Materials data management is the systematic capture, management, approval and provision of materials information within a company. It ensures that development, simulation, quality, procurement and manufacturing work with the same verified materials data, and that it is always clear where a value comes from.
What is materials data management?
A material is not a static row of properties. Its usable engineering properties depend on composition, product form, manufacturing route, heat treatment, test conditions, statistical treatment, qualification status, revision, source and intended application. A property value without this context is of limited use for design or simulation.
Materials data management, often also called materials information management, collects this information, manages it centrally and distributes it to where it is needed. The Enterprise Materials Integration approach goes one step further and connects materials knowledge with the processes and systems that create and use it.
Why materials data management matters
Quality and traceability: Test orders, specimens, raw data and approvals remain linked. Every released property value can be traced back to the test, and manual transcription is no longer needed.
Simulation and CAE: Material models for solvers such as Abaqus or LS-DYNA are derived from approved source data. All simulation teams therefore work with consistent input data and controlled revisions.
Norms and standards: Standards such as VDA 231-301 for sampling and test information or DIN SPEC 9012 for electronic certificates of conformity make materials data exchangeable in machine-readable form between suppliers, test laboratories and manufacturers.
Compliance and sustainability: Composition, substance data and process information form the basis for substance declarations, product carbon footprints (PCF) and the Digital Product Passport.
These use cases overlap. A qualification result may become a property in the material master, feed the calibration of a simulation, generate a CAE material card, support a compliance decision and be exchanged with a customer. Materials data management preserves identity, context and provenance as the same data moves through these purposes.
Typical requirements
Materials data management has to do more than a table of property values:
- Structured materials data: material master, specifications, composition and properties with units, conditions and provenance.
- Curves and multidimensional data: many properties are functions of several variables, such as temperature, strain rate, strain and time.
- Approval and versioning: revisions, qualification status, approval workflows as well as permissions and responsibilities.
- Process histories: a label such as “heat treated at 900 °C for 2 h” does not fully describe the resulting material state. Measured or simulated histories such as temperature or strain over time are therefore part of the materials data.
- Documents: test reports, certificates, standards and literature, linked to the corresponding materials.
- Analysis: statistics, curve fitting and parameter identification directly on the managed data.
- Openness: data and meaning must remain understandable and usable outside the application. An API alone is not enough. What matters are open formats, a data model owned by the customer and a path for complete export.
Data sources
Materials data comes from many sources that need to be brought together:
- Materials testing: test series, raw data from testing machines and test reports.
- Simulation: calculated properties, for example with JMatPro®, and results from parameter studies.
- Reference data: established sources such as MMPDS, ESDU MMDH, NCAMP/CMH-17, StahlDat or Copper Key. Matplus offers a range of materials databases for this.
- Supply chain: sampling reports and certificates from suppliers, ideally in standardized formats.
- Metallography and process data: micrographs, process curves and measured histories linked to material, specimen and process history.
Integration with PLM, ERP and CAE
Materials data management does not replace PLM, ERP, LIMS or CAE. These systems remain authoritative for their own transactions. Materials data management maintains the materials-related relationships between them and provides approved data: to PLM for bills of materials and design, to ERP for procurement and suppliers, to CAE for material cards and to the laboratory for test orders.
An important principle is the separation of transport and meaning. REST interfaces, files, message queues or data spaces transport information. What this information means is defined by the data model, for example a standardized schema such as VDA 231-301. This allows a company to change a target system without losing the meaning of its materials data.
How Matplus EDA helps
Matplus EDA® is the Matplus platform for materials data, processes and materials knowledge:
- Open architecture: data is stored in JSON rather than proprietary formats. EDA uses open source components and Docker-based microservices and runs on premises or in the cloud.
- Central material master data: EDA DM manages material base data across the company.
- From test to material model: EDA MM creates material models from test data with scientific Python libraries and exports them for CAE solvers.
- Standardized exchange: EDA DX reads and writes test certificates according to DIN SPEC 9012, and EDA supports import and export in VDA 231-301 format.
- Simulation: EDA for JMatPro® shares JMatPro results with teams and enables material comparisons and exploratory analysis.
- Extensibility: Python is the extension language, so companies can implement their own analyses directly on the managed data.
Talk to us
Would you like to set up materials data management or connect your existing systems better? We will be happy to show you what this can look like with Matplus EDA.
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