For a global engineering organization, Autodesk Vault can become much more than a place to manage CAD files. It can serve as the common data foundation connecting engineering teams across facilities, countries, and time zones.
But getting there becomes increasingly difficult when a company’s infrastructure grows region by region.
KETIV is currently nearing completion of a global Autodesk Vault Professional project for a multinational manufacturer with engineering operations distributed around the world. The initiative is bringing previously separate Vault environments and locally stored engineering data together within KETIV’s Vault in the Cloud.
A global strategy for engineering
From the start, this project was about more than consolidating Vault environments. Management had broader goals for how engineering technology should support the business globally. The objective is straightforward: give engineering teams around the world a more consistent way to access and manage their product data.
- Move infrastructure to the cloud. The Vault project supports a company-wide initiative to move software away from physical, locally managed servers and toward cloud-hosted infrastructure.
- Enable consistent manufacturing worldwide. Engineering teams need a common product data foundation so the same product can be designed and manufactured consistently, regardless of where an order originates.
- Put engineering systems in Engineering’s hands. Rather than having IT determine and manage the tools engineers use, the organization wants Engineering to take greater ownership of its applications, workflows, and processes.
Together, these goals made Vault modernization part of a much larger effort to standardize how the company operates across its global engineering and manufacturing footprint.
The challenges of PDM at global scale
The manufacturer was already an established Autodesk Vault Professional customer, but years of regional growth had resulted in multiple Vault environments supporting engineering operations around the world.
Separate environments existed across the U.S., Europe, South America, and multiple locations in East Asia. Some teams were experienced Vault users, while others were just beginning to adopt Vault as part of the global initiative. Engineering drawings also remained distributed across local file servers.
The challenge was no longer simply how to maintain those individual environments. The company wanted to establish a common global approach to engineering data management.
That aligned with two broader initiatives: moving software infrastructure away from physical servers and into the cloud, and creating greater consistency in how products are designed and manufactured across global facilities.
Consolidating Vault in the Cloud
KETIV developed a strategy to bring these distributed Autodesk Vault Professional environments together within KETIV Vault in the Cloud.
Rather than treating each location as an independent deployment, the project is creating a unified environment capable of supporting engineering teams across regions. Existing Vault data is being migrated and consolidated, while engineering drawings previously residing on local file servers are being brought under Vault management.
The project also includes an important adoption component. Some teams in South American and Asia are completely new to Vault, while other groups entered the project with established Vault experience.
That combination makes the initiative more complex than a typical migration. KETIV has had to address infrastructure, data consolidation, regional deployment, new-user adoption, and global process consistency as parts of the same project.
A global rollout is more than a server migration
For an enterprise implementation, moving the data is only part of the job.
Engineering teams still need to connect, configure their Vault clients, understand workflows, and begin incorporating the new environment into their daily work. That has made regional rollout and adoption an important part of the project.
Rather than treating deployment as complete when the infrastructure is online, the project team is tracking usage and working directly with regional teams to help turn technical deployment into actual adoption.
KETIV and the customer’s IT and engineering teams have been working region by region to verify installations and connectivity, troubleshoot network dependencies, review Vault usage, and help users begin working with actual project data.
The realities of a global deployment show up quickly. Network configurations differ. Time zones limit collaboration windows. Language differences affect training. Some locations move faster than others.
For example, one Asian engineering group progressed from initial deployment toward six of eight targeted users actively using Vault, while another regional team required additional installation and network verification before adoption could move forward.
Those aren’t exceptions to a global implementation. They’re part of one.
What a unified Vault environment changes
Once the migration and rollout are complete, the biggest change won’t simply be where Autodesk Vault is hosted.
It will be the move from several regional sources of engineering information toward one managed global environment.
For engineering teams, that creates the foundation for more consistent access to controlled product data regardless of where they work. Drawings previously residing on local file servers can become part of the same managed system as CAD data already stored in Vault.
For IT, it reduces the need to manage separate regional Vault environments and provides a clearer architecture for supporting a geographically distributed engineering organization.
And for the business, it creates a stronger foundation for standardizing engineering data management as the company continues to grow.
The expected result is an environment designed to provide:
- A single Vault PDM environment instead of separate Vaults across the globe
- Cloud-hosted Autodesk Vault Professional supporting geographically distributed engineering teams
- More engineering data under Vault management, including drawings previously stored on local file servers
- A current Vault environment rather than maintaining the company’s older deployment
- Greater consistency across regions in how engineering information is accessed and managed
- A scalable foundation for future global PDM adoption
Cloud PDM enables global collaboration
“This project is bigger than moving Vault to the cloud. We’re taking engineering data that has historically lived across different Vaults, file servers, and regions and bringing it into one environment that can support the company globally. The real measure of success is when an engineer, regardless of where they’re located, can work from the same system and trust that they’re working with the right data.”
— Jason Courtemanche, Data Management Team Lead, KETIV Technologies
