Artisan announces Artisan Workbench

“Artisan Workbench provides a standard access portal for all of an organization’s embedded design tools, facilitating the implementation of best design practices, enabling large, geographically dispersed teams of analysts, systems and software engineers to Work as OneTM, modeling systems and software for the complete project lifecycle,” said Hedley Apperly, VP Marketing of Artisan Software Tools. “It provides an ultra-efficient collaborative working environment that maximizes output and also keeps projects on time and on budget.”

Based on an open, plug-and-play architecture built on a multi-user repository, Artisan Workbench reduces costs by enabling tool-independent standard processes to be deployed in a single environment. It facilitates better collaboration by enabling data to be directly shared and linked between the various integrated tools. It can be easily configured for an organization’s own operational processes, IT Infrastructure and tools and its ability to standardize across an engineering organization creates economies of scale, minimizes risk, exploits tool technology and utilizes common standards.

“Joining up embedded engineering disciplines, teams and organizations enabling diverse and disparate specialists to Work as One, has never been more important,” commented James B. Gambrell, CEO of Artisan Software Tools. “Within the context of mission and safety-critical embedded systems and software development, visibility across the entire design process is crucial to timely and effective decision making. It is also fundamental to improving efficiency and productivity, reducing costs and proving compliance with industry-specific formal certification processes. At a product or project level, savings are made through reduced start-up costs, shorter familiarization times and fast learning curves. At an engineering enterprise level, savings come from reduced training overheads, flexible resource deployment and leaner quality management. Now engineering teams can achieve the same productivity benefits across the entire development lifecycle that they have become accustomed to with PLM/PDM solutions.”

With Artisan Workbench, data only needs to be entered once. The data is managed with all project artifacts contained within the multi-user repository and displayed in a project browser, irrespective of the specific tool that created it. Artisan Workbench achieves this through a unique set of inter-tool features which include rich, multi-level traceability and on-demand impact analysis without the need for point-to-point integrations, adaptive and configurable document and report generation, and automatic artifact re-use management that ensures that only master versions of artifacts are modified and that their impact is minimal, easily identifiable and indicated to all projects that are using them. Other benefits include the automation of time-consuming tasks such as version control, change tracking and auditing, quick and easy project start-up with only a few simple steps required to define a new project, and built-in configuration management avoids the need for third-party tools for item check-in and check-out and enabling Artisan Workbench to manage the configuration of tool data behind the scenes.

Artisan Workbench generates significant efficiency gains as core business engineering processes such as tool and data access control, change management, configuration management, traceability, document generation; review and approval are implemented in the same way independently of the tool suite utilized. It also reduces the reliance on IT support requirements as project tools no longer have to be deployed to individual desktops and tool upgrades can be handled centrally when it is convenient from a project perspective. The cost of effective project management is reduced by automating administrative functions and providing central control for data management, access and automated status reporting. Security is also improved by providing comprehensive access and permissions management across the entire project that is tool-independent. Integrated Artisan Workbench tools include Microsoft Office, DOORS, Artisan Studio, Sparx Enterprise Architect, Mathworks Simulink and more.