Bombardier Aerospace Virtual Product Definition: Achievements and Future Directions
By Isabelle Latulippe

A Brief History
Bombardier Aerospace, a unit of Bombardier Inc., is the world's premier business, regional and amphibious aircraft manufacturer. It offers the most comprehensive families of turboprop and regional jet aircraft and, the widest range of business jets. It also provides the Flexjet fractional ownership program, technical services, aircraft maintenance and pilot training for business, regional airline and military customers.

Headquartered near Montreal International Airport (Dorval), Bombardier Aerospace is an internationally integrated organization with full design and production operations in four sites located in Canada, United States and in the United Kingdom, giving it excellent market access and flexibility in program management.

Bombardier Inc., a diversified manufacturing and service company, is a world leading manufacturer of business jets, regional aircraft, rail transportation equipment and motorized recreational products. It is also a provider of financial services and asset management. The Corporation employs 79,000 people in 24 countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Bombardier's revenues for its fiscal year ended Jan 31, 2001 totaled $16.1 billion and more than 90 percent were generated outside Canada.

To learn more about Bombardier Inc., please visit our Web site at http://www.bombardier.com/.

Bombardier Aerospace Initiatives with Virtual Product
In 1993 CATIA was established as a Bombardier standard application to support the digital
product definition. A few years later, Dassault Systemes announced the next generation of products with V5. Bombardier got involved early with this highly specialized product evolution and quickly started a rigorous evaluation of the new potential.

With the V5 initiative, Bombardier Aerospace objectives are to integrate and optimize processes across the extended enterprise and to provide product definition process linked to production and maintenance. As well, it will improve the quality and quantity of iterations within a reduced cycle time. The integrated virtual product definition will also contribute in reducing configuration changes by achieving first time quality. Finally, with the enhanced digital mock up capabilities it will be possible to further the elimination of physical prototypes.

Sharing Experiences
Exciting demonstrations of the potential of V5 have been prepared by the CAD/CAM/CAE
department at Bombardier Aerospace. Demonstrations include the wing design with conceptual and layout design, collaborative design on the nose landing gear, assembly-disassembly simulation, mock-up reviews and more. Presentations to management in numerous departments have raised enthusiasm for the V5 generation of products at Bombardier. People are truly receptive to optimize their process and contribute to the deployment of a fully integrated Virtual Product Definition Environment.

Strong Product Development Executive sponsorship assures end user ownership to the provided and evolving solutions. Users have been involved early in the process by the creation of focus groups to encourage active participation in the definition of the product and to ensure continuous communication between production and the CAD/CAM/CAE development team.

So far, a clearly defined plan has been established for the implementation of CATIA V5, a key component of Bombardier Aerospace extended digital enterprise. Limited production pilots will be conducted for every main process, with initial deployments starting this fall. Within a few weeks, CATIA V5 will already be in place at Bombardier Aerospace on targeted processes. Meanwhile parallel activities are on going with every process being carefully looked at and tested. Methodologies are being reviewed and a training program prepared for future V5 users. With this activity, Bombardier people have already developed a high level of expertise on V5 products. Full project approval is dependent on the validation of the results versus the business benefits.

To deliver the best-integrated solution possible, Bombardier is in constant communication with Dassault Systemes, provider of PLM solutions. Specific product enhancements and issue resolutions are requested to ensure Bombardier processes are fully supported. It is essential to guarantee that business needs and processes are understood by Dassault Systemes and that the provided solution meets expectations.

About ENOVIA
The V5 generation of products mandate is to support the overall digital enterprise from product creation to digital manufacturing and digital lifecycle management. In terms of lifecycle management, ENOVIA Solutions will integrate people and processes to support product definition and evolution from design through manufacturing and up to the service function. Therefore, to fully exploit the potential of CATIA V5 integration with the ENOVIA solution is essential. In order to reach this objective with success, Bombardier is investing to ensure proper interoperability and synchronization between ENOVIA and CATIA V5. The existing database systems and the amount of legacy data owned by Bombardier make this an interesting challenge.

Impacts on the Business
One objective of the Bombardier Virtual Aircraft Strategy is to ensure no negative impact on current and sustaining activities and therefore not to affect our priority -customer satisfaction.
The deployment of PLM Solutions has a major impact on the business but it is also a great opportunity for process optimization as well as for implementation of new processes. Bombardier Aerospace will take this occasion to promote concurrent engineering, to develop collaborative work and, above all, to benefit from knowledgeware capabilities by capturing and reusing individual and corporate business knowledge.

Future Directions
Bombardier Aerospace has demonstrated leadership by getting involved early with the evolution of PLM solutions and is now planning to implement the new generation of V5 products throughout its extended enterprise. This will contribute in improving product definition for customer satisfaction and in reducing costs and cycle time. Above all, Bombardier Aerospace will be able to reach its objective to build the best product on time for its customers, keeping its place ahead of the competition.

To hear more about this topic, please come and see Bombardier Aerospace at the next COE Conference, September 30 - October 3, 2001 at the Coronado Springs Resort in Orlando, Florida.

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