New vehicle concept defined in 3 hours rather than 3 days
by Design World Staff
Friday, January 19, 2007
Efficiency, ROI, and ultimately happier customers are some of the
reasons Lotus Cars have implemented an extended, integrated product
lifecycle management (PLM) toolset for end-to-end product creation. The
toolset consists of CATIA V5 for design, DELMIA for production, and
ENOVIA SmarTeam for collaborative product data management.
“Before
implementing this toolset, our creation and design change requests
involved numerous employees and hours,” said Dave Balcombe, Head of
Information Management at Lotus. “In one case it took 14 designers to
create an underbody and 150 hours to change the material thickness. The
PLM toolset changed that. On one 2006 project, we completed a design
with only six engineers and implemented a change request in eight
minutes. Recently, we turned around a new vehicle layout in under 24
hours. The customer proposed the idea at the end of one day, and we
presented the project the next day at a 9:30 a.m. meeting.”
DELMIA
provides an integrated virtual manufacturing environment that engineers
use to quickly spot issues and find solutions before production, saving
time and money. For Lotus, this has reduced the number of physical
prototypes required to validate vehicle assembly.
ENOVIA
SmarTeam centralizes data and organizes intelligence into nodes linked
to different vehicle zones. This arrangement gives Lotus engineers a
head start by transferring knowledge nodes to the next model.
“Lotus’
decision to go with an integrated PLM strategy is already reaping the
rewards,” explains Denis Senpere, DS General Manager PLM North Europe.
Dassault Systemes, IBM, Lotus Engineering
www.3ds.com
www.ibm.com
www.grouplotus.com
:: Design World ::