Jaguar Digs In to Bridge the Product Lifecycle
When Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) was sold from Ford to Tata Motor in 2008, it meant the automotive company would have to migrate from Ford’s IT and product lifecycle management (PLM) systems. But rather than looking at this as a chore, Dave Sharrat, senior manager for PLM at Jaguar Land Rover described the change as having “a blank sheet to create new systems for the business.”
The standard of integrating PLM systems had previously been a loose one for the automaker, as computer-aided design (CAD), manufacturing (CAM) and engineering (CAE) tools were brought together only to a limited extent.
“We started with existing applications like CAD, CAM and CAE and created a new technical architecture to build a new PLM system with a single version of the truth,” said Sharrat at the recent IBM Innovate 2013 event in London. “Where appropriate, this is connected to our ERP system.”
Instead of passing data back and forth between applications, this change meant that data is kept within the original application that created it, with APIs in place to allow other applications access. According to Sharrat, this led Jaguar Land Rover to turn to Dassault Systems and IBM, using Dassault’s Enovia PLM with IBM’s Rational toolset.
By mapping the two products, Sharrat said that JLR is able to monitor the company’s information flows much more closely. “All our vehicle milestones and dates are exposed in the Rational toolset from where we can fully define the requirements we can put into the [new] product,” he said. “These requirements are then transferred back into Enovia, which drives a verification process.”
In addition, JLR is using Rational to gather data related to product development testing that the automaker creates in Enovia. There Jaguar Land Rover is currently developing a new simulation interface that should automate the CAE testing process. Sharrat explained that Rational then steps in to help engineers measure the results and study product development over time.
And Sharrat noted that JLR is already seeing the benefits of the investment. “We’ve implemented control systems that constantly monitor quality [assurance] data from our production plans using dashboards on an iPad,” he said.
The automaker expects the result of the collaboration to be deployed in 2014 in JLR’s new vehicle programs. Meanwhile, the PLM program as a whole will require three years to come to fruition.
