Collaboration and knowledge management with PLM solutions

Citation

(2005), "Collaboration and knowledge management with PLM solutions", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 77 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/aeat.2005.12777dab.009

Collaboration and knowledge management with PLM solutions

Collaboration and knowledge management with PLM solutions

Keywords: Computer software, Aerospace engineering

IBM and Dassault Systèmes, recently announced that Alcoa has chosen their product lifecycle management solutions (PLM) to improve collaboration efficiency and increase integration between engineering and production. Alcoa will be presented its collaborative facilities management solution at the COE Annual Users Conference in Phoenix.

Alcoa is a leading producer and manager of aluminium products and components. The supplier is active in the aerospace, commercial transportation and automotive industry, among others. It has experienced the benefits of Smarteam in two of its subsidiaries.

Alcoa’s capital engineering for Cleveland Works deployed Smarteam for facilities management across four locations. The company is meeting the global challenges of a distributed enterprise by streamlining change management and providing unified access to the more than 60,000 AutoCAD and TIF drawings of presses, buildings, and support systems at its 30-acre Cleveland site, as well as at production sites in Virginia, Hungary, and Mexico.

“Setting up an enterprise PLM system will allow us to expand our capabilities”, said Dora Tripp, system administrator, Design Engineering Services, Alcoa Cleveland. “SMARTEAM’s flexible data model has enabled us to build a complex, scalable knowledge structure for accessing and collaborating with in our organisation”.

In a successful two-year pilot programme, the other subsidiary, Alcoa Wheel Products’ Commercial Vehicle Wheel Division – which serves the Class 8 truck and automotive OEM industries – implemented Smarteam to vault and manage all its CATIA V5 product design data. Upon a successful production launch, the solution will be extended by introducing more optimised processes across additional locations, including multi-CAD legacy data, CATIA V4, SolidWorks and Pro/ ENGINEER, and achieving gateway interconnectivity with the company’s ERP system.

“SMARTEAM has the best integration with CATIA V5 for handling complex file structure interrelationships”, said Jim Black, wheel tooling coordinator for Commercial Vehicle Wheels at Alcoa. “The engineers who work with this day in and day out believe this is key for our future”.

“While delivering daily benefit to individual users and teams, SMARTEAM empowers Alcoa with a strategic enterprise asset for enterprise- wide collaboration and optimal leveraging of product intellectual property”, said Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO, Smarteam. “For Alcoa, the rewards are already evident today, with future business value guaranteed as the scope of its PLM programme expands”.