prostep ivip is an association with its headquarter in Darmstadt, Germany. It is a globally active, independent association of 180 member companies from industry, IT and research. As an industry-driven association it focuses on the digital transformation in product creation and production. By designing the digital transformation in the manufacturing industry prostep ivip defines and aggregates the requirements of manufacturers and suppliers, with the goal of defining standards and interfaces primarily for the digitalization of the entire product creation process – from idea to implementation. Founded in 1993 as ProSTEP Association for the Promotion of Product Data Standards and renamed to ProSTEP iViP Association in 2002. Since May 2017, the association's name is written as "prostep ivip".
History
After the end of the ProSTEP Initiative of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, the ProSTEP Association was founded in 1993. Leading IT managers at BMW, Bosch, Continental, Daimler, Delphi, Opel, Siemens, Volkswagen and 30 other companies realized that the development of modern processes for efficient product data management was crucial to ensuring the ability of German companies to compete in the global marketplace and that they can address their common aims at best when joining under the neutral umbrella of an association. The starting point for this endeavor was the joint development of the STEP data format. In 2002, it merged with the initiative "Integrated Virtual Product Creation " of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, which led to a massive scope-extension. Until today, the prostep ivip association remains committed to developing new approaches to end-to-end process, system and data integration for its members and providing digital support for all the phases of the product creation process.
Organization
40% of today's 180 member companies in ProSTEP iViP are manufacturing companies, 40% are IT companies and service providers and 20% are research institutions and other standardization bodies. This tripartism is also reflected within the by-annually elected board of the association: one representative of the manufacturers, one of the suppliers, one of the IT and one of the research institutions. prostep ivip's Technical Programm, with its currently over 20 running project groups, is governed be the Technical Steering Committee.
Cooperations
prostep ivip maintains and continuously expands its network toward like-minded organizations. Examples for these organizations are AIA, ISO, OMG as well as associations like the French , the Japanese JAMA, the US-based , the German etc.
Publications
ProSTEP iViP publishes Standards, Recommendations, White Paper and Best Practices, also together with its partner organizations. For example:
Each year in spring prostep ivip conducts one of world's largest neutral PLM Congresses: the prostep ivip symposium. Beside this, it invites to smaller topic-specific events and Webinars.
