Executive summary

CNH is engaged in three principal lines of business: agricultural equipment, construction equipment and financial services. These businesses, which had combined revenues of nearly $11 billion in 1999, are organized globally with separate, brand-driven commercial organizations and distribution networks. CNH has a legacy of 160-year history.


Challenges

As a manufacturer of a broadest range of equipment used on every farm and livestock operation around the world, CNH had a need to have strong visualization and markup software for its design teams. They already had eMatrix from MatrixOne installed and wanted a product that can be integrated with eMatrix.

With the global presence, CNH wanted a tool that can enable seamless communication across three continents, where the design and document review teams are located. This was an expensive need and they wanted a good return on investment.

Some of the challenges (business and technical) were:

• Physically Dispersed
• Support for Multiple environments
• Integration with existing PLM System
• Return on investment
• Multi-Format viewer.
• Firewall friendly environment
• Secured document viewing.
• Ease of Use
  
  

Solution

• Extended eReview print functions to be used by all eMatrix users from anywhere.
• Installed eReview server with WebLogic 5.1 on Sun-Solaris platform and integrated with eMatrix Value Chain Portfolio applications (VCP).
• Integrated eReview viewer applet with eMatrix CWI application interface to view, redline and collaborate multiple documents. More than 150 file formats supported.
  
  

Advantages and benefits of the solution to the customer

eReview is deployed in CNH environment as part of design review cycle. At present, there are 1.500 concurrent users and 1000 named users using eReview at CNH. CNH chose eReview to be the standard viewer as well for all the design viewing, marking up and reviewing needs. Below are some of the advantages that CNH has after having eReview as part of the standard viewing and collaboration procedures.

• Deployed on multiple platforms: eReview is presently deployed on multiple platforms at CNH. This means that there were no changes made to the software and hardware environment while deploying eReview.
• Collaboration along with viewer, all in the same package: CNH does not need to get viewer and collaboration tools separately. eReview has all these features in one.
• Integrated with existing PLM system: eReview is tightly integrated with existing PLM (eMatrix from MatrixOne) in CNH environment. This is an out-of-the-box integration deployed at CNH.
• Ease of maintenance: Since, eReview is server side software; all the changes and updates are applied at only one place. The clients do not need to install anything so CNH does not have to worry about maintaining updates at the user end.
• Retain the originality of the documents-less cost on maintaining multiple copies and versions of the same documents as they are marked up: Since, the markup paradigm in eReview is document centric, the original design documents/models are retained in the original form. It is simple, easy to use and at the same time, the original documents are un-changed. This means less maintenance on keeping multiple copies/versions of documents even if the reviewers from all over the world make annotations and markups on them. This was an added advantage to CNH: all at no extra cost.
• Multiple Document Interface: CNH got the advantages of a true Multiple Document Interface (MDI) at no extra cost. This means that only one instance of eReview gets loaded in the browser even while viewing multiple kinds of documents/models.
• Print features were not only in-built in the viewing system, but also extended to the users of the existing Product Lifecycle management (PLM) system being used.