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AEROSPACEMANUFACTURING | february 2012

A single version

of the truth
Product lifecycle management (PLM) software is helping designers to store, share
and manage information with everyone across an organisation by doing all the
legwork. Mike Richardson looks at some of the leading solutions that are enabling
companies to stay competitive.

nformation pervades our everyday

lives and the Internet has made
it possible to consume it in vast
amounts. How we use it is entirely
our choice. Information is power and
we should use as much as we need to
make our decisions. However, its only
powerful if we know not only how to
acquire it first, but how accurate it is
too. Information also modifies the way
companies in the supply chain consume
what they need to know in order to keep
pace with technology. The latest advances
in digital manufacturing techniques
are helping aerospace designers make
alterations to new products in seconds
and see how every minute change will
affect the entire supply chain.
Professor Jim Scanlan of
Southampton University
and Ian Poccachard, then
of Rolls-Royce, founded
Plexus Planning in 2003.
Plexus allows decision
makers to analyse the product
and associated processes to
highlight and act upon priorities.
Plexus can be applied at various
stages of the product development
process, but a particularly
important application within
aerospace is supply chain
improvement.
The development of
an aerospace product is
essentially a race against
time whilst at the
same time trying
to minimise
risk, begins
Scanlan. At every
stage of product

development, decision makers

continually try to ensure that resources
are targeted at the highest priority
areas. At the early design stage, for
example, designers use PLM tools and
sophisticated optimisation workflows
to undertake sensitivity analyses to
prioritise design effort. Later in the
development process the sheer scale of
product data makes the identification of
priorities extremely difficult.
Why is supply chain design such a
challenge in the aerospace industry?
There are several difficulties. Firstly,
unlike automotive and consumer goods
industries, the production volumes in
aerospace products are small. Secondly
aerospace primes try to build a supply
chain based on risk sharing, but the
gestation period for a new aerospace
product is often measured in decades.
Finally, because of the very high
level of performance expected

from aerospace products, theres little

opportunity to use standard parts as
widely as other industries. Hence the
supply chain becomes deeply embedded
in the design process which requires
complex interchange of information
and careful negotiation of contracts,
confidentiality and ownership of IP.
A typical aerospace supply chain is an
extremely complex multi-dimensional
network of connections involving,
geography, time, responsibilities and
often politics.
Aerospace prime contractors used to
undertake the majority of manufacturing
in-house. In recent decades primes have,
largely for reasons of efficiency, placed
the vast majority of manufacturing
outside their organisation. A discipline
that has emerged in recent years has
been that of supply chain design where
right at the beginning of a project, key
suppliers are systematically identified
and the supply chain built holistically to
minimise
risks and
costs. Plexus
has been designed
and proven to fit
this role by gathering and
manipulating all of the relevant
knowledge for an engineering
development in order to optimise the
product development process and
provide a complete PLM environment.
Resource Engineering Projects, a
division of Resource
Group, is a
Siemens PLM
software partner
with over 20 years
engineering experience

SUPPLY cHaIN I

ProDUCT liFeCYCle MAnAgeMenT

within the aerospace sector. The

company offers Siemens Teamcenter
software, implementation, support and
maintenance services.
The aerospace industry is highly
competitive and exists as a complex
multi-tiered supply chain requiring
suppliers to work closely together on
aircraft components, explains Resource
Engineering Projects director, Paul
Martin. A PLM solution gives them
greater control over their product
lifecycle and achieve a reduction in
manufacturing costs though efficiency
gains such as improved BoM accuracy
and reduced time to market of a product
though increased global collaboration.
With Teamcenter, you can establish
a single source of product and process
knowledge that connects all global
team members everywhere, all the time.
Your teams can access this single source
to find needed information quickly,
reducing the time it takes to search for
information by up to 65%, resulting in
R&D costs being dramatically reduced
and enabling companies to maintain
an acceptable profit. Teamcenter also
provides decision makers with better
visibility into the most up-to-date
product lifecycle information to make
faster, more informed decisions.
Enterprise application and service
specialist Infor helps customers improve

Professor Jim Scanlan: Founder, Plexus Planning

Plexus takes PLM and MRP data to auto produce analytical supply chain maps that can overlay design and
data dependencies: Seen here are MBOM view (blue), Supplier view (yellow) and Geographical view (red)

operations, drive growth and quickly

adapt to changes in business demands.
The companys director of business
consulting for aerospace & defence,
Arsenin Rodrigues says that the use of
PLM in aerospace is based on efficiency,
control and profitability.
As these concerns filter through
the supply chain they have a wide range
of effects, he reveals. However one
continuous theme is that the risks being
faced by large aerospace companies is
being shared throughout the supply
chain this risk management must
be co-ordinated and PLM is a key
technology in that.
The main benefits in adopting PLM
are improvements in product quality
and a faster time to market or to the
required scale. The key is to then go
beyond what one system can offer by
looking at its integration PLM linked
to ERP or other elements of a supply
chain management system. At this point
the possible improvements in terms
of reduced inventory and improved
profitability can leap significantly, but
only if the data flows across the systems
that may indeed be across different sites
or even suppliers.
Taking on new systems to replace

legacy ones can often be a headache for

employees that have become reliant on
them. Some are sceptical whilst others
welcome the new solution with open arms.
There is indeed great reluctance
for organisations to implement new
systems without very good justification,
agrees Scanlan. This is, in many ways,
a good litmus test of how important
the new solution is perceived to be.
Plexus has been introduced into many
large aerospace organisations with great
enthusiasm. This is largely because the
tool is very easy to use, but also reflects
the fact that it provides a unique solution
to a complex high priority problem in
the aerospace industry.
Plexus is welcomed by everyone that
uses it. Where there is a legacy PLM
system then this can be retained. Plexus
will interact with this system and build
a complete database of product and
project data by adding supplier, BoM,
and know-how from project knowledge
workers and other sources to give a
model that visualises the complete
value chain. This type of complete value
chain picture is normally only achieved
painfully through an unstructured mass
of separate spreadsheets, meetings and
post-it note sessions.

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AeRospAceMAnufActuRing | febRuARy 2012

SUPPLY cHaIN I

ProDUCT liFeCYCle MAnAgeMenT

to do, and decided that importing their

old data into the new system on an as
and when required basis was found to
be the most efficient and cost-effective
approach. This does, however, vary from
customer to customer, dependent on
their data security model.

Lets get digital

Siemens Teamcenter software: Managing the

complexity of products in the real world

Infors Rodrigues says his company

offers two approaches: One for those
looking to add to existing systems
where either the weight of those legacy
systems is enough to demand any
additional investment and follows the
path already laid out, or the need is for
additional systems rather than a new
solution, and another for those looking
to actually move over to a new platform.
Infor10ION is our new middleware
offering that enables integration with
a whole range of Infor and non-Infor
systems its lightweight, incredibly
quick to install and based on open
standards.
For those companies looking to
actually implement an entire new
system, our new strategy of basing suites
of software around an industry rather
than a product has resulted in Infor10
Aerospace and Defence a system that
includes ERP, CRM and SCM/PLM
capabilities.
Meanwhile, Resource Engineering
Projects Martin explains that there are
many different approaches to handling
the legacy data issue: We generally find
that companies initially feel the need
to import all their old project data into
their new database. However, through
talking to other companies who had
already adopted PLM software, they felt
this would perhaps not be the best thing

The conversation now turns to digital

manufacturing and the kind of role it
is playing in an aerospace companys
PLM set-up. Scanlan believes that
this philosophy has a number of
interpretations.
It ranges from the exchange of
geometry data with the supply chain to
directly produce manufactured geometry
using CNC machines to the interchange
of design data in the supply chain in order
to collaborate in the creation of a design,
he says. A recent trend is the increasing
use of direct digital manufacturing
also known as rapid prototyping.
Aerospace companies are starting to
exploit this technology to develop parts
with sophisticated geometries that
would be impossible to manufacture
using conventional CNC processes. This
capability changes the dynamics of the
supply chain and can dramatically reduce
development lead-times.
Rodrigues says that while digital design
has been used for many years now, digital
manufacturing is a much broader subject.
From a PLM view, the manufacturing
capability is very important in
understanding how the product will
be built and produced, he avows.
Design decisions have an impact on
manufacturing capability. Embodiment
points for design changes are more
effective if the operational data, i.e.
progress per tail number, configuration
being produced, inventory, procurement
etc, is viewed. Our strategy with
Workspace and in the context of
capabilities means that people dont have
to leave their systems environment to
view information from other domains
this is important to the decision making
process. This increases the quality of the

decision and naturally, the speed that

translates into lead-time reduction and
cost control of design decisions.
Its Martins belief that digital
manufacturing enables OEMs to design
the entire manufacturing process digitally
at the same time that designers are
designing the next product/concept.
Consequently, manufacturing
engineers are able to provide immediate
feedback to designers if there are any
constraints in the part manufacturability,
he points out. This type of collaboration
between manufacturing engineers and
designers creates a holistic view of
product and process design and can
save millions of pounds in costly rework
having to be done.
For example, a company tendering
for new contracts could use a digital
manufacturing system to create a 3D
simulation of a complete production
line and analyse the different production
variants and concepts as part of the
request for quote (RFQ) process. This
kind of transparency and precision in
planning and proposal preparation can
help a company gain greater customer
confidence and ultimately help it quote
accurately and win new contracts.
www.plexusplanning.com
www.infor.com
www.resource-engineering.co.uk/plm

Paul Martin: Director, Resource Engineering Projects