MANUFACTURING SOFTWARE


Aerospace supplier adopts a platform approach to Product Lifecycle Management for rapid development and collaboration.


PLM gives aerospace supplier more flexibility


J


apanese industrial conglomerate, Kawasaki Heavy Industries (KHI), is combining its expertise in manufacturing automation


systems and aerospace manufacturing through the streamlining of its processes and product lifecycle management (PLM) capabilities through the use of “Platform-As-A-Service” hardware and software from Aras to perform its digital transformation.


PLATFORM AS A SERVICE By taking a Platform-As-A-Service approach, KHI has been able to cut costs and accelerate deployment of advanced product lifecycle management capabilities across its diverse $13 billion engineering enterprise. After identifying a need for a new approach within the business, KHI adopted Aras Innovator as its enterprise- wide platform for engineering business processes. The company identified Aras as the best solution for its requirements, which included a more standardised and unified product development environment, improved collaboration and information sharing between disciplines, lower setup and management costs and the ability to respond faster to changes in the business environment.


DEMANDING ENVIRONMENT With 34,000 employees on six continents, KHI plays a significant role in the aerospace supply chain as well as participating in other industries including energy, industrial equipment,


❱ ❱ Kawasaki is deploying a PLM platform approach to increase flexibility in its manufacturing operations


power, transport and shipping. The aerospace industry is particularly demanding due to the requirements for rapid innovation, conformance to exacting standards and the need for competitive performance. The decision to adopt a single product


lifeycycle management platform was driven by the desire to improve efficiency and enable the rapid sharing of process innovations in core areas such as CAD data management, Bill of Materials (BOM) management, document management, design data management and infrastructure system collaboration. At the same time, KHI needed an approach with the flexibility to meet the diverse needs of the global aerospace industry.


MODEL BASED ARCHITECTURE KHI evaluated a range of PLM and manufacturing system software approaches from a total of eight different suppliers and selected Aras as the best fit for its needs, choosing to run Aras Innovator in a private cloud environment to maximise the ease and speed of deployment. Such an approach doesn’t require the installation and management of server hardware and software on its premises. Instead, the hardware requirements are managed as a service and the software is configured,


updated and managed for the company thereby enabling KHI staff to focus on their area of expertise. The Aras platform’s model-based architecture allows KHI to change the data model, business rules, workflows, forms and other capabilities without complex programming and compiling. Since adopting the platform, KHI has reduced the cost for creating a new PLM production environment by 51 to 83 percent, and cut the time taken to deploy a verification environment from several weeks to as little as a day. The company credited the improvement, in large part, to the self-sufficiency enabled by the new software. “The company head office develops the templates for KHI groups as common infrastructure, then we help deploy it in each company,” explains Yutaro Mishima, Information Planning Department, Corporate Planning Division of KHI. “Each company or affiliated organisation can develop their system based on their own purpose and scope of work in a short period of time using the common template which was created at the headquarters.” This approach provides KHI employees with the capability of managing their own specific business requirements without the need to become experts in the software. “The possibilities for streamlining both technical and business processes are almost endless and the fact that the upgrades are included in the subscription and performed by Aras is a significant benefit to us into the future,” concludes Mishima.


Aerospace Test & Validation Vol 2 No. 2 /// 13


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32