Nov 15, 2020
About the Customer
Engineering Group’s Industries eXcellence team just started an exciting new Aerospace, Space & Defense Manufacturing project for an American spacecraft service provider that manufactures and operates advanced rockets and rocket vehicles capable of launching spacecraft into orbit around Earth and other bodies in our solar system. Their customers include the United States government, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and NASA.
The Customer’s Challenge
Our Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) team is working directly with the customer’s enterprise IT team, which is in charge of digitalization initiatives, that is bringing in new technologies, then standardizing and connecting these technologies across their entire organization. Our PLM experts were called in to help the customer’s team identify, design and implement the right solutions in order to bridge the communication gap between their rocket design team in the engineering department and their rocket manufacturing team on the factory floor.
This disconnect was preventing the two teams from collaborating efficiently and effectively, and this was a risky problem, since the operations team is tasked to produce a rocket based on the specifications and in the way defined by the design team. Finding a solution to enable them to share product and manufacturing data, and to do so continuously, was critical to ensure that any changes from top floor to shop floor, and vice versa, were communicated quickly and correctly, and in order to reduce costly quality issues and rework on the production floor.
About the Project
When our team was brough onboard, the customer was already using Siemens Teamcenter as the core PLM system for managing their rocket design and engineering data. But when it comes to making any product, there are two types of data that must be managed: design data AND manufacturing data. Today, just like with this customer, it is common to find companies taking advantage of PLM to manage only the design aspect of their data and entirely missing out on the benefits of managing their manufacturing data within the same environment.
The manufacturing data defines how a product is to be made, whether these are the routings explaining various operations needed to assemble a product, electronic work instructions that operators need to execute a complex process in the factory, or documentation defining when and where quality inspections need to be taken to ensure that the product is within specification. Missing this critical aspect is often what prevents companies from achieving the full value of a PLM system, and it was what our customer was ready to resolve. Creating a single point of information for the product, and particularly one that automatically reflected changes, revisions and requests from both design and manufacturing, would allow the customer to drive paperless manufacturing, significantly speed up their time-to-market and ensure product and process quality throughout the rocket’s product lifecycle.
That was the goal of this project: to consolidate all of the customer’s design and manufacturing data within Siemens Teamcenter Manufacturing, to make up-to-date work instructions easily and digitally available for the execution team on the factory floor, and to facilitate the sharing of data and changes between different departments of the organization.
As the project’s lead technical consulting team, our engineers will provide the technical expertise needed to cover all the tools within the Siemens Teamcenter Manufacturing software portfolio, with a particular focus on Bill of Materials (BOM) Management, Bill of Process (BOP) Management, Electronic Work Instructions (EWI) and Change Management in the first phase. We are also the initiative’s lead functional consulting team, responsible for taking the customer’s business requirements and helping them design and define how the final solution should work, as well as how it should integrate with other systems, including their Manufacturing Execution System (MES).
Engineering’s Advantage
As the customer’s strategic digital transformation partner, leveraging our technical knowledge of the entire Siemens Digital Enterprise offering, and utilizing our experience delivering solutions designed to support the specific processes and needs of the aerospace manufacturing and complex assembly environments, our Industries eXcellence team will help direct the customer’s entire digitalization initiative, starting from solution design and development, to solution integration and validation, all the way to solution implementation and ongoing support.
PLM can open up a plethora of new business possibilities and benefits to an organization, even revolutionizing how their products are to be designed and manufactured. Engineering is an industry leader and a go-to-partner in delivering successful PLM solutions and helping guide customers across different sectors into this exciting new age of Industry 4.0.
