From the Drawing Board to the Rubicon Trail...the Product Definition Process for Jeep
by Scott Baker

For the last 60 years, the Jeep Brand has been synonymous with 4-wheel drive, off road capability. As a matter of fact, Jeep is generally credited with creating the whole SUV market. It is very ironic that most "SUVs" available in the market today are not truly off road capable.

The mystique of ruggedness sometimes suggests a lack of refinement, "low tech," and even makes some people think that it must also be pretty easy to design and build these vehicles. The reality is, to achieve such go anywhere, do anything characteristics requires a very accurate engineering, development, and manufacturing process. This is a process, which is constantly being refined.

Obviously, to make these types of vehicles successfully for 60 years, there has to be a stable and complete set of legacy systems and processes in place. The Chrysler Group had already made the leap from the old days of drawings to what we called "the CATIA Pipeline" with full CAD modeling, visualization, and CDM for some time. But, in 1998, during the initial development of the Jeep Liberty, Jeep Vehicle Engineering decided to take the next steps, to develop a more integrated product and assembly development process. This new vision was built around such concepts as "enter data once, and use it many times" in all disciplines of the company, "share data often and early," and push changes as early as possible in the product development cycle. What became obvious immediately was the need for a robust product data manager, and with the help of our strategic partner, Dassault Systemes, we decided to embark on the use of ENOVIA VPM in our product development process.

In the initial phases of the project, Jeep Engineering decided to pilot these new tools with Body Engineering, due to their involvement in both product and process engineering, but quickly expanded the project to the rest of the vehicle engineering groups. Since this was an entirely new way of doing business, there were many successes, failures, and false starts. And now, after several years of experience, we are expanding the use of these tools to all Jeep vehicles, and the rest of DaimlerChrysler vehicles.

Many workshops were required to determine the best "product structure," to determine how to integrate VPM with legacy systems, finding new best practices, developing change management schemes, incorporating timing events, and improving the efficiency of the visualization process. After evaluating process, position, and functional "trees," we concluded that the most efficient type of tree is based on function. This structure is strictly a product or engineering bill of materials. These trees are able to accept buildable/orderable combinations through the configuration management tools in VPM from corporate legacy systems, and incorporated program-timing events with the use of milestone effectivity. Once that is in place, it is a relatively easy to conduct configured DMU sessions for visualization.

After several false starts with previous generation tools, we are now able to migrate these product structures for use with the latest generation virtual processing tools. Jeep engineers are evaluating the use of Delmia DPM for body assembly processing, and Delmia Delta for our trim/chassis/final processing on future Jeep vehicles. By linking these tools through the PPR hub, communication is improved between all corporate organizations by assuring that the latest data is available to all in near real time. DMU sessions are conducted to visualize the assembly process and identify potential issues. The goal is to be able to account for best practice assembly processes early in the product design phase to accomplish true design for assembly. To complete the full process, CCPlant is used to take the above assembly processes and integrate them into the plant layout for full plant evaluations.

This journey has really just begun. To stay on track, every detail in our process is being reviewed. This is kind of like making sure that every rock is turned over and analyzed. At Jeep, we are pretty familiar with charting new courses and doing the dirty work over the rocks. "It's a Jeep thing. . . You wouldn't understand!"

Don't miss Scott's presentation at the COE Spring 2002 conference, April 15 - 17, 2002 in Palm Springs!