Mike Richardson discovers how PTC helps companies transform and streamline their businesses.
How often have you been faced with a mountain of administrative paperwork when all you really want to do is focus on what you are best at: the design and manufacture of aerospace products? However help is at hand, as the latest sophisticated product lifecycle management (PLM) software technology does all the legwork for you by helping store and manage your design content in order to more efficiently share it with other people across the organisation.
Ric Prince is PTC's director of product and market strategy for aerospace and defence (A&D). His role is to interact with A&D customers, understand their needs and then use this information to drive PTC's product development roadmap.
“Engineers are smart and talented people and they want to spend as much time as possible developing new capabilities and looking at emerging technologies and products in the future,” he begins. “PTC wants to help them get to a position where they have a very streamlined methodology through which to essentially quantify and archive their data so that other colleagues across the organisation can leverage it. We want to minimise the effort on their part so they can focus on their core development and design work. Our PLM technology provides the foundation and framework to help design engineers classify their design content so it can be reused and extended across an entire organisation that may have dispersed sites across the extended supply chain.”
Can't see the wood for the trees?
Many of us are creatures of habit and entrenched in our work routines, so bringing about organisational and cultural changes to adopt new ways of doing business is probably at least equal to any other task, which makes it a challenge to implement PLM technology. According to Prince, most people tend to focus on the PLM software itself and aspects like the culture and the process become secondary.
“Unfortunately, this increases the risk that your company won't be successful,” he continues. “Engineers tend to be very entrenched in the way they work, so we have to spend more time getting them to appreciate how a PLM technology application can really revolutionise their work routine and remove a lot of effort. One of the core capabilities that differentiates PTC's product offering is that it is completely web-based. By being intuitive in terms of ease of use is a significant enabler in helping engineers to overcome the process of adopting this technology and how storing, retrieving and leveraging data across the organisation will impact on them on a daily basis.
“It's also important to have an extendable system that can be quickly scaled across different organisations and with minimal training requirements. There's a big role that PLM technology is playing in helping companies to revolutionise their business, but you need to spend the time helping them appreciate the value proposition and the benefits they will realise, and then train them to understand how to use it the right way - if you don't, then it's unlikely they're going to use it for very long before they could try and work around it instead.”
Prince notes that in terms of the kinds of demands being forced on the A&D sector, time to market, improving operating efficiency and developing optimised Lean product development processes are key trends that are applicable around the world.
“These trends typically concern increasing process and product complexity,” he states. “As products become more electronics-based and software configurable, then the need to integrate this information into a single environment so that you can perform cross-functional product development becomes more important. Companies need to figure out ways of applying PLM technology applications to integrate electrical, mechanical and software design data into a single BoM. They want to enable the processes that designers use to develop products so that when design decisions and engineering changes are proposed, the system promotes a cross-functional change impact analysis in order to isolate and understand these changes early.
“In the past, we had ‘silos' of product development where engineers worked in isolation. When they made design changes they often didn't realise the manifestation of those problems until later in the process. The issue of process and product complexity and the need to create a cross-functional environment where you can analyse and integrate this information is a growing trend in the marketplace. Being able to do this is a key way of helping companies extend the values of their underlying intellectual property to their organisation and supply chain.”
A life of its own
But with some larger organisations supply chains now being extended globally, keeping track of the multiple design changes experienced during the lifetime of aircraft programmes such as the F-35 or Eurofighter must present huge data management challenges? According to Prince, it's about a systems engineering approach to project development where companies can holistically manage the entire lifecycle of product development according to a systems engineering approach.
“It's not just about how you design and develop your PLM system, it's also about considering sustainability and maintenance,” he reveals. “This means that when you begin your detailed design phase, you also consider how the equipment will be maintained in the field. Total lifecycle systems management and through-life support are the most important initiatives we have found in the global A&D regions and are probably the predominant trends we've seen in the marketplace.”
Prince concludes that it's the more progressive A&D organisations that realise the only way they can be truly be competitive and enable global product development processes is through the implementation of PLM technology.
“They see a significant benefit in implementing best in class technology solutions that help them extend their information, manage it to a deeper level and control access to it,” he confirms. “It's the foundation for collaborative interface with the customers, suppliers and partners, and today, it's easier to get them to understand the need because they realise they need to revolutionise the way they develop products.
“A&D budgets are shrinking and in the current economic downturn, companies need to figure out a way to reconfigure and repurpose existing systems - and find a way to be more efficient and more competitive. It's much easier to get engineers to appreciate the value of PLM today, rather than be faced with the prospect of relying on legacy systems that have little integration between them, change frequently and carry a high cost of ownership. Yes, there's still some handholding required, but it's mainly about developing partnerships and helping companies realise their corporate objectives.” www.ptc.com
