Sep 2, 2021
About the Customer
Engineering Industries eXcellence’s Industries eXcellence team of experts recently kicked off a new Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) initiative for a global industry leader in Aerospace, Space & Defense Manufacturing. With facilities throughout the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom, the customer designs and manufactures state-of-the-art aerospace systems and components for aeroengines, aerostructures, space rockets and specialty aerospace products. The aerospace leader also repairs, overhauls, tests and provides aftermarket support services for complex aerospace engines, engine components and assemblies.
The Customer’s Need
Organizing and managing large amounts of data is a huge task in the manufacturing industry, and nowhere is this truer than in aerospace and defense, where products are highly complex and require high levels of precision and documentation across their lifecycles. Furthermore, keeping this information up-to-date as well as making sure that data is controlled and accessible between different departments (between engineering and manufacturing, for example) across the enterprise is a big challenge. Within a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system, teams and individuals can create, organize, manage and consolidate information effectively.
This was precisely the challenge at hand for our customer, whose product data was being managed within a PLM system that was built for their parent company operating in a different country. Not only did that impede its usability, since the needs and requirements of our customer’s operations and business were not considered when the system was built, but reliable control, access and support were increasingly necessary yet difficult to ensure as the U.S. company began growing and expanding at a very rapid rate.
About the Project
The customer wanted to implement a new PLM solution that not only gave them full visibility and control over all their product data and changes, but the structure of which was designed to both meet their current needs and be flexible enough for future extension.
The first phase of this ambitious enterprise PLM initiative ultimately aimed at transforming how and where the customer manages all of their engineering, manufacturing and product data just began in one of their major U.S. production sites. Our team of experts will be:
- Designing and implementing a new PLM solution based on Siemens Teamcenter Manufacturing and the customer’s unique product data and change management requirements;
- Consolidating and standardizing all of the customer’s product design, engineering and manufacturing data to be stored and managed within one central database built for their needs;
- Integrating the new PLM solution with the customer’s existing systems for advanced computer-aided product design, or CAD, and computer-aided manufacturing design, or CAM, data management (in this case, Siemens NX);
- Installing and integrating Shop Floor Connect for Siemens Teamcenter, a Direct Numerical Control (DNC) tool designed specifically to make the PLM database directly available to operators and machines executing production on the factory.
Engineering’s Advantage
The Siemens Teamcenter software offering is the world’s most widely used PLM system. While most companies see Teamcenter as a tool to manage engineering data alone, we focus on Teamcenter to bridge the gap between engineering and production as it relates to manufacturing. By delivering a solution designed for the unique needs of our customer yet flexible enough for future extensions, and one that will provide them with full visibility into and parallel execution of all their product design and manufacturing process planning activities, we will help the aerospace leader finally take control of their data, and drastically improve product profitability, time-to-market and quality.
