Supporting collaborative product development with customers and suppliers

Citation

(2006), "Supporting collaborative product development with customers and suppliers", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 78 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/aeat.2006.12778aab.006

Supporting collaborative product development with customers and suppliers

Supporting collaborative product development with customers and suppliers

Keywords: Aircraft, Computer software, Product design

PTC, the Product Development Company, recently announced that Airbus has extended the use of PTC's Windchill solutions to collaborate with customers and its suppliers while developing order-specific variants of the A380 passenger and A380 freighter aircraft lines. Airbus now for the first time is directly integrating customers into the Airbus Extended Enterprise using a Windchill-based digital mock- up (DMU) solution.

The customer involvement in the development process happens much earlier than previously possible. Engineers in Toulouse and at customer sites are managing mock-up reviews, which enable the customer to seamlessly collaborate on the development and layout of individual aircraft right from the beginning of development. This new capability will result in reduced manufacturing lead times and will help to ensure conformance to customer requirements.

Airbus' Extended Enterprise Program has also been broadened to include supplier collaboration. PTC has assembled a software bundle that will be offered to hundreds of global Airbus suppliers to help enable information exchange and design integration during product development activities.

The Windchill-based DMU allows designs to be reviewed, simulated and shared virtually across Europe in a realistic workspace. Inconsistencies can be detected early in the design phase which reduces the costs and speeds up the process. Additionally, the ability to collaborate with customers using a realistic digital representation benefits customer satisfaction.

The DMU solution deployed by Airbus makes use of an integrated set of capabilities provided by several PTC products. Windchill is used as the product data management system to manage CAD models and drawings developed by a distributed product development team. The CAD environment is heterogeneous with a mix of PTC's CAD products and multiple versions of CAD products from other vendors. Windchill also provides configuration management and controls the change and release processes so the DMU is under formal configuration control. PTC's Division Mock-Up and Reality product allows engineers at different sites around the world working with heterogeneous CAD systems to load complete sections of an aircraft on a single screen and to check interferences between different sub-assemblies. CAD models from different systems are integrated by mock-up integrators in a single virtual assembly. Designers and manufacturing engineers can now work simultaneously to build the DMUs, using various configured DMU views, before releasing the design for manufacturing and assembly. Division Mock-Up and Reality is a key component of the various packages that PTC has bundled for the supplier community.