Maintenance of funStep Products

The funStep initiative was born with the goal of helping furniture related companies to improve their business processes. Along its history, it was realized that most of the problems common to the majority of companies, especially SMEs, came from erroneous data and communication difficulties. A clear communication between the different parts of the supply chain is at the heart of developing any business. Information technology (IT), which is part of the communication process, is a priority as businesses seek to reduce costs, improve design time and manage production and inventory systems. This way, the funStep-IG decided to develop a specific furniture sector International Standard that would enable the resolution of all the data exchange problems.

However, this theory of having one product, i.e. the funStep standard (ISO 10303-236), has a unique solution for all the data exchange problems has proved inadequate because it would require the existence of a tremendously big standard. This way, besides ISO 10303-236, the funStep community developed two other products that complement themselves: the SC4 N2253 - Business documents for product transaction and management, and the funStep ontology. All of these require maintenance and revisions over time.

ISO 10303-236, the funStep Standard

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has been pushing forward the development of standards and models. Efforts like STEP, "Standard for the Exchange of Product model data", have tried to deal with integration and interoperability issues. The ISO 10303-236, i.e. AP236 or the funStep standard defines a formalized structure for catalogue and product data under industrial domains of the furniture sector.

The funStep standard was officially published by ISO in the December 2006, and with the first implementations, some mistakes in the data model were already found, some additions to the data model were required so that it is able to satisfy all industrial requirements, and some organizations expressed the need to have smaller implementation sets, instead of just six.

A standard, it is something not meant to be changed frequently, but for the above reasons it has to be maintained and updated to new editions when sufficient requirements are gathered. To procedure to reach this point is not regulated, but in the funStep case, typically follows the steps described bellow.

1 - Mistakes detected during implementation stages should be reported to the funStep community, which is the official liaison with ISO for the maintenance of AP236, representing the group of organizations part of the interest group. Similar procedure is followed in the normal day by day business situations. In that case, the furniture organizations may find the need to include some additions in the standard motivated by the detection of new business requirements.
2 - Have received, either the errors report, or the new requirements, the funStep community technical committee analyses the pending issues and if they are considered valid, submits an approval request for the steering committee, which decides when to forward these modifications to the official ISO organisms. Since the creation of a new edition of the standard is a time-consuming process, normally this phase only occurs after sufficient requirement are put together.
3 - Afterwards, a funStep delegation, counting with representatives from the furniture industry, will present the list of modifications to ISO TC184/SC4, which is the committee responsible for STEP and its application protocols, including AP236. If it is accepted, a new working item is created in ISO to handle the modification of the AP236 standard and publication of the new edition.

ISO SC4-N2253, Business documents for product transaction and management

Electronic business as the way for communication encompasses three main stages: e-commerce, e-business and e-partnering. The e-business benefits will be effectively achieved by industrial organizations only when product data, business and technology become fully aligned and interoperable between them.

Part of this problem is covered by ISO 10303-236. However, despite AP236 clearly enables e-business and the use of Internet based channels to enhance marketing, selling, or to make purchasing of products more efficient, the transactions management (e.g., RFQ, Quotation, Order, Order Confirmation, Delivery Note, Packing List, Invoice) is not yet covered by the standard. Due to the use of e-commerce, these transactions standardization is equality important to product data standardization, since it might be allowed to take place with minimal disruption to organizational culture and business processes. The transactions include many concepts such as, e-storefront (typical web page), e-catalogue, e-invoicing and e-payment, and e-purchasing. Due to incorrect orders, consumers often have to wait several weeks for medium or high classed product deliveries.

Having understood the importance of the transactional part of electronic business, the funStep community implemented a first solution to the problem during the with the e-business furniture Open Architecture (ebfSOA), even before the publication of AP236. Nowadays, with the first implementations of the AP236, the core organizations of funStep community pushed by a strong industrial support, felt the need to 'maintain' the old ebfSOA documents restructuring them to enable a direct link with the catalogue and product data standard (AP236).

This work has been proposed to be developed under the umbrella of ISO technical committee 184 sub-committee 4 (TC184/SC4), and has acquired the official designation of SC4 N2253 - Business documents for product transaction and management.

funStep Ontology

Many definitions of ontologies have been proposed, and it seems that the most acceptable one is based on the one proposed by Gruber: An ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualisation. A 'conceptualisation' refers to an abstract model of some phenomenon in the world, which identifies the relevant concepts of that phenomenon. 'Explicit' means that the type of concepts used and the constraints on their use are explicitly defined. 'Formal' refers to the fact that the ontology should be machine understandable. 'Shared' reflects the notion that ontology captures consensual knowledge, that is, it is not restricted to the knowledge view of some individual, but reflects a more general view shared and accepted by a group.

Ontologies facilitate the understanding, communication and cooperation between people and organizations. Ontologies offer a semantic - content and meaning based - approach to electronic information management and exchange.

The funStep interest group came across for an ontology that could be used for furniture products classification. Nowadays, having a multilingual dictionary, a thesaurus and ontology (knowledge) is a must, and a domain expert manager for each of the languages used is required. In the case of the overall funStep products (knowledge, standard, and business documents), there is a committee that analyses issues specific related to data representation; and there is a domain committee that analyses general issues specific to the domain knowledge.

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