Oct 1, 2019
About the Customer
The customer is a big American conglomerate and multinational manufacturer operating in different industry segments including Aviation, Healthcare, Power, Oil & Gas, Renewable Energy, Digital Industry and Additive, among others. As an industry front-runner, the customer is always looking to leverage the latest engineering and manufacturing technologies to drive efficiency and innovation across their enterprise. Their overarching goal in the years to come is to be a global leader and example for Industry 4.0.
A Leader in Aviation Innovation
Our team has previously worked with the Energy division of the customer’s business, but this project’s effort involves delivering digital manufacturing solutions and expertise to their innovative Aviation group. This group is responsible for the production of large jet engines for use in commercial, private and military aircraft. Over the years, this manufacturing division has expanded from the production of engines alone to an expanded portfolio including pilot-friendly cockpits, aerodynamic aircraft body designs and other cutting-edge flight systems. In addition to a myriad of accomplishments over the last century, the customer is recognized as producing one of the most powerful jet engines on the market today.
The Customer’s Challenge
The customer’s aviation division has many manufacturing plants located all over the world. Over the years, their increasing adoption of enterprise technology in their production, while admirable, when combined with the rapid expansion of their business and the unique and challenging requirements of their manufacturing process, has led the customer to fall into a very common IT trap of large manufacturers – high customization.
High development and maintenance of custom solutions can hold manufacturers back from achieving their true operational potential as the rest of the world moves forward towards Industry 4.0. Though custom PLM, MES, DNC, etc. solutions may fulfill an immediate need and perform the functionality well, there will be costly pitfalls along the way for new integrations or upgrades to other systems, leading to inefficiencies and production downtimes for one or more plants. More than that, this customer’s system customization exists at the plant-specific level, leading to a significant lack of visibility and standardization at the organizational level.
About the Project
Recognizing the benefits of moving away from customized amalgam systems, the customer has partnered with Engineering Industries eXcellence’s team of Industries eXcellence experts in order to take the first critical steps towards standardizing and streamlining their aviation manufacturing data management systems and processes on a global scale.
The first area of focus: the systems responsible for master data management, production planning and manufacturing execution. Currently, our PLM experts are working closely with the customer’s team to define an integrated solution architecture for expanding the capabilities of their existing Siemens Teamcenter environment to cover CAM data management as well as engineering data. In addition, we are planning the integration of Shop Floor Connect (SFC) for Teamcenter within this architecture to enable Direct Numerical Control (DNC) for the customer. SFC is an application add-on for Teamcenter that will enable the customer to deliver critical production information directly to their shop floor and CNC machine controllers. More than just a traditional DNC system, SFC’s connection to a centralized Teamcenter database will help the customer avoid data duplication, easily manage revisions and ensure that only correct manufacturing data is used during production. This complete PLM solution will ultimately create a single source of truth for the management of all of the customer’s product and process lifecycle data.
The Big Picture with Engineering
The deliverable at the end of this initial phase will be a global solution architecture for future rollout that will cover the customer’s engineering data management, manufacturing data management and DNC processes. This project is the first step in a much larger effort to prepare these systems for use in production.
So, what’s our advantage? Our specialists are looking at the organization as a whole rather than at the plant level, which has been driving the customer’s operations for so many years. We are building a solution that will cover all the core needs and common requirements of the entire aviation division. This architecture will replace the customized solutions that required each site to operate with its own set of rules and processes. When this foundation is in place, it will be a much simpler and significantly more efficient process to collect and enable any residual site-specific requirements that may be needed. Being reliable and well-defined, our high-level solution will standardize and streamline data management processes across the customer’s aviation manufacturing division. At the same time, being flexible, our solution will enable the customer to add new functionalities and system integrations in the near and far future without the risk of affecting operations or the business.
