Cambridge—August 23, 2007

Boeing and Northrop-Grumman Join the Material Data Management Consortium

New members and continued enterprise-wide roll-outs are focus of August meeting

Groups from Northrop Grumman and Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems business unit are the latest to join the Material Data Management Consortium (MDMC), which met at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, this month. This tenth meeting of the project reviewed new developments in GRANTA MI™, a software system for managing and applying critical materials data in the engineering process. The MDMC helps to guide development of GRANTA MI. Members also discussed practical issues relating to the on-going enterprise roll out of the system within several participating organizations.

The MDMC seeks to define best practice in the management and use of data relating to alloys, composites, and ceramics—from materials testing, right through to the use of approved design data on engineers’ desktop computers. It advises Granta Design in the development of software to support this best practice. Members benefit through the delivery of software that meets their needs. These needs include: processing, analyzing, and interpreting specialist property data; tracing the pedigree of data quickly and reliably; and security and reliability for data shared enterprise-wide. The meeting discussed recent or upcoming developments in all of these areas.

Seventeen enterprises are now members of the Consortium, with the Boeing and Northrop Grumman teams joining representatives of organizations such as Rolls-Royce, Honeywell, GE—Aviation, NASA, and Los Alamos National Labs. Dr Steven Arnold of NASA Glenn Research Center, who chairs the Consortium Steering Committee, welcomed the new members, "The Consortium is becoming a 'Who's Who?' of the aerospace industry and thus provides sufficient diversity and experience to ensure that GRANTA MI meets both industry’s and government’s critical needs relating to materials information management."

"The most important aspect of the meeting was the way the participants focused their considerable expertise on defining new capabilities required from the software system," comments Dr David Cebon, Managing Director at Granta Design. "The fact that the members can reach a clear consensus on the development priorities and functionality is the reason why resulting software meets the needs of the aerospace, defense, and energy industries. The new members, and the overall quality of the MDMC community that they are helping to grow, are also tremendous assets as we seek to ensure that future software developments get the best possible guidance and review."

Links to further information

MDMC: www.mdmc.net