In its infancy, product lifecycle management (PLM) software centered on CAD files. Creating a central, constantly updated repository for design files, PLM users made sure designers and manufacturing engineers always had the latest specs. It was a vital piece to making sure that producers, suppliers, purchasing managers, and customers were all coordinating their efforts.
And the job has gotten more complicated.
“Products that were traditionally just mechanical, like a car, have become increasingly electronic and driven by software content,” says Peter Schroer, CEO of Andover, Massachusetts-based PLM software company Aras. Even those most mechanical parts of a car, he adds, are getting smarter. “It’s amazing how much software there is right now in a transmission. So you’re having to manage a lot of non-mechanical pieces with each product.”
PLM today not only has to track the latest CAD design changes, it also has to manage software updates, maintain separate profiles for parts that are mechanically identical but function differently because of programming, and provide modular functions to manage variants on designs used across multiple end products. Schroer says Aras is growing steadily with automakers and suppliers because those companies are looking for efficiency improvements in design and manufacturing.
“One of the reasons why we like the automotive market is that the management is really quite complicated,” Schroer says. “You’re dealing with mechanically complex equipment, and you’re dealing with several variants of each product. From a purchasing side, you need common parts to be tracked, and from the design and production sides, you need variations tracked. It’s a really complex puzzle, and we think we can add a lot of value there.”
Growing complexity
One of the primary tasks a PLM suite can perform is generating bills of materials (BOMs): lists of the raw materials and components needed to manufacture any given vehicle or part. In digital design’s early days, when one design equaled one part, engineers could generate one BOM and use it for years.
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PLM in the cloud: a big problem Maintaining one set of master files on cloud-based servers eliminates having different versions of a design saved on dozens of individual computers. With design software, however, there is one major limitation to putting everything on the cloud – file sizes. “If you’re talking about designing cars, an engineer might need 10GB to 20GB of (Dassualt Systèmes) CATIA data first thing in the morning to start on his designs. That’s a big download,” Aras CEO Peter Schroer says. Manufacturing and purchasing engineers don’t need to pull that much data, so they can take advantage of the speed and simplicity of the cloud. But the designers themselves, for now, need to keep much of their data on their own machines, Schroer says. That’s why Aras offers hybrid deployment options where file vaults are on-site close to designers while the main application servers are in the cloud for global scalability. “Network speeds will accelerate. We’ll eventually get to the point where it will be feasible to put that much data in the cloud, but we’re pretty far away from that right now,” he adds. |
But the platform-sharing boom in automotive design has made that process much more difficult. Worldwide, producers are using basic modular designs – a single platform for all small vehicles, all mid-sized vehicles, and all large vehicles – and developing variants on those platforms for different customers and markets.
Toyota’s Camry sedan, for example, shares many of the same mechanical features as the Highlander crossover. Fiat’s compact-wide platform underpins vehicles as different as the Alfa Romeo Giulietta compact, the Dodge Dart compact, the Jeep Cherokee crossover, and the Chrysler 200 sedan.
By using such modular designs, automakers can develop vehicles more quickly and less expensively because the most complex engineering work gets done once and is then repeated across the variants. Purchasing managers can order the shared basic parts in bulk, winning volume discounts on the components that every vehicle on the platform will use.
The challenge is creating platforms that are flexible enough to allow design consolidation while offering vehicles that are different – not just identical cars with different name badges on the front. Schroer says PLM can make it easier for designers to track and manage the differences between platform-shared vehicles.
“With product planning that involves variants and options, the bill of materials is not so clear. One master BOM can make 15 variations of the car,” Schroer says. “And within each of those variants, you can have software and component variation within single models.”
For example, the difference between a vehicle with a sporty suspension and one designed for touring may be only in control software managing shock absorbers.
Delivery options
Though Aras offers its products directly to customers, Schroer sees growth potential through partnerships and OEM-style arrangements. In 2014, the company reached an agreement with enterprise software provider Infor to offer Aras’ cloud-based PLM software to its customers as an Infor product, not as a reseller. It’s the third such licensing agreement that Aras has reached. Increasingly, companies want unified software packages that combine PLM with enterprise resource planning (ERP), purchase planning, and other systems.
“You don’t want people to have to log off and log on to two different systems to get their jobs done,” Schroer explains. “For Infor’s customers, there’s only one person to call to make it work and to keep it working. When you’re running a bunch of loosely integrated products, and something goes wrong, the individual software suppliers can end up pointing the finger at each other, blaming everyone else for the failure. When you’ve got an integrated package, one phone call fixes everything.”
With the Infor partnership, customers buy the software on a subscription basis, paying a regular fee instead of making a one-time purchase. Common among cloud-based providers, Schroer says customers are getting used to software-as-a-service (SaaS). While, that delivery model means constant payments instead of one-time purchases, it eliminates ongoing costs from upgrading software, which become the responsibility of the software provider, not the customer’s IT staff.
Schroer says Aras sells its products through subscription both for its on-site installed and cloud-based offerings, with a pricing model that encourages customers to move to the cloud when possible.
“PLM is all about supporting good design and manufacturing,” Schroer states. “The more that we can do to make it easier to use the product and to support IT staffs by taking tasks off of their plates, the more value we can offer to our customers.”
Aras Corp.
www.aras.com
About the author: Robert Schoenberger is the editor of TMV and can be reached at 216.393.0271 or rschoenberger@gie.net.