Software for users that helps them to accomplish their daily tasks within today’s networked organizations instead of software for isolated activities — or, simply put, user orientation instead of technology orientation — that is the overall goal behind the Engineering Center.  This name stands for a new software generation aimed at the convergence of disparate information resources to support various task-oriented roles not only restricted to a single organization but within a network of collaborating partners.

See the eCenter implementation case history PLM Rollout at Siemens Transportation Systems, Managing Complexity

See also our product flyer on MetaUI, eCenter for Metaphase sites (get free Adobe Acrobat Reader)

Focus on Users and their Collaboration

IT integration is becoming a decisive factor of competitiveness.  The Engineering Center delivers solutions fit closely to IT strategies, which combine isolated applications and data sources to make them available over the Internet.  This applies not only to your company's internal applications (EAI — Enterprise Application Integration) but also to those involving partners, customers, and suppliers (CPC — Collaborative Product Commerce) as part of e-business.  Collaborative development is assuming a key role in the process of continuous innovation and its quick conversion into marketable, competitive products and services.  IT integration across applications and organizations derives the main share of its it’s weight from supporting collaboration.

The increasing number of IT systems involved should not mean increased complexity for the user.  Simplicity is the key to effectiveness, and the Engineering Center from WAMware and ECS meets this challenge.  Agents doing their work invisibly in the background implement business-logic.  Access to existing IT systems takes place through wrappers abstracting away their specific details.  User-centric interfaces allow an overview of the working content within its context and allow direct access to specific information.  It takes the task-oriented reduction and concentration of functions and information to develop the productivity potential of an IT infrastructure that combines resources throughout the network.

Why Engineering Center?

Current IT systems' functions and data are usually available only within a limited corporate network.  In order to involve geographically separated locations or even partners, customers and suppliers electronically in the business processes — everything, that is, that falls under the heading of e-business — an integration product is required.

The Engineering Center therefore embraces one user interface that can be run anywhere there is an Internet connection and a Java-enabled web client.  The infrastructure backing up the Engineering Center makes sure that all users can access the same information and processes, wherever the corresponding resources are located.  This makes collaboration based on information sharing across separate organizations a reality.

Users currently have a growing number of isolated IT tools available providing even more perfect support for isolated functions by means of a relentlessly growing number of features – with a much higher degree of sophistication than is required for the task.  The power of the tools transforms into uncontrollable complexity, whereas the challenge posed by business processes involving disparate IT systems remains unmet.

From Isolated Systems to Function Integration

The Engineering Center overcomes the gaps within the current IT infrastructure, resolves the miss-match between the available systems and the tasks to be accomplished and thereby reduces the increasing workloads for users of the available IT systems.  Agents control information flows in the background while role-specific interfaces compose data and functions from diverse sources and applications, fitting them to the task at hand by bringing about the selection and confluence of relevant information.  Critical information that was formerly hidden in IT system complexity will be found within the grasp of executives.

Current application islands isolate data from context: business processes and organizational structures involve documents and files from disparate IT systems whose administrative functions often are as inadequate as redundant.  Completeness, consistency and context of the data are usually not guarantied and a great deal of work is involved in achieving it.

The Engineering Center makes it possible to maintain the context as determined by the structure of the objects or processes.  The synchronization between different IT systems takes place automatically, based on the XML-formatted metadata the engineering center exchanges with the application wrappers.  These form the basis of the company-wide content management.

eCenter is a software product jointly developed by WAMware and its partner ECS GmbH, Germany.  WAMware is a registered trademark of WAMware Ltd. and eCenter a trademark of ECS GmbH.