microsites>>   

e-Business Transformation to a Manufacturing Digital Enterprise

Pat Toole, Jr., IBM General Manager, Product Design Management
Joel Lemke, Chief Executive Officer, ENOVIA Corp.

...continued from page 3

ENOVIA and IBM e-business Solutions in Action
A number of companies throughout the world have already begun their journey to becoming a digital enterprise. Below are two IBM examples. The first, Sikorsky Aircraft, has used IBM e-business solutions in combination with ENOVIA technology for their own advantage and the advantage of their business partners and customers.

Case History #1: Sikorsky

Just before Christmas 1999, an S-92A Helibus prototype lifted off on its maiden flight at the Sikorsky Flight Development Center in West Palm Beach, Fla. A midsize chopper, the Helibus can carry 19 passengers in an airline-style cabin or 22 to 24 soldiers in a utility layout.

Like a growing number of sophisticated aerospace projects, the Helibus is a truly global product. The cabin, designed and built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan, is attached to a nose cockpit module-including the cockpit floor, walls, roof, controlling linkages, and wiring-designed by Aerospace Industrial Development Corporation in Taiwan. The big fuselage then receives the tailcone from Gamesa in Spain, the vertical fin from Jingdezhen Helicopter Group/CATIC in China, and the landing gear and fuel sponsors from Embraer in Brazil. The Sikorsky Aircraft subsidiary of United Technologies manufactures the Helibus transmission, rotor system, and other high-value components, and then assembles the S-92 in the same factory in Stratford, Conn., that has built Black Hawk and Seahawk helicopters for the military since 1974.

But this is not just an international production program based on build-to-print guidelines, where the subcontractor puts together whatever Sikorsky's drawings indicate. The Helibus project gives its global partners the authority to design the details they build. Design engineers in far-distant locations contribute in virtually real time to a three-dimensional electronic mockup that goes together like the real thing.

"This is a leading-edge concept," says Dave Burdick, a vice president of engineering applications at GartnerGroup. "The supply-chain partners are true design collaborators rather than design fulfillers. They have the authority to originate design intent rather than just process it."

The S-92 partners are linked by an international wide-area network (WAN) to a common, digital 3-D model that speeds development and eliminates costly misunderstandings. Probably more than any previous international aerospace partnership, the S-92 effort required a broad, early commitment to distributed information technology. "If we hadn't had it, we'd have had questions as to whether we could pull off what we did," says S-92 integration team leader Tom Toner.

Sikorsky didn't take this bold step into leading-edge information technologies just because its engineers thought they needed to. Easy assembly without the need to rework promises dramatic savings in manufacturing costs and makes possible cost-effective made-to-order helicopters. That's critical to Sikorsky and its partners because their markets have changed dramatically. Orders for the intermediate- and heavyweight helicopters Sikorsky builds have fallen in the short term, along with defense budgets and oil prices (as oil companies need fewer helicopters to support offshore exploration and production).

At the heart of Sikorsky's business model for the S-92 is the 3-D electronic mockup that reduces the cost of building the helicopter and of developing the option packages. "I think each one of these major option suites would be a major implementation if we didn't have the shared three-dimensional database," says S-92 IT specialist Michael Cohen. "There would be a lot of prototyping, a lot of cut-and-try, a lot of fitting."

Some S-92 preliminary design work was done on two-dimensional computer-aided design (CAD) systems that replicated traditional drafting procedures and stored drawings in electronic form. But the Sikorsky team realized that if they really wanted to reduce the cost and speed the development of the new helicopter, they would have to work in 3-D CAD. Three-dimensional design moved them from drawings to models that supported structural and dynamic analyses, computer-controlled machining, and assembly visualization. "Having the 3-D data was also a way to make sure communication was straightforward," explains Toner. "There's much less ambiguity when you can view the design in 3-D and see how the parts relate to one another."

Sikorsky invested around $2.6 million in 130 workstations. For the sake of diplomacy, international partners were given the responsibility for making their own IT infrastructure improvements. Exchanging data between the designers and the electronic mockup involves taking the 3-D models released to Sikorsky by its international partners and updating the CATIA model on the server network and then the electronic mockup in IGOR, Sikorsky's electronic drawing vault. The partners do not have direct access to IGOR, so an automated transfer routine dumps released drawings from the vault into the network. The server senses what data was released from the electronic mockup and issues a message to the user confirming what data should be in the user's possession. The partners maintain their own databases of the models being worked on, while special interface software keeps all databases concurrent.

Informal communications between Helibus design groups are routinely carried by e-mail and Internet-based FTP (File Transfer Protocol). All communications are in English, the universal language of the world aerospace industry. Because of the widely different time zones, videoconferencing is used only occasionally.

The network, which cost $15,000 to $20,000 to set up and about $30,000 a month to maintain, pays off in the lean Sikorsky presence at each partner site. In-country teams include a leader from purchasing with business responsibility, an airframe lead designer with technical responsibility, a manufacturing engineer to deal with whether the pieces can actually be produced, and a quality-assurance representative. Teams may be augmented for a time to address specific issues, but Tom Toner observes, "If we didn't have the 3-D database, the requirement to have a much larger team in-country would have been an issue. Communications would also have been difficult to manage with only 2-D data."

When electronic models turned into real parts, CAD tools saved the S-92 program an impressive amount of fabrication time and money. For example when the first canopy roof was laid up, only 4% of the plies had to be changed, versus 40% on similar components made in the past. Composite cockpit components were also produced 27% faster than comparable parts on earlier programs.

Hopefully, this Sikorsky example provides a sense of the transforming potential that e-business strategies, processes and techniques coupled with ENOVIA technologies can provide for manufacturing companies of any size. Sikorsky didn't just "do it better" or "do it cheaper." They developed a whole new way to design and build a helicopter that included not only improvements to their own processes, but involved their supplier-business partners as well. Clearly, Sikorsky and its partners all benefited from the faster, more accurate design process. Most importantly, time-to-market improved significantly, positioning Sikorsky well for the anticipated rebound in sales of this type of aircraft.

While the software and networking technologies are important, Sikorsky officials are quick to add that the required transformation of their basic business processes and the implementation of these digital enterprise steps could not have been accomplished without help from IBM acting in a service capacity.

more...

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Please rate our article...

 

Sponsored Links

AnyDWG Offers DWG to PDF, DWG to DXF, PDF to DWG, DWG to JPG, PDF to DXF Converters

AutoDWG offers DWF to DWG, DWG to PDF , PDF to DWG, DWG to Flash Converters, DWG Viewer.

eCampus.com Get your stuff for College... Cheap! Textbooks, Greek Gear, DVD's, University Clothing, Computers and MORE!

Access Your PC from Anywhere Free Trial plus 10% Off!