British Aerospace Selects IBM's Product Manager--

A CIMdata Case Study

British Aerospace Military Aircraft & Aerostructures, a world leader in aerospace design and manufacturing, selected IBM's ProductManager PDM system as an integral part of one of their major business process reengineering initiatives. The ProductManager installation has been designed to provide British Aerospace work groups with common access to all product information from conceptual design, through manufacturing definition, to the configuration of the delivered aircraft. It is being used by the company's multi-disciplinary teams from technical, engineering, manufacturing and customer support that work as part of a company-wide Integrated Product Team initiative to reduce time scales throughout the entire life cycle.

In today's global market no one company or industry is exempt from the fierce competitive pressures. To persevere, change must take place. As a result of this realization, British Aerospace Military Aircraft & Aerostructures (MA&A), a wholly owned operating unit of British Aerospace PLC (BAe), undertook an aggressive program to dramatically alter the way it operates. The new way to operate would call for restructuring from functional staffs to project teams. This new way to operate called for new processes and enabling technologies. One of the core initiatives designed to strengthen MA&A's competitiveness and to enable a new way to operate is MA&A's Operation Efficiency Improvement (OEI) Project.

One of the primary elements of the OEI project is the creation and enabling of Integrated Product Teams. These Integrated Product Teams are being created within a new Integrated Product Development (IPD) environment that is being enabled with new and improved product development processes and enabling information technologies. IPD is all about better engineered business processes, a critical part of this is giving the right people, the right information, at the right time, so that they can make the right decisions. To enable such an environment with the appropriate information technology MA&A developed the OEI Application Architecture.

This architecture, illustrated in Figure 1, is comprised of four main elements providing the foundation on which the various technology initiatives within the framework for the OEI Project are being built. The main idea driving this architecture is to be able to provide the Integrated Product Teams with an integrated information environment. At the center of this architecture is what is referred to as the Product Information Environment (PIE). This is the environment that integrates the various elements of the architecture together - this is the product data manager environment. It is the point where the various tools, including a range of software packages, are integrated with the various business processes to work together seamlessly.The PIE Vision calls for a single integrated change controlled environment for MA&A product and process information. The core information technology enabler being deployed to attain this vision is IBM's Product Data Management (PDM) product, ProductManager.

MA&A recognized early in the development of the PIE Vision that PDM technology could provide the necessary functionality and information technology infrastructure required to enable the new environment being developed by the OEI Project. For years PDM had been used within MA&A's Computer-Aided Design (CAD) group for file management and simple task management, such as file check-in and check-out. As a result of MA&A's PDM experience within the CAD group, MA&A management believed that enterprise PDM was possible and at the end of 1995 a team was put together to define requirements for an enterprise PDM system. In April 1996 IBM was chosen to construct a pilot implementation focused on bill-of-material management using their ProductManager Version 3.1 PDM product. MA&A chose IBM and their ProductManager product because of IBM's level of commitment to develop a best-in-class aerospace solution in partnership with MA&A and the strengths of IBM's PDM technology offering. Upon the successful completion of the pilot in late September 1996, MA&A and IBM signed a long-term partnership agreement.

As the pilot completed, the PDM team, comprised of business specialists as well as information technology specialists, began its implementation effort. The characteristics of the implementation team were very important to MA&A. As part of the bigger OEI Project it was important that the PIE team consist of employees involved with the business process re-engineering effort that designed many of the new product development processes. It was also important for the team to be guided by business requirements and not technology requirements. To address these issues, much of the project's management team were selected from within major aerospace development projects and not from the information technology (IT) management ranks.

The first ProductManager system deployment took place in March 1997. The major driving force for this deployment was the data management requirements being placed on the organization for the Eurofighter. This implementation of ProductManager included a basic CATIA integration in order to manage CATIA models and CATIA generated BOMs. It should be noted that the ProductManager implementation on the Eurofighter program was not its first implementation at MA&A. In fact ProductManager was implemented in a limited functional configuration within MA&A to provide contract documentation management in late 1996. The PDM team credits this rapid implementation to ProductManager's out-of-the-box capabilities, its customization environment, and on the team's commitment to deliver business solutions.

There is no doubt that the PDM implementation at BAe Military Aircraft & Aerostructures is a major undertaking. BAe Military Aircraft & Aerostructures has made some very significant waves throughout the PDM industry as a result of their rapid implementation of IBM's ProductManager product. They have shown that given the right resources, the right tools, the project management and planning, and the right partnership, PDM implementation on an enterprise scale does not have to take years. For years the PDM industry has received a lot of criticism because of the perception that PDM implementations take too long and expend too much resources. There should be no doubt now that this does not have to be the case.BAe Military Aircraft & Aerostructures should be commended for their recognition from the start that PDM provides an enabling technology that when properly implemented can support critical business processes designed to allow employees to work within a concurrent environment. An environment, according to Mr. Brian Carr, IPD PIE Integration Manager, "... that allows employees to work smarter and not harder."

For now we will have to wait and see what the long-term impact of PDM is on BAe Military Aircraft & Aerostructures' organization. At this point BAe Military Aircraft & Aerostructures believes that the path that they have taken must be successful or the company may no longer exist as it does today. According to Mr. Carr, "Our customers will not be able to afford our products in the future if we keep doing the same old thing. We need to achieve the goals defined by OEI in order to stay in business."