Artisan unveils Artisan Workbench

It provides a fully integrated, collaborative engineering framework for the deployment and maintenance of tools for mission and safety-critical embedded systems and software development.

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 eases collaboration by enabling data to be directly shared and linked between the various integrated tools.

It can be easily configured for an organisation's own operational processes, IT infrastructure and tools, and its ability to standardise across an engineering organisation creates economies of scale, minimises risk, exploits tool technology and uses common standards.

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 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 reuse 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, avoiding 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 used.

It also reduces 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 tool-independent comprehensive access and permissions management across the entire project.

Integrated Artisan Workbench tools include Microsoft Office, Doors, Artisan Studio, Sparx Enterprise Architect and Mathworks Simulink.