Engineering data management
Engineering data management without a PLM project
PLM systems are built for series production: parts master, bills of material, change orders, release gates. Development before series is a different situation. The structure changes every week, half the data is models and code, and the team has no administrator. This page is for the engineering lead who runs that phase on folders and a wiki and knows it will not hold.
The situation
Where folders break
They hold until they do not. A customer audit asks which test verified requirement 4.2 in the version delivered in March. A key engineer leaves and the model directory on their laptop turns out to be the master. A supplier sends the third revision of an interface sheet and two teams work from two different ones. None of these is a technology failure. They are what folders do at forty people.
The usual next step is a PLM evaluation, which ends in one of two ways. The company buys a system sized for its future and spends a year configuring it. Or it finds the quote and stays on folders for another two years. The gain from doing it properly is measurable: a 2025 Virginia Tech study of a US Navy design-change process estimated that a digital engineering transformation would halve the median project duration.
The requirement
What R&D data management has to do
Keep everything the product is made of during development in one place: requirements, architecture, models, software, supplier inputs, test data. Keep the complete history, so that any past state can be read back. Say what is current and what depends on what, so that a change does not surprise the team next door. Hold access rules that survive suppliers and customers working in the same data.
An engineer could argue that Git plus a wiki does this. For software it nearly does. For a product with models, measurement data and a supply chain, Git has no answer for a forty-gigabyte result folder or for a supplier who must see one subsystem and nothing else.
In Ref
How it works
Connect your repositories, upload model directories and test data, write requirements, and keep supplier inputs beside your own work. Ref keeps the history of all of it. It tells you what is affected when something changes and what has gone stale. Structure can change as the product matures without losing the trail.
Ref works beside a later PLM and hands data to it at release. It does not hold your parts master and does not want to. The scope page says where the line runs, item by item.
Ownership
Your data stays yours
The Python client pulls any of your data, files and metadata included, to a local directory during the contract and after it. Escrow of code and data is contractual on request. Grunetal GmbH is a German company; hosting is on Microsoft Azure in the EU region you name, under your own tenant if you want it.
Limits
What it costs
No CAD editing, no bill of materials compliance, no ERP. Hosting is on Azure in the EU by default; your own premises is a project on request. Grunetal holds no ISO 27001 and no TISAX certificate as of September 2026; the controls exist and are documented, the audit has not been run. A pilot costs nothing in money and one project of your time.
Who
Who this page is for
Hardware and mechatronics companies between the first prototype and series: a start-up after seed funding, a mid-sized company opening a new product line, an engineering service provider with several customers' data to keep apart. If your parts master and change orders are the daily work, buy a PLM. Siemens Teamcenter X and Dassault 3DEXPERIENCE Works are sold for exactly that.
Questions
Asked before every pilot
Is Ref a PLM?
It covers the development phase that PLM covers badly and stops at release. Bills of material, effectivity and substance compliance stay in the PLM or ERP.
Can it coexist with Teamcenter or Windchill?
Yes. The handoff at release is an adapter we build per customer, and its shape is on our roadmap as of September 2026.
How do suppliers get access?
They sign in with their own Microsoft Entra ID account and see what you scoped for them and nothing else.
What about data protection?
Hosting in an EU region, a German company as contract partner, and an order processing agreement on request.
Related
If your development data lives on laptops and shared drives, a pilot on one project costs nothing. Tell us about your project.