The holy grail of 'collaboration' is meaningless if the parties are not speaking a common language. The 'lingua franca' that translates the language of engineering into the language of business is 'cost', specifically, product cost.

In the current issue of Automation.com (www.automation.com) Frank Azzolino, CEO of aPriori Technologies discusses how the business operations focus is on financially related concerns such as margin, contribution, and profit. The language of the business is time and money. It is no secret that the profit motive is what drives critical company decisions. It is also no secret that the ability for the product to achieve the expected financial goals is driven by design and manufacturing decisions that occur very early in (and continually throughout) the product delivery process.

MCAD and PLM have historically focused on the engineering and design aspects of product delivery. The language of engineering as spoken by MCAD and PLM is based on physical attributes of the product and technological capabilities of the software solutions used. The result is a series of conversations about features, rounds, fillets, and chamfers.

Major PLM and MCAD providers long for acceptance and penetration outside of engineering departments at the same time the major ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendors strive to enter the engineering and product delivery arena.

In each of these application platforms, PLM and ERP, cost can be managed. On the ERP side, costs are always historical; these costs are available to be managed only after production. While it is more difficult to manage costs on the PLM side of the house, it is often potentially more valuable. The need for real- time, predictive costs are essential to allow design and manufacturing teams to avoid and eliminate costs early in

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