Farnborough Air Show features advances in products and PLM
By Malcolm Wheatley, senior contributing editor (malcolm_wheatley@compuserve.com) -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 9/1/2008
Every two years, Europe’s Farnborough Air Show is where the global aerospace & defense industry goes to sell its wares. This year, it gave Siemens PLM Software a chance to showcase stories from satisfied customers.Take Russia’s first internationally designed and manufactured “paperless” aircraft, the Sukhoi Civil Aircraft Company’s SSJ100 regional airliner, which had its maiden flight less than two months before the show.
The story here isn’t the paperless design; aerospace giants like Boeing Aircraft Company and Airbus have been doing that for years. Instead, it’s about Sukhoi’s determination to exploit product life-cycle management (PLM) to break into the competitive global regional jet market.
The Teamcenter software suite from Siemens PLM Software, it turns out, was central to this, with the project plan calling for Sukhoi to work closely with a team of international partners and aircraft systems suppliers throughout Western Europe and the United States. By bringing all these companies together into a virtual enterprise on a single global platform, development times could be slashed even as the latest technological advances were harnessed to reduce operating costs and fuel burn.
“We set out with an aggressive plan and succeeded because of our collaboration with partners and suppliers powered by Teamcenter,” says Sukhoi President Viktor Soubbotin. “The technology played a central role in getting the SSJ100 into the air faster and at lower cost.”
In all, Teamcenter coordinated the efforts of approximately 1,700 Sukhoi engineers and manufacturing specialists spread over eight locations in Russia with a world-class team of partners around the globe. The resulting aircraft has broken records, consuming 10 percent less fuel than its nearest competitor, and offering a 10-percent lower overall cost of ownership—and the lowest price in its class.
“Multiple CAD systems were harnessed together in a single PDM [product data management] platform to create a single virtual 3D mock-up, says Tim Nichols, Siemens PLM Software’s managing director of aerospace & defense global marketing. “It’s not about Sukhoi playing ‘catch-up’ with the West—it’s about bringing together a world-class team of suppliers and experts, and driving down the aircraft’s development and manufacturing costs.”
Sukhoi wasn’t the only satisfied Siemens PLM Software customer at Farnborough. Saab Aerosystems, part of Sweden’s Saab Group, invested in Teamcenter four years ago to improve PDM for its JAS Saab 39 Gripen fighter plane, aiming to reduce development time and operating costs. An announcement at the show revealed that the company has now licensed Teamcenter MRO—taking its active users to a total of 2,200 seats—with the intention of reusing product data to improve customer support.
“Saab is an excellent example of an aerospace OEM that has taken a solid PLM platform and extended its MRO activities, recognizing that parts and logistics performance is just as important as raw aircraft importance,” maintains Nichols. “Its customers should all see improvements in their fleet availability, overhaul cycle time, and total cost per operating hour.”
PLM Summit hosts a collaboration room with many views
Steve Smith, a principal consultant with telecommunications provider BT Global Services North America, revealed what’s called a virtual collaboration room at the European PLM Summit hosted in late June by the World Trade Group in Toulouse, France. Smith claims the virtual room can be deployed on top of any product life-cycle management (PLM) vendor’s technology stack without writing any new software code.
Of the vendors Smith has spoken to about the "room," many have pieces of the technology it comprises as part of their existing PLM, product data management, CAD, and desktop productivity solutions. What’s required now is getting those solutions to interoperate. Smith says that happens to be BT’s area of expertise.
The BT solution combines Microsoft SharePoint Server, Exchange Server, Windows Server, Active Directory, and Office Communications Server into a single platform integrated with a company’s own telephony infrastructure to create an environment for sharing PLM, CAD, ERP, and other files using video conferencing, wikis, and blogs. Digital design data is made available throughout the room without requiring additional seat licenses for the native application in which it was created.
Says Smith, "Everything in the room is contextual to the project in question. Click on a component, see an issue; click again to talk to the relevant person—all without leaving the virtual collaboration room’s desktop on your screen."
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