automotive_tc_engineering_collaboration

Editor's Notes

• #4: Let’s look at some of the trends and challenges faced by the automotive industry that impacts both the OEMs and suppliers. We will then look at some of the engineering collaboration tools available from Siemens PLM Software that can help manage today’s complex vehicle programs.
• #5: Speaker notes: Mandatory fuel consumption, fuel economy, and GHG standards for light-duty vehicles are currently in effect for more than 70% of the global new vehicle market. Many governments around the world - including Japan, the European Union, United States, California, Canada, China, Australia, South Korea, Mexico, and India - have proposed, established, or are in the process of revising vehicle fuel economy and emission standards. While Japan and Europe currently lead the world in terms of fleet average fuel efficiency of passenger vehicles, the US is expected to achieve the highest future reduction in fuel consumption of new vehicles — a 56% reduction from 2000 to 2025. <click> Nowadays, automotive OEMs rely on electronics and software as a key mechanism to manage vehicle and powertrain performance to meet the fuel economy and emissions regulations. In addition, electronics and software innovations drive safety, enable intelligent mobility and incorporate new features and capabilities demanded by consumers to better integrate their lifestyle. The advantage of using software to implement much of this functionality is the speed with which vehicles can now incorporate new electronics and keep pace with the fast changing requirements of the global markets. <click> The automotive industry continues to enjoy very good growth in the past few years. The industry has recovered from the financial crisis and you can see that growth continues at a high rate although European Sales levels are still low. Asia continues to be the growth engine for the industry with China becoming the number one market starting 2009. Although the US market has recovered from a low of under 10M vehicles in 2008 to an expected 16M vehicles this year. This growth is providing industry record setting profits with the exception for a few European OEMs who have more of a European centric footprint. The high profitably of the industry in the current cycle is providing the necessary fuel for driving investment and innovation to achieve the forecasted growth.
• #6: Speaker notes: In order to meet the needs of the market, top Automakers have been greatly expanding their model lineup. Since 1998 most Automakers have tripled the number of models they have in the market place to penetrate the different market segments of a globalized economy and to enhance their brand. This model proliferation is creating huge challenges for supplier engineering and manufacturing organizations to manage the increased number of product variations and configurations to be engineered and manufactured around the world. As the automakers expand their market reach, they expect suppliers to follow suit to these local markets where suppliers are required to engineer and produce parts to support their local operations. This adds significant complexity to program execution for suppliers as they must now manage a larger base of operations and develop personnel to deliver to the automakers expectations in each of these markets. The expansion of vehicle system design and penetration into the emerging markets also requires development of the required skills and knowledge transfer of core product development processes and methods including appropriate managerial oversight for global vehicle programs. Moving forward the Tier 1 supply base will face larger risks in terms of missing cost, time, and quality targets. Therefore, proper visibility to program execution will be critical to success.
• #7: Speaker notes: To address these trends where complexity of managing vehicle programs is increasing, program visibility is critical for OEMs and suppliers to capture the complexities of all of the product variations.  Visibility and transparency into design status and changes, timing, cost, and part/system validation will be critical to reduce program risks. This way product designs are pushed to new limits and development personnel around the world can grow their overall skill level.  Susan Zimmerlee will take it from here and show you how solutions from Siemens PLM Software can help automakers and their suppliers to drive collaboration and increase efficiency of developing new vehicle programs.
• #9: The key to improving transparency, accuracy and responsiveness in program execution across the value chain is engineering collaboration using PDM. Let’s talk about what we mean by PDM.
• #10: Managing today’s products is not as simple as keeping track of your design data. <BUILD>Other information, such as documentation, supplier data, manufacturing information, customer requirement and more all have an impact on what an engineer needs to do. <BUILD>In many cases, engineers find themselves searching through irrelevant information to find the design data they need to work on. <BUILD>And once they find something, often times is out of date or obsolete <BUILD> <BUILD> They often struggle to figure out how it got to this point (why was this piece added?) And where exactly it needs to go from here.
• #11: PDM can help. With PDM, engineers can quickly and easily find exactly what they are looking for.
• #12: Once you find what you need, you can understand the context of what you’re working on – without wading through irrelevant information.
• #13: And PDM provides process management capabilities that help you understand the history of what you’re working on, and what to do with it to move forward.
• #14: You can work smarter, not harder, to deliver performing products to market at the right time. With PDM: Design data is easy to find, share and re-use – saving you time and money. Release processes are standardized and optimized – eliminating confusion and getting products to market on time. Documents are managed WITH the product – making sure everything you need to define your product is in synch and easy to find. Changes are implemented quickly and accurately – helping you respond faster to customer needs and issues. Today we will focus on a couple areas that help deliver these benefits.
• #15: When it comes to collaborating – with your team, with the rest of the organization, or with outside partners, it is critical to be able to track all the documentation that helps to define your product.
• #16: There is a lot more that defines your part other than just the CAD design. There’s customer specifications or requirements, control plans, FEMAs, test results, supplier contracts, etc. With PDM in Teamcenter, you can manage all the documentation that helps define a part (or assembly or an entire products) aligned with the product itself. By managing all this information in Teamcenter, you can easily search and edit, control versions and revisions, use in workflows, define templates, etc. One of the key things to take away is that those documents are tied to the product itself. That means if you are working on a product, you have clear visibility to the documentation driving it’s development. Often times, one of the road blocks to getting users to manage documents in a PDM system is usability. People who aren’t engineers are reluctant to sign up for putting documents in a system they don’t otherwise use or understand. We enable users to work directly from familiar desktop tools – such as word or outlook. They can view a document, make changes or comments, and save it right back to Teamcenter without ever leaving their desktop tool. We call this transparent PDM.
• #17: Many users responsible for documentation lie outside the typical engineering user base. These participants may be reluctant to learn a new UI to manage their documents. With user friendly “transparent PDM”, you can enable users to continue work in their familiar desktop tools – with PDM managing data in the background. In this example, the user is creating a new document using PDM. Behind the scenes, the appropriate template for this document is retrieved – making it easier for the user to know where to get started, and ensuring everyone across your organization adheres to the document standards your business defines. With a couple clicks the user can create a document, make some changes, submit it to a workflow, and so much more – all without ever leaving the office application. This user friendly experience removes a common roadblock to PDM adoption. An advantage to product data management in Teamcenter is that all documentation that defines your product is securely managed in one place. In this example, we can see several documents tied to the snow blower product: from pdf files, to images, to Microsoft Office documents like the Requirements Study that was created earlier. These are not static snapshots – but living document go through their own review and approval processes, are subject to version and revision control, and more. That critical connection to the product provides consistency across the lifecycle that cannot be maintained with stand-alone document management. That means that when something changes on your product – maybe an updated requirement driven by a customer commitment- all associated documentation is easily identified and can be updated to reflect that change. In this example we can see several comments that have been made on the document – one based on a requirement change to the product. The user can make the needed change and respond to the comment directly in the document. These markups are managed and tracked as part of the document’s history.
• #18: With PDM in Teamcenter, you can manage documents and product together. All documentation that defines a product is securely managed in one place. There is no searching for missing documents or working with documents that are out-of-date or obsolete. You have one place to find all the product information. Documents evolve with the product across the lifecycle, keeping them in sync and up-to-date. Documents are easily captured, updated and re-used with familiar desktop tools. This makes it easier to extend PDM to the rest of your enterprise to accurately manage all needed documentation.
• #19: When we talk about PDM, another critical area of concern is responding to customer needs.
• #20: The key to responding to customer issues and needs is effective change management. When you need to make a change to the product, PDM helps you implement change quickly, accurately and comprehensively. With impact analysis capabilities, you have complete understanding of the scope of change. What data is impacted? What people are affected by this change? What processes are in progress that may be impacted? With an accurate understanding of impact, you can more clearly assess the cost and timing of change. Flexible processes help you manage the “right size” change. This means you can expedite simple change or formally control complex change. You have the flexibility to implement and execute change in a way that is right for your organization and for a given change. Workflows and schedules help you automate you change processes to execute most effectively. History and signoff reports help to automatically track changes. This provides full change traceability.
• #21: Change management in Teamcenter is very flexible. From issue and resolution tracking, to simple change management, to managing complex changes across complex organizations – you determine the right level of data and process management. In this example, we use easy search and reporting capabilities to find an issue we’d like to know more about. We can see that the issue is being addressed by a change, and can continue to interrogate for additional information. A change often addresses more than one problem or issue. This information is tracked, and is a part of the complete change history. A critical advantage to change management in Teamcenter, is that you can understand the impact of change. In this example, we can see the change item, and everything related to that change – from parts and assemblies, to documentation, to project plans and other changes that might be impacted. We can drill through the relationships to get more information. Understanding the impact of change is vital to accurately predict the cost and timing associated with that change. As the change evolves and is better understood, impacted items, reference information, and all other details pertinent to that change are easily tracked and recorded as part of the history of the change. You have the flexibility to execute change in a way that is right for your organization. You can use project schedules and workflows to automate your change processes. Here you can see the workflow this change is going through – and can drill down into any step to get additional information. The signoff history is one more tool to help provide full change traceability. This history, as well as all the associated information we’ve seen, are tracked together as part of the change – in a single environment for full change traceability.
• #22: With PDM in Teamcenter, you can implement change quickly, accurately, and comprehensively. When it comes to managing change, Teamcenter provides an optimal balance of flexibility and control to ensure the right process is used for every change The impact of change is clearly understood, providing a clear picture of cost and time required for a change. Everyone affected by a change is aware of it, so nothing falls through the cracks - there are no errors or last minute scrambles at the end of the process Throughout the change process, all decisions and changes are fully documented for complete traceability
• #24: Thank you Susan for showing Siemens PLM Software capabilities in enabling collaboration among automotive suppliers. Automotive suppliers must collaborate effectively in all stages of a program to avoid absorbing costs associated with fixing last-minute launch or warranty problems. This becomes especially important as you are faced with managing an ever-increasing number of programs. Greater visibility and transparency into program execution enables better collaboration across the engineering domains and value chain. <click> With PDM, engineers can quickly and easily find what they need, understand the context of the information help you know what to do with it. <click> Transparent PDM enables user friendly document management. Products and their corresponding documentation are managed together so that all documentation that defines a part (or assembly) is aligned with the product itself. This provides the user with clear visibility to the information driving a product’s development. <click> Flexible change management with clear impact analysis and change tracking help you implement change quickly, accurately and effectively.
• #25: Thank you for joining us today. For further information, please contact <insert name and contact information>.