Saab story ends well thanks to Ciim on RDBMS - Saab-Scania's use of Avalon Software Inc's Avalon Computer-Integrated Interactive Manufacturing software package based on Oracle Corp's Oracle RDBMS

Software Magazine, June, 1994 by George Black

Sweden-based truck manufacturer left proprietary system by the side of the road after trading up to relational database-based manufacturing application. The new system cut delivery time in half.

Relational database technology proved to be the key that opened the door to efficient manfacturing for Saab-Scania. The company chose computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) applications from AVlon Software Inc., Tucson, Ariz., based on the Oracle relational database management system (RDBMS) from Oracle Corp., Redwood Shores, Calif.

Scania is the truck manufacturing arm of the Swedish automotive firm Saab, and second only to Volvo in worldwide truck production.

Headquartered in Sodertalje, Sweden, Scania operates four other truck production facilities worldwide: in Lulea, Sweden; Angers, France; Zwolle in The Netherlands; and Sao Bernardo do Campo, Brazil. The factories get their components from various sources, including Scania's own plants in Sweden. Parts are passed between the Sodertalje and Lulea plants, as well as to the other Scania sites around the world. Together the plants produce around 140 trucks per day.

Scania's computerized production system has to be able to keep the axles, frames and gearboxes moving along the assembly lines and between the plants at a speed that will ensure the fastest possible output with the lowest possible inventory.

Getting Locked in

In the late 1980s Scania was in danger of getting locked into an outdated and proprietary systems environment, according to Hans Lundmark, a computer engineer at Scania's Lulea factory. Scania was using a Sperry Univac Varian 700 machine running a Univac proprietary operating system from Unisys Corp., Blue Bell, Pa., and ManMan manufacturing applications from The Ask Group Inc., Santa Clara, Calif. Lundmark said the problem was not so much the applications themselves as the proprietary platform that supported them.

"We could not continue to build new programs onto this system, so we decided we must move to a more up-to-date environment," said Lundmark, who headed the migration project.

"We knew what we wanted was a relational database," he continued. "We did not want to get locked into a hierarchical database, which would be very hard to work with. This was our main criterion and it has turned out to be the right one.

We wanted the freedom to add new tables or add new fields to tables, because we were constantly changing the system."

Lundmark also strongly favored a product that would run on the VAX/VMS operating system, because Scania was already using VAXes from Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), located in Maynard, Mass., for many of its commercial applications.

The company narrowed its list of choices to six or seven well-known manufacturing packages that ran on relational DBMSs, but, upon examination, was not very impressed with any of them. Lundmark said that most of the packages demanded that the company adapt its work practices to accommodate the software. "A production facility as big as we were simply could not do that," he said.

One alternative was to make some very detailed and complex changes to the way the software worked, an approach that most of the vendors would not support.

The Avalon Ciim (Computer-Integrated Interactive Manufacturing) package was not on Scania's list of vendors, Lundmark said. In fact, he had never heard of the product. But, shortly before he needed to choose the new software, he heard about Avalon through "a friend of a friend" within Scania.

At the time, Avalon did not have a major installation in Europe. The vendor's Chairman and Chief Technology Officer, Tim Shridan, was so determined to win the Scania contract that he flew from the United States to Sweden to demonstrate his product. Digital, anxious for Scania to continue to use its products, hosted the demonstration as its offices in Stockholm.

Following the demonstration, said Lundmark, "we decided we could use the Avalon Ciim software with a lot of changes - but fewer than the others would have needed as we could make them more easily. The fact that it was based on Oracle, with which we had already had a lot of experience, made us sure that it would be possible. Also, Avalon promised us a lot of support, which the others did not." And, because Ciim is based on either Unix or VMS, Scania could run the software on its VAXes.

Scania bought the Avalon software through Avalon's Swedish distributor, IFS Industrial Systems, based in Linkoping. With IFS's help, it took Scania about a year to convert all the necessary programs, translate the user prompts into Swedish and move from the Sperry Univac platform onto the VAX 3500.

The Avalon code was written in Oracle's computer-aided software engineering (Case) tools, which Lundmark believes made the transfer much easier than it might have been had Avalon supported Case technology. The migration team also wrote a few extra routines in C and C , he said.

Alistar Sorbie, Avalon Software's Reading, England-based director of customer services, emphasizes that because Avalon Ciim was developed entirely with Oracle and Sybase Case tools based on the industry standard Structured Query Language (AQL), users need only have either Oracle or Sybase skills. Many other CIM products require support by people with knowledge of the specific CIM code, he said.