PLM in pieces

Sometime within the next three to five years, Pratt & Whitney Canada hopes to design, build, and ship complete aircraft engines with little or no paperwork.

En route to this goal—which is part of what Pratt & Whitney calls its Digital Enterprise Initiative—the Quebec-based company recently purchased a new set of applications that will allow everyone involved in designing or building an engine to get the product-related information they need to perform their particular job in electronic format.

Ultimately, Pratt & Whitney wants anyone who could make suggestions for improving product designs to be able to join online design reviews, with everyone in attendance looking at the same 3D model of a proposed new engine without having to leave their respective offices.

"We are hoping to further reduce product development time, which already has gone from five years down to three years through improved business processes," says Amal Girgis, chief information officer at Pratt & Whitney, Canada. "Adding this new technology will ensure those processes work even better by allowing engineers to get faster feedback."

Gathering feedback throughout the supply chain is a central component of product life-cycle management, or PLM, which is the core business process behind Pratt & Whitney's digital enterprise initiative. "Our vision is to have all of our processes streamlined and integrated," Girgis says. "That includes processes that involve customers and suppliers, which we consider part of our enterprise."

That same vision drives PLM software vendors, including IBM PLM, Armonk, N.Y., which supplied the applications that are powering Pratt & Whitney's digital engine. "The only way to do PLM is in holistic fashion," argues Edward Petrozelli, general manager of IBM PLM. "You have to start with managing a portfolio of products, then moving through the stages of developing a concept, creating a design, and then the actual building of the product. You have to be able to freely share data along the way. That's how you get the fast feedback that allows for reducing product development time while also improving product quality and lowering overall product development costs."

Petrozelli points out that IBM, through its partnership with Dassault Systemes, a French software company, offers tools to handle all aspects of PLM. But he also concedes that few, if any, companies can execute an end-to-end PLM strategy at once.

Even Pratt & Whitney, which clearly aspires to achieve the complete PLM vision, recognizes that things have to be done in stages. "Our digital enterprise program has many pieces," Girgis says. "It has a technical side that involves our engineering and manufacturing processes. Then there is the transaction side that involves things like procuring the parts that are needed to build the product."

Getting both sides of the enterprise to work in digital fashion requires the installation of multiple systems. The IBM/Dassault applications manage all of Pratt & Whitney's engineering processes, while much of its manufacturing and all of its transaction-oriented processes are managed by an enterprise resources planning (ERP) system from SAP, Walldorf, Germany.

Pratt & Whitney went through what Girgis describes as "a huge SAP implementation" in 1999. It purchased the IBM/Dassault applications in 2002, and is still installing them. Specifically, Pratt & Whitney purchased the latest release of CATIA, Dassault's CAD package, along with a product called ENOVIA VPM, and a third application called ENOVIA 3d com.

ENOVIA VPM, or virtual product manager, is what is known generically as a product data management (PDM) system. It will serve as the central repository for all of Pratt & Whitney's product-related data. ENOVIA 3d com is a universal viewing application; it will use data stored in the VPM application to generate the 3D product models that will be shown in Pratt & Whitney's online design reviews.

Once all of these applications are in place, Pratt & Whitney expects to produce engines faster, at a lower overall cost. But Pratt & Whitney's digital enterprise cannot be complete until a bridge is built to facilitate smooth passage of data between the company's technical and transaction systems. "We are looking to build an architecture for integration," Girgis says. And that is not a trivial task.

In fact, the sheer enormity of what would be considered a complete PLM project is causing many manufacturers to adopt pieces of PLM technology to solve specific business problems. For instance, a division of Babcock Power, which makes power generators and related equipment for electric utilities, purchased an application from PTC, a PLM software vendor based in Needham, Mass., specifically to solve a document management problem.

"With the exception of our fax machine, we had the office of the 1950s," jokes Steve Scally, manager of engineering computer applications for Babcock's Worcester, Mass.-based division, which makes equipment that filters pollutants out of the gas that is released as coal or other fossil fuels are burned to create electricity. "All of our document control was paper-based, and we were spending more than $300,000 a year just mailing out forms and documents to customers and suppliers. That really made no sense because we were creating all those documents electronically. We should have been able to send them out electronically as well."

This led to a crisis roughly a year ago, when Babcock was hit with an influx of orders in a short time span. "We found ourselves with a huge bottleneck," Scally says. "We were losing paper, and our production schedules starting falling behind, which made our customers mad." That prompted the purchase of ProjectLink, a component of PTC's Windchill PLM software suite.

"This product fit our business," Scally says, "because we make technical products that require us to treat each order like a project." ProjectLink is a Web-based system that allows companies to hold virtual meetings in which various parties can join in to discuss the details of a product's design.

The package is installed on a Web application server at Babcock's Worcester facility. Babcock starts a project by sending out e-mail invitations to the appropriate parties—which typically include the customer that's purchasing a particular product and the vendors that are expected to supply parts for that product.

Invitees go to a secure Web site where—using a password provided by Babcock—they open folders containing the information they need to see for this particular project. "These folders can contain all types of data, engineering drawings, spreadsheets, contracts, and schedules," Scally says. "Suppliers can review it to see if they can meet the specifications for parts on the project; they can even upload the latest design of the part they are supplying for our review." When Babcock selects a particular part, it can put the information on that part in an electronic folder and invite the customer to a separate Web site to review and approve that part.

After six months with this application, Scally says, "Our bills from overnight shipping couriers have dropped, and our turnaround time for processing orders is down dramatically."

The next step for Babcock, Scally says, will likely be installing PTC's PDMLink, which will provide a corporatewide repository for product-related data.

Software vendors typically recommend that users start their PLM programs by creating that central data repository. Scally says Babcock chose a different route because the document management application could solve its immediate customer service problem.

ViaSat, a producer of satellite-based communications systems based in Carlsbad, Calif., found dual uses for the PLM applications it purchased from Agile Software, San Jose, Calif. But ViaSat also originally turned to PLM technology to solve a specific problem.

For ViaSat, that problem was getting information on new designs to its contract manufacturers in a timely fashion. "The nature of our business is that we have a lot of products in development all the time," says Steve Hart, ViaSat's vice president of engineering. "But we have to get those products to market quickly because they have a short life-span. Every day that we can save in getting information to our contract manufacturers is valuable."

ViaSat initially tackled this problem by purchasing a package that Agile calls Product Collaboration. This is a Web-based application that pulls information from engineering applications and converts it into a format that can be transferred to the contract manufacturer.

Before ViaSat implemented Product Collaboration, Agile had released another application that links the actual purchasing of parts and services related to a product with the passing of the product data. "We looked at that and decided it would add value to our project," Hart says. ViaSat then accelerated its system implementation time by asking Agile to host both applications.

To get these systems working, Agile had a systems integrator write an adaptor that pulls data from ViaSat's electrical and mechanical engineering applications and converts it into an Agile bill of material (BOM). Now when ViaSat engineers complete a design, they simply click a button on their desktop to automatically generate the Agile BOM, which can then be passed to the contract manufacturer over the Internet as part of a "build package."

"It used to take several days to create a build package," Hart says, "because people had to go to several different sources for the required data, the BOM, and the parts schematics. Now it happens in a matter of minutes because the adapter is converting everything to an Agile file as the engineer does the work."

Dictaphone, Stratford, Conn., is primarily a software developer. It creates transcription applications for a broad range of organizations, and installs them on standard computer systems before delivery. If a problem occurs with one of its systems, the customer expects Dictaphone to respond. Charles Wiltsee, director of product support engineering, says Dictaphone wanted to make the job of fixing its systems easier by limiting the number of different product parts, and that's where PLM technology fits in.

Dictaphone's PLM application is a PDM package from Herndon, Va.-based Baan, which also supplies Dictaphone's ERP system. Wiltsee says the PDM system was added to establish a central repository of product-related data that could ultimately allow product teams to locate the same combination of hardware to fit multiple products. By stocking fewer parts, Dictaphone now anticipates saving millions over a three-year period.

As these examples illustrate, manufacturers are embracing PLM, but they're moving incrementally. This movement is what will lead to increased revenue based on better product development.