For defense and aerospace manufacturers, the New Millennium brings not only great promise for business growth, but substantial challenges, as well. Aircraft, ships, and related equipment are becoming ever more sophisticated. Yet purchasers, such as the U.S. government, are regularly tightening budgets and demanding shorter time-to-deploy.
The challenge is multi-faceted. More sophisticated systems mean greater complexity, but tighter budgets and time-to-deploy demands add an extra degree of difficulty for those manufacturers who are striving to satisfy these requirements -- and maintain high product quality -- all at once.
Collaborative Product Commerce to the Rescue
Fortunately, a solution to these challenges is coming by way of the product-design process known as collaborative product commerce, which is powered by a new generation of software from vendors like Parametric Technology Corp (PTC).
The idea behind collaborative product commerce, or CPC, is simple: make it possible for all interested parties to share product development information. This means, for instance, that all the companies involved in making subassemblies for an aircraft should be able to work from the same design model. Also, detailed information, right down to the location where the castings were poured, should be available for the aircraft's entire 30-year-or-more lifecycle.
As innovative as CPC may be, the concept of collaboration is not new to aerospace/defense manufacturers. In fact, CPC ties in nicely with the current electronic product design trend toward using integrated data environments for product modeling. And it addresses the related industry trend toward virtual teaming, where design-engineering teams from sub-assembly manufacturers collaborate by forming virtual workgroups in cyberspace, linked together through computer networks.
Web Browsers, PDM and Other Tools
What CPC does is use modern software and networking technologies to bring these concepts closer to reality.
For example, CPC uses advanced Internet development and integration tools, such as Java and XML (Extensible Markup Language), to let users access data via standard Web browsers. And CPC builds on the data storage, versioning, and organization techniques that grew up around product data management (PDM) systems over the last few years.
Still, as clearly focused as the CPC vision is, translating that vision into a functioning software architecture is anything but simple. What's required are powerful, sharable tools for finding, using, and managing product design data.
PTC: A Look Inside Windchill
PTC's Windchill integration framework demonstrates how these tools combine to enable CPC.
At the heart of a Windchill architecture -- and responsible for the "finding" part of the CPC formula -- is an enterprise application integration framework known as Info*Engine.
Info*Engine uses software adapters to pull data from relevant sources within the supply-chain extranet, including PDM systems, ERP systems, SCM (Supply Chain Management) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems. Info*Engine's adapters employ powerful technologies for speaking in "native" languages to the diverse underlying technologies that make up these systems. To do this, Info*Engine's adapters must be fluent in talking to legacy IBM mainframes, Oracle databases, and SAP ERP systems, among others.
This ability to connect to multiple sources is a vital feature for the many manufacturers who want to deploy commercial off-the-shelf software -- called COTS -- while still maintaining their investments in custom-developed legacy systems.
Also, it's notable that Windchill uses what's known as a federated architecture. This architecture functions by setting up hyperlinks to the actual information that's stored in these source systems, rather than making copies of the information. As a result, data freshness is guaranteed, and complexity is reduced.
For the second part of the find-use-manage formula, Windchill delivers the information to user's Web browsers via powerful, standards-based technologies such as HTML, Java, and XML.
Here, Windchill creates what are known as role-based portals for each of the virtual team members. A modern virtual design team might consist of thousands of members, representing hundreds of manufacturers. The team might consist of engineers, procurement specialists, project managers, quality assurance people, sales and marketing professionals, support and maintenance specialists, manufacturing designers, contract and legal experts. Role-based portals match the on-screen content to the user's need -- giving solid models to engineers, for instance, and progress reports to project managers. That way, each user is assured of getting just the information he or she needs to do the job at hand.
Another key component in helping design-team members use their information is, of course, visualization software. Visualization, where team members can view and sometimes interact with a life-like rendition of the product model, is a popular way of gaining the benefits of physical prototyping, but without incurring high prototyping costs.
Modern visualization software lets users see the product in 3-D by wearing 3-D glasses. Users can even "walk" through larger models in order to check for interference or other potential problems.
Visualization can significantly reduce the cost of physical prototyping -- a one-fifth scale physical prototype of a submarine might cost as much as $12 - 15 million; an aircraft wing mockup could cost more than $5 million, and a fuselage mockup might be as high as $11 million. Yet another benefit: unlike the physical prototype, the virtual model is always up to date, reflecting the most recent design changes. As a result, the team can see numerous "prototypes" at various stages of design.
In Windchill, PTC's ProductView visualization software includes capabilities for scaling resolution and other functions from the smallest user laptop to the largest conference-room display screen. Large visualization centers, sometimes called virtual-reality centers, are becoming popular among defense and aerospace manufacturers for showing product visualizations to design-engineering teams, customers and prospects, and other interested groups.
An important feature of Windchill's visualization software is that it's CAD-neutral, so it can create images of models that were created by different vendors' CAD software. It can even combine such models into a single visualization image. For instance, subassemblies modeled in CAD software from vendor A can be shown in relation to subassemblies modeled in CAD software from vendor B. This is a useful tool when changes and markups need to be communicated amongst a virtual team using different product development tools.
Also, Windchill's visualization software functions at the highest, "presentation" layer of the application, so it doesn't require that the user possess the actual CAD application software in order to view the model. This is an important feature, considering that not only are today's products more complex, but today's design teams are more varied. They are likely to be made up of members who use many different types of CAD software, including PTC's own Pro/ENGINEER and CADDS 5 products.
For the third part of the formula, Windchill also features a number of advanced software tools for managing the information that design team members are extracting and using. Some examples:
- Document management and vaulting -- stores all relevant information, carefully tracking versions and maintaining security. Information stored includes hyperlinks to source databases;
- Lifecycle management -- adds powerful change management, alarm notification, and other features necessary for lifecycle tracking;
- Workflow management -- supplies a framework for automating complex business processes, both within the enterprise and out to the supply chain extranet;
- Security and system administration -- enforces sophisticated access control policies and monitors sharing of administrative directory information in large, complex installations.
Also, vertical applications are available that are linked to job functions such as production planning, procurement, standards, and engineering design.
More Than the Sum of Its Parts
Even with features like these, the overall value of Windchill -- and the strength of CPC -- lies in the commitment to making the most of complete, end-to-end product-lifecycle management.
According to Mark DeBellis, director of technical marketing for the government division of NetIDEAS, Inc., "More than any other product, Windchill puts forth an architecture that encompasses an entire, start-to-finish strategy for fulfilling the promise of CPC."
NetIDEAS (www.netideasinc.com) is a year-old ASP (application service provider) that uses Windchill to help small and medium-size commercial manufacturers as well as government agencies embark on their own CPC initiatives.
Benefits of CPC
For defense and aerospace companies around the world, CPC and Windchill represent valuable allies in resolving the challenges of greater product sophistication and tighter budgets.
For instance, by using Windchill software to activate CPC, manufacturers can speed time-to-deploy by compressing their design/manufacturing cycles.
In the past, design and manufacturing teams worked sequentially, with designers first perfecting the product on paper, then handing off the drawings to the manufacturing team. If a manufacturing engineer found a problem -- say, a part that could not be manufactured as it was shown on the design drawing -- the manufacturing engineer would hand it back for a redesign. Today, with CPC and Windchill, many such efforts can be accomplished in parallel, with manufacturing engineers sharing the same model as designers, and giving instant feedback as to manufacturability.
Also today, thanks to virtual teaming, the design/manufacturing teams can be located in different companies, and on different continents; they may be using different CAD software and different PDM systems.
This is important because large aerospace/defense projects are increasingly international in scope; they are taken on by multi-vendor consortia, and consortium vendors frequently represent a mix of nationalities. Through CPC, they will be able to build better, more sophisticated products, in shorter time and at lower cost than ever before. For example, it used to take about eight years to conceive, design, and build a large ship; now it takes about four years.
As for cost, CPC not only saves money by compressing the time-to-deploy cycle, but it saves additional charges that can come through maintenance. In fact, lifecycle maintenance costs for a sophisticated aircraft or ship can amount to four times the original product-procurement cost. Considering today's multi-billion dollar procurement costs for new systems, that represents a substantial additional burden. CPC can help reduce that significantly, by letting maintenance planners anticipate and deliver in advance the parts that will be needed. That way, aircraft or ships do not have to lie idle, literally for months at a time, while mechanics order and wait for the repair parts.
Power to the People
Ultimately, the benefits of CPC will extend to all of us. As consumers, we'll be able to order new products that are customized for our use, and are delivered quickly. And as taxpayers, we'll be assured that our dollars are being spent wisely and well, producing high quality aerospace and defense products with a minimum of wasted time or money.
