Give your document control a lift

DRU009 - three
DRU009 - three

Aerospace Manufacturing discovers how Design Rule helps Meggitt improve its document management using ENOVIA.

Everyone knows the Wright brothers as the inventors of the modern aeroplane. However, not everyone is familiar with the reason they won the title. It wasn’t that their machine was the first ever to fly, but because it was the first that could be controlled while in the air. Every aircraft built since then has had controls to roll wings and pitch and veer the nose.

The industry has come a long way since the early generation of gliders that first took to the skies over a century ago. Nowadays, more than eight million people fly on commercial airlines every day and over 50 million tonnes of cargo is transported by air each year. To keep up with the market pressures, manufacturers have to ensure everything they do – from product design and testing, to document management and compliance procedures – is as precise as clockwork.

Meggitt has been part of the aerospace industry for almost half a century, and there’s scarcely an aircraft in service that doesn’t carry Meggitt’s critical components and smart systems. Companies that operate in such onerous environments have very strict design, test and compliance requirements. When these spread across a large team based in different locations, document control can become a bit of a nightmare. Add more than forty years’ worth of historical data and drawings to the mix and the situation becomes even more delicate.

For these reasons, the move to one software platform across divisions and a better document control system has been a priority for Meggitt. To implement the right software, UK and Swiss divisions of Meggitt approached product lifecycle management (PLM) specialist Design Rule for advice.

“Our two main objectives were to improve document control and get our teams based in different locations to collaborate more effectively using a shared platform,” explains Andy Lodge, design engineering manager at Meggitt UK. “The move to a new software platform was also an opportunity to review and improve our existing document archive.”

Alongside its French and Swiss partner Visiativ, which led the international implementation, Design Rule coordinated the project in the UK and made recommendations of how PLM software could help Meggitt achieve its objectives.

Improving electronic storage

As a value-added reseller of Dassault Systèmes, Design Rule used its expertise to implement the ENOVIA software platform in the Meggitt UK offices. With the largest ENOVIA skill base in the UK, Design Rule coordinated the transition to the new system and worked closely with its Swiss partner to ensure the multi-site implementation was successful.

“Because Meggitt’s history is so long and fruitful, we have over a million of drawings and documents, some of which go back the first half of the last century,” continues Lodge. “Most of our documents have digital copies, but the existing system wasn’t flexible or accessible enough. Most of our electronic storage was organised in a folder structure similar to the Windows model and shared on the network. The main problem was that the search function was unreliable, so if you needed an archived document, you would either have to ask someone where to find it or spend a lot of time looking for it.

“One of ENOVIA’s benefits we saw straight away was an improvement in efficiency in locating files and performing admin tasks. Just to get an idea of how complex our document archive was, we used to have over a million documents spread across 15,000 folders. Some of them were duplicates or had become obsolete.

“Last year, we identified about 100,000 working files that needed to be managed and installed on the new system. We’ve already added 80,000 of them to ENOVIA, which now allows us to find relevant files in just seconds. This has saved our team a significant amount of time already.”

Invisible governance

Better document control was the original reason Meggitt decided to implement a PLM system. ENOVIA not only allowed Meggitt to identify documents more easily, but also streamlined the procedure of getting documents signed off through electronic capabilities.

Meggitt runs hundreds of concurrent products and projects across an international team of experts. Design Rule helped the company simplify its processes, from product development to quality, compliance, export control and intellectual property protection. The ENOVIA software suite delivered an element of ‘invisible governance’, which allows Meggitt to drive project updates and spot potential issues or risks before they manifest.

ENOVIA made product planning and document management easier by connecting two parts of the business: the document authors – such as engineers, CAD designers and product designers – and the consumers of information from the purchasing, quality and export control teams. Different Meggitt employees need to access certain documents for various reasons. For example, the document procedures for qualifying products that are fit for flight can be many hundreds of pages long and need to go through different levels of approval, not to mention they need to be accessible in real-time. By using ENOVIA, Meggitt has simplified the approval process, making the digital trail of a document much clearer and improved the accessibility of relevant team members.

The Export Control and IP Security module enables Meggitt to classify data with defined security rules with exceptions in an evaluated expression. This classification enables the enforcement filter to protect data from unauthorised disclosure within the ENOVIA platform.

“Perhaps the most ground-breaking aspect of the project consisted in the multiple site implementations,” states Bob Hillier, managing director of Design Rule. “This is where the partnership with Visiativ really made a difference because it allowed us to take advantage of ENOVIA’s flexibility to adapt the software to each division’s culture, structure and way of doing things.

Design Rule
PLM software is about being in control, anticipating organisation and market challenges and responding to them in the best way possible

“One of the trickiest things about introducing new software is getting the team on board and helping everyone to see the benefits of the new system. Unless all the users are on the same page, there’s a chance the implementation will fall flat and the results will not reflect expectations. By allowing the UK and Swiss teams to adapt the software to their existing needs, processes and procedures, the transition was smooth and the users were more likely to engage with and make the most of the new system.”

“Although we’re part of the same company, the two divisions have different company cultures and backgrounds,” explains Lodge. “One of the biggest challenges was harmonising the requirements between the two sites. Design Rule, Visiativ and our IT departments worked closely for several months to align the project from a hardware and software point of view. The flexibility and support Meggitt received throughout the implementation of the project was where the added value really came from and we were very pleased with how our teams worked together across borders, company cultures and requirements.”

Where PLM meets CAD

In the near future, Meggitt is hoping to get more departments and divisions to use the ENOVIA software, turning it into one of the main communication and management tools of the company. It plans to move beyond document management and employ PLM for project management and bill of materials management, while also integrating a collaborative CAD software platform into the system.

Meggitt’s implementation of PLM software is exciting not just because of the time, cost and efficiency savings the company has already started to see. Implementing PLM software is about more than the advantages of doing things better, it’s about being in control, anticipating organisation and market challenges and responding to them in the best way possible. Just like on-board controls make an aeroplane modern, PLM software makes companies smarter and more agile.

www.designrule.co.uk

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Design Rule

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