Falcon 7X Flies to Market with PLM
Of all the creative and scientific barriers
to designing cutting-edge products quickly, the biggest barrier is also
the most mundane: finding the right information quickly and easily.
In many companies, product design information resides on designers' desktops, engineers' workstations or departmental servers, inaccessible to many of the people in the design process. Engineers waste thousands of hours every year rooting through servers to find product data that may not be available in the form they need, nor what they thought they were looking for in the first place. Although most product data are electronic-generated from CAD programs, they exist in a variety of formats that make them little better than paper drawings because they cannot interact electronically to provide detailed feedback to designers and engineers through the design chain.
These barriers erode the value of intellectual property. Instead of being one of a company's most productive assets, intellectual property is a drain as companies struggle to put it to profit-generating use to take advantage of changing market conditions. The problem is only getting worse as companies expand their supply chains outside the enterprise, and the pace of market changes increases steadily. Never have companies faced such intense pressure to deliver the right product at the right time. With product upgrade cycles sometimes measured in months, companies try to stay ahead of constantly shifting customer needs by rapidly upgrading product technology, while maintaining profitability as products and processes grow more complicated.
Manufacturers need a virtual common ground where product information can reside to everyone's benefit. Although this is not as simple as designating a centralized server where all product data resides, it is nevertheless a realistic goal. Product data management (PDM) is an increasingly popular strategy for using intellectual property like product data as an agile strategic asset. An element of the broader product lifecycle management (PLM) concept, PDM is about bringing together the people, all essential information tied to the product, and the processes and resources required for the development and launch of a product. Enabling this common view of product and process information across disciplines lets enterprises make more informed and better decisions. Not only are early adopters realizing quantifiable time and cost savings, they are leveraging newfound agility and flexibility to tackle new business models and new markets.
Leveraging Product, Process, and Resource Data
The concept of connecting the different pieces of information wasn't
new with the advent of PLM. Companies have been creating and accessing
data repositories from the very first days of the mainframe era. What's
different about PLM is the nature of the information in it, and what
users can do with it.
To yield the efficiencies and time savings companies depend on, PLM solutions must provide data in readily reusable formats. Just being able to quickly locate information eliminates valuable development time wasted searching for it, but that is not enough. Designers and engineers at every step in the product development process should be able to seamlessly incorporate new and historic product data into their work, so they can construct digital models that predict how designs will behave and interoperate as physical objects.
Dassault Aviation
French aerospace manufacturer Dassault Aviation used such a process to
develop its Falcon 7X business jet. The company needed to design and
produce the aircraft quickly enough to stay ahead of the competition,
which meant its many international partners had to work concurrently,
not in the traditional linear model. Dassault Aviation's global
partners develop critical sub-systems ranging from instrumentation to
engines. For the design process to move ahead quickly, yet accurately
enough to avoid late-stage errors, each partner had to see what the
others were doing and gauge how it would affect their own work.
Dassault Aviation designed the aircraft in concert between a widely dispersed team of 27 global partners by deploying a PLM system that included a unified and central environment where the teams could collaborate with each other and share their ideas and progress. This enabled the extended design team to share a common, configured, and constantly updated product details and digital mockup of the Falcon 7X in real-time. The PLM collaborative environment allowed engineers at different companies to easily find part and assembly data that related to their work and be aware of the changes made by others and how they might impact their activities. Because the product data are all in the same format, engineers can assemble it into virtual prototypes that identify potential problems long before they turn into real problems downstream in the development process. Documentation filed along with the design data tells users if what they're attempting has been tried before and whether it worked. Policies built into the system enforce the company's engineering rules automatically to prevent costly variation from standard practices. Parts vendors, production engineers and everyone else in the supply chain can monitor the progress of the design toward completion, so they don't have to wait until it is completed before beginning to plan tooling and production.
This unified approach yielded extraordinary accuracy and savings. Dassault Aviation cut assembly time in half, largely because virtually defined parts fit together perfectly the first time. Assembly time for the first Falcon 7X was seven months, compared to the 16 months the previous version required. Tooling costs dropped 66 percent because parts and assemblies were designed to match from the outset and require no customized machines. Not only did PLM help eliminate traditional tooling and assembly problems, it did so while allowing Dassault Aviation to leverage the expertise and talents of risk sharing partners to make a better jet.
Organizations that build their design processes around PLM tools and complementary PLM technologies report similarly huge productivity gains. A survey of Dassault Systèms' customers using PLM technologies revealed: 30 percent reductions in lead time to market;65 percent reductions in design changes; 40 percent reductions in planning manufacturing processes; 80 percent reduction in time spent searching for information;15 percent increases in production throughput; and 13 percent overall reductions in production costs.
However, engineers who work around a digital environment like this are saving their company more than time. They are making it agile enough to compete in markets where change is often measured in weeks and months, rather than years. The net benefit of optimizing innovation processes is that it makes designers and engineers freer to innovate, because they can see the end result of their work modeled digitally long before a single die is cut. Quality improves as digital modeling predicts faults that don't surface until final prototyping or even production under current systems.
Communicating Effectively
Although PLM is based on technology solutions, it is ultimately more about strategy than technology. The technology to support widely accessible libraries of interoperable product models is neither exotic nor unusually complicated. The challenge is to spread the technology throughout the supply chain without causing unacceptable financial stress, and to create policies and procedures for using the right intellectual capital. Whether you are leveraging a risk sharing partner business model to drive business agility or simply looking to use collaboration to compress cycle-times the only effective way to do this is to get the major players in your value chain to communicate effectively. This allows your ecosystem to work towards a common goal with an emphasis on incorporating innovations, not issue resolution. While that is a significant burden, the consequences of not centralizing IP and creating strong, repeatable innovation processes is much worse. Time is no longer just money, it's survival. Today's competitive markets do not forgive companies that don't correct their mistakes quickly. Ford survived the Edsel debacle and Apple bounced back from the Newton disaster in very different times from these. Such mistakes these days are not footnotes, they are epitaphs.
Lance Murphy is a product manager at Enovia Corp. (Charlotte, NC).
