

 

The folder structure within a collaboration project can be hierarchically structured by subfolders that can contain different kind of objects: documents, discussions, data sheets, bookmarks, or texts. A sophisticated authorization concept on top guarantees that each collaboration partner can only edit those objects he or she is allowed to work with. Once a project is set up, the authorization mode will be initially set for each member of the collaboration project and will be passed on to all subordinate objects. This mode at the highest level of a collaboration project can later be overwritten for selected objects within the hierarchy.

 

The version control mechanism within cFolders ensures that all collaboration partners can track the change history of a document. In addition to the version control mechanism, it is essential that all partners can be actively informed by means of notifications about relevant changes within objects. Alternatively, partners can subscribe a folder to stay informed of any possible changes.

 

The alias concept integrated into cFolders allows the same object to possess different names. This can be useful when dealing with different companies where a specific object has more than one name.

 

If it is necessary to share information synchronously, SAP has integrated WebEx into cFolders as part of SAP Product Lifecycle Management to help customers work on projects in real time over the Web. Users can access the "meeting" function from the cFolders interface and organize/track these meetings within their cFolders meeting inbox.