WHO'D HAVE DREAMT A EUROCONSORTIUM WOULD HAVE STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS? (via Jim Hamlen):

PLM: Boeing's Dream, Airbus' Nightmare (Mel Duvall and Doug Bartholomew, February 5, 2007, Baseline)

Airbus' 2006 nightmare with PLM can actually be traced back to the giant company's difficult birthing process in 2001. "This issue dates back to the historical structure of Airbus," recalls former Airbus financial executive Massey. A loose consortium of French, German, British and Spanish companies formally spun out Airbus in 2001 at the same time the A380 program was being launched.

Massey well remembers the infighting among the partners over jobs, and over which country would get the bulk of the mammoth aircraft's production work. Some executives, in fact, expressed the feeling that, as Massey puts it, "We shouldn't be launching this aircraft put together by four different nations." Such disputes can have a downside, resulting in a level of distrust or, at best, erratic coordination. "Because there was an awful lot of debate about the way to create this single-company structure, the A380 was held hostage to that," he says.

For example, the Germans were adamant that the entire aircraft not be built in France, where Airbus was headquartered. Ultimately, work on the A380 was carved up among the four players, so that at its founding in 2001, Airbus had offices and factories at 16 sites spread across four countries and employing 41,000 people. Each country had a level of independence to go its own way when it came to systems and technology, Massey points out.

This lack of strict uniformity of processes and technologies laid the seeds for what was later to grow into an entangled vine of trouble for Airbus. "The systems had been set up under the old structure," Massey says. "No one was watching who was using what versions of Catia. It may be a systems issue, but as much as anything, it's a management issue."

Airbus' lax enforcement of a single lingua franca for design was at the heart of the A380's later problems. While there are many ways that different CAD systems, and even different editions of the same CAD programs, can trip up a product's design, those ways become multiplied with the complexity of the end product and the increased number of suppliers creating parts or components for its manufacture.

By contrast, Boeing management is taking no such chances. Well before Airbus' problem became public, the U.S. aerospace manufacturer had put into place a rigorous set of requirements to ensure that the same edition of Catia is used by everyone connected with the shaping of the Dreamliner.

At least one Airbus design manager was well aware of the potential for a CAD incompatibility disaster. Martin Horwood, lead engineer for CAD capability development at Airbus U.K., co-authored an article titled "CAD Data Quality" in the May-June 2005 issue of Engineering Designer magazine in which he warned, "With data arriving into the digital mock-up from a globally dispersed design community, including industrial partners, suppliers and subcontractors, it is imperative that the CAD data is of the right quality. Failure ... will cause the digital mock-up to be inaccurate and not fulfill its task, leading to expensive reworks in real life."

And fail it did. With its German designers creating wiring bundles to fit inside one set of spaces in the A380's fuselage using Catia V4, and the French designers having created the fuselage wiring spaces using the more modern Catia V5, the actual wiring bundles were unable to fit.

Says Peter Schmitt, vice president of marketing and communications at Dassault Systèmes of America, "The 6 billion [dollar] loss at Airbus was the result of a fairly simple problem that could have been fixed with a fairly low investment." Schmitt didn't offer an estimate of how much it would have cost or how long it would have taken for Airbus to upgrade the German unit to Catia V5. But his message was clear: Companies using PLM should make sure they are using the same software package and version of that software. "Manufacturers using PLM," Schmitt adds, "should make sure everybody is working with the same set of data."

Although Airbus has remained mum on exactly why the German designers used an older CAD package, most observers believe the reason was simple Eurodollars and Eurocents.

The cost to train the engineers in Catia V5 may have been the sticking point for Airbus management that led to the A380's multibillion-euro design flaw. That's the view of an executive at a firm that trains Airbus' suppliers to use Catia. "Airbus made the decision not to migrate Germany to Catia V5 because it would have meant a complete retraining," says Geoff Haines, managing director of Cenit Ltd. in Oxford, England. "They decided not to do it for budgetary reasons."

So great is the chasm between the two versions that someone schooled in Catia V4 trying to get up on V5 is similar to a motorist learning to fly an airplane. It takes six months to a year before they become fully proficient, Haines says. "It would be like starting from scratch," he adds. [...]

In the past, the standard practice for Boeing has been to design the plane in-house, then pass blueprints for parts or whole sections of the plane to manufacturing partners. This time, however, Boeing is turning that process on its head, designing the 787 in collaboration with its partners using the PLM software from Dassault. Essentially, some 6,000 engineers around the world are jointly designing and engineering the aircraft. Partners include companies such as Alenia Aeronautica of Italy, which is building the plane's main fuselage; Japan's Kawasaki Heavy Industries, which is also building part of the fuselage as well as the wings and landing gear; and Goodrich Aerostructures of Chula Vista, Calif., which is constructing the nacelles (shell around the engines) and thrust reversers.

"There are a number of advantages to putting the people closest to the work in charge," Fowler says. The manufacturer of the fuselage, for example, will ultimately know the most cost-efficient method to build the structure. Component manufacturers can point out whether their existing machinery can manufacture a part, or whether new robots or tools will need to be purchased. By altering the design, say, by using a 6 millimeter fastener instead of an 8 millimeter fastener, they may be able to produce the part with existing machinery or manufacture the part faster, saving time and money.

Pittman and Fowler agreed that all engineers working on the 787 would work in Catia V5--no substitutions. This is not as simple as it sounds. For starters, it requires a large up-front investment. Boeing and its suppliers are paying an estimated $20,000 per desktop for the software, which, based on 6,000 engineers worldwide, works out to about $120 million. In addition, engineers do not always adapt well to being told what software to use. Most have spent years learning how to use a specific software package, often customizing it to meet their preferences and learning through experience exactly how digital designs translate into actual engineering.

"We considered allowing our partners to use their own preferred applications, but we decided that wasn't feasible because of the [data] integration challenges," Pittman explains. "It wasn't a popular decision, and we really had to work on explaining why we were doing it."

Boeing provided its suppliers with a financial incentive to get on board with Catia V5. "If you use the common Catia tool, Boeing will provide you with the tool and the support for free," says Barsamian, who trains Boeing engineers to use the software.

Another key plank in the company's strategy was ensuring software version control. Even though all Boeing engineers and partners were starting off with the same version of the various software packages, there is ample opportunity to lose control as updates are released and new partners are brought on board. The team decided that software updates would take place at four specified points in a year--referred to as Block Points--and that all Boeing engineers working on the Dreamliner and all outside partners would receive software updates at the same time.

Again, this understates the complexity of the task. For starters, the updates include far more than Dassault's software; they involve dozens of other applications that are used in the design and engineering process to do everything from test the stress tolerance of composite materials to achieve optimum aerodynamics. Many of the applications have been internally developed by Boeing; however, a number have been developed by third-party vendors, such as Metrologic, whose software is being used for analyzing 3D measurements. In all, some 150 applications are updated at each Block Point.

The updates also include software from other PLM vendors. Boeing is using Windchill, a software package from Parametric Technology in conjunction with Dassault¹s Enovia, to streamline the process of managing changes to components on the Dreamliner. If changes are made to a window design, for example, those changes need to be conveyed to manufacturing partners and internal Boeing designers working on areas affected by the change. Parametric¹s Windchill manages that process, ensuring that engineers follow a consistent set of steps to resolve any conflicts and that changes are completed as requested. Brian Shepherd, vice president of product management for Parametric, notes that even when companies try to consolidate on one vendor¹s PLM offering, they often find certain functions, such as change management, are still best handled by third-party software.

In all, some 150 applications are updated by Boeing at each Block Point on the Dreamliner program.

A final cornerstone of the Dreamliner technology strategy involves the use of a master data repository for all design and engineering information. Enovia, the Dassault platform, is used as a gateway to a 16-terabyte data warehouse in Bellevue, Wash. Boeing encourages its partners to send updates to the data warehouse at least twice a week, and sometimes more frequently depending on the stage of work in progress. The warehouse is housed on Unix servers running IBM's DB2.

Boeing chose to use CAD and PDM systems from the same software firm, Dassault, thereby ensuring tight integration. Airbus, on the other hand, decided to mix and match. The European aerospace company is using a CAD package from Dassault and a data management system from Parametric Technology. In September 2005, Parametric announced that Airbus was extending the use of its data management solution, Windchill, as the platform for managing all CAD models for the A380 that are used in its digital mock-up.

But mixing and matching your CAD and data management vendors can require extra work to ensure a smooth fit. "If you want deep integration with your CAD data, it's best to go with a PDM system from your CAD vendor," Cheney says.

There are signs, though, that Airbus is already having second thoughts.