PLM in Aerospace

Manufacturing Engineering, Mar 2007 by Schmitt, Peter

High-profile projects help extend PLM technology through the entire aerospace supply chain

High-profile aircraft programs that highlighted product lifecycle management (PLM) technology's value over the last decade had an unintended side effect: They contributed to the misconception that PLM is only for multinational OEMs and top-tier suppliers with huge stakes in product design. Most aerospace suppliers that concentrate on manufacturing and have relatively little stake in design still don't consider PLM a logical investment.

There are two issues with this mindset. The first is that it isn't entirely true. PLM encompasses manufacturing processes as well as design and collaboration. The second is that by failing to more seriously consider PLM, aerospace manufacturers are shutting themselves out of new revenue streams created by an aircraft development business model that the Boeing Co. (Chicago) pioneered with its 787 Dreamliner program.

It has been well-publicized that Boeing designed the 787 in a 3-D PLM environment. The 787's radical new design prompted Boeing's technology partners to break new ground in PLM technology and, for the first time, integrate manufacturing process planning into the aircraft design process from the very beginning. The manufacturing component was crucial. With design work so decentralized, Boeing needed to know that the 787 would come together as planned without costly late-stage errors. A digital manufacturing environment was the only way to model production processes throughout the early phases of the 787's design.

Those aspects of the story have overshadowed an equally important aspect. The PLM innovations that emerged from the 787 project were spurred by the new business model Boeing developed to design and produce the aircraft. Boeing spread the 787's development costs among its partners in return for a larger share of profits. Suppliers that were once responsible only for manufacturing a Boeing-designed component were now designing it as well. That changed the design cycle's dynamic, and created new opportunities for almost every company in the supply chain. The 787 project's success hinged on keeping internal and external design teams in synch. Boeing chose to do this through a Dassault Systèmes 3-D PLM environment that, for the first time, extended PLM from design through manufacturing and maintenance.

This leaves aerospace suppliers with two things to consider. The first is that PLM technology is relevant to manufacturing-oriented companies. The second is that it is also their conduit to greater profit. Before they can share in the new business model's benefits, however, aerospace suppliers must revise their understanding of PLM, and how it fits into their future. To do that, they should:

* examine the aerospace industry's history of technology adoption for context on why migrating toward PLM is a good idea;

* fully understand what "PLM" means;

* and evaluate a strong commitment to the technology.

The aerospace industry has been ahead of the design technology adoption curve since the first CAD programs emerged in the 1960s. An aircraft's complexity, operational demands, long service life, and regulatory requirements combine to make advanced design technology mandatory in the aerospace industry.

Adoption in aerospace has followed a pattern similar to that of information technology in other industries. Individual groups and departments adopt the technology of their choice to complete their portion of the design work. This leads to heterogeneous design technology infrastructures comprised of custom and packaged applications running on a variety of hardware and software platforms. With no universal file format, there is no way to unify the various groups' work in a single system. The common link between them is the age-old 2-D drawing on Mylar. When design teams must roll their work together, it usually means printing out 2-D drawings. Production engineers either work from the drawings or re-enter the information into yet another CAD system. This approach survives in every industry-10 years after affordable 3-D CAD came to the desktop.

Moving away from the oft-mentioned informational "silos" that piecemeal technology adoption created was more complicated in aerospace than in most industries. The amount of data in legacy systems and the sheer sprawl of the aerospace supply chain made porting to a new system expensive and complicated. In addition, with the long service life of aircraft, switching data systems during the aircraft's lifetime doesn't yield enough gain to justify the cost.

Nevertheless, aerospace companies are using new product development initiatives as the impetus to upgrade their design technologies into full-fledged PLM implementations. Definitions of PLM vary, so for this article's purposes, PLM is defined as a software solution that encompasses in one environment all of the design, engineering and collaboration, and business-process management solutions required to bring a product from concept through manufacturing to end of life. The ultimate PLM environment is a virtual 3-D world where engineers, designers, and marketers can interact with the product as though it were a physical object.