Collaborative Engineering Through the Supply Chain
By Sohair VarnHagen, DaimlerChrysler and Ken Amann, CIMdata Inc.

State of the Industry
In his annual state of the industry address at the conference, CIMdata President Ed Miller emphasized the critical need for companies using cPDm to have a clear vision of the implementation.

"A grave mistake many organizations make with cPDm is buying and assembling technology without having a clear idea of what business objectives they want to accomplish with the system," explained Miller. "They narrowly focus on technical details and system capabilities such as storage capacity and file transfer before they identify why money is being invested in the system in the first place."

"Look at what's critically important to the organization in maintaining your competitive position, in staying alive in the marketplace. Maybe your business depends on product innovation in coming out with entirely unique designs. Or perhaps time to market is the number one factor to get there before a window of opportunity closes. In some industries with decades-long product lifecycles, most of the revenue is generated in after-delivery field support. Others are focused on efficiently managing globally dispersed facilities," Miller said.

"These core business priorities define where your company is going and should form the basis of what you expect cPDm to accomplish," said Miller. "This is the overall vision that drives decision-making: the big picture that maps out where you are headed with the implementation, what you need in terms of technology, and how processes should be configured."

The company's vision is then aligned with its business goals, not with a particular vendor system or technology. "All the solutions currently revolving around e-business and collaboration offer tremendous opportunities for companies. But keep in mind they are facilitators, tools, and enablers. They are not objectives in themselves," said Miller.

"Your vision should be achievable, of course. But don't get hung up on details in this wide view. Make it broad, and make it a stretch," said Miller. "Remember that the framework to establish that vision is cPDm: a business-focused approach that incorporates multiple best practices, methods, initiatives and technologies. Companies that put such a vision in place and keep their objectives focused will be successful in the coming years while others inevitably fall behind."

Collaborative Technology at DaimlerChrysler
The keynote address "e-Product Creation, from Vision to Deployment" on the second day of the conference was presented by Sohair VarnHagen, Program Manager of Product Creation Process Improvement at DaimlerChrysler.

She discussed the importance of involving suppliers in every aspect of product development and described initiatives to electronically connect the supply chain and populate the DaimlerChrysler data management system with information from suppliers.

"The goal is represented by full digital mock-ups that show how every component, assembly, and subsystem come together in the final vehicle," said VarnHagen. "The glue that holds all this together is PDM. Creating and combining these models quickly and efficiently is a huge competitive advantage, and payoffs are tremendous." She noted that the Chrysler group has developed eight full digital mock-up vehicles since 1996.

VarnHagen said that DaimlerChrysler is aggressively pursuing a ten-year digital product synthesis plan that relies heavily on PDM and knowledge management technologies. The initiative started with defining engineering processes and developing generative shape modeling technology for the purpose of capturing design history and methodology.

The digital link connecting business processes throughout DaimlerChrysler and its supply chain will be FastCar, an engineers desktop portal development based on collaborative technology from i2 and PDM from IBM and ENOVIA.

"FastCar is a web-based system for collaborative workflow and change management that will link engineering information such as design geometry and analysis results with business systems from finance and procurement," said VarnHagen. "This will give users a single source, one space, for information they need to do their jobs more effectively, not only in working faster but in shifting efforts forward in product development to process changes and refine designs much earlier in the cycle."

In a typical scenario, VarnHagen said an engineer working at a standard PC would access part information through ENOVIA, pull this data in through the FastCar portal, make required annotations on the design geometry, generate the required documentation, and request estimates on time and cost through RFIs (requests for information).

"Using the FastCar portal, changes that otherwise would require four to twelve weeks could be accomplished in a few hours," explained VarnHagen. "With the company processing tens of thousands of engineering changes annually, the savings are staggering, potentially 15-30 percent of product development costs."

CIMdata provides knowledge and expertise on the use of collaborative Product Definition management (cPDm) solutions that utilize best-practice methods, and related technologies. These include product data management (PDM), visualization, collaboration, collaborative product commerce (CPC), document management, component supplier management (CSM), configuration management (CM), software configuration management (SCM), enterprise application integration (EAI), computer-aided design/manufacturing, and numerical control (NC).

The company also conducts focused research and produces several commercial publications. CIMdata serves clients worldwide from locations in North America, Europe, and the Pacific Rim

For more information, contact CIMdata at 3909 Research Park Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48108, U.S.A. Tel: +1(734) 668-9922. Fax: +1(734) 668-1957. Or visit the CIMdata Web site: www.CIMdata.com

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