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Concurrent Engineering Blog

New Software Helps Airbus Product Development

Posted by Richard Strange on 05-Nov-2009 12:07:00

This article has been published in Germany’s No. 1 of business/financial dailies ‘Handelsblatt’ 

Markus Fasse, Munich/ 8 May 2009

This story still causes high emotions: As engineers of aircraft builder Airbus were working with different software programs during the development of the mega plane A380, the cabling of the engines failed in manufacturing. This disaster as per today causes for mother holding EADS a 2-year-delay in delivery to the customer and 5 billion Euro in expenses. Today’s Airbus-Boss Tom Enders keeps repeating: “This must not happen to us again.” In order to ensure, that this does not happen again, a completely new software system shall overcome this challenge.

In 2007 EADS started one of the most comprehensive evaluation processes for software vendors.

The goal was to create one integral system for the development of planes, rockets and satellites. This system also was supposed to be open for suppliers and be able to integrate the so-called lifecycle management into the planning of a product from the very beginning, i.e. the unified management of all data of a product should be enabled. “The goal is the standardised description and management of all our products during their entire lifecycle – from the first idea up to the after-market”, says Gurus Dekkers, since 2008 the first Chief Information Officer at EADS.

Next to EADS’ preferred vendor Dassault also Siemens, SAP and the US concern PTC were bidding for the order. The Americans won the deal which will bring them a three digit million amount in revenue during the next years.

This task could hardly be more difficult. Besides Airbus the PTC software will also be introduced at helicopter producer Eurocopter, at defence division “Defense and Security” as well as at aerospace daughter Astrium. The EADS divisions that used to be completely separated in the past shall now share their engineers, developments and components, says Dekkers.

This is an operation at the open heart: According to voices from Airbus especially the transfer of data and product specifications from legacy databases into the new system will be delicate.

PTC shows a long list of references:

The US Ministry of Defence is represented as well as car builder BMW or the pharmaceutical concern Astra Zeneca. However, the EADS deal exceeds any dimension. It will take several hundred PTC experts several years to implement the software. At the end roughly 70,000 people on every single continent will be working with the new software platform. EADS is enlarging its development centres in India, China, Russia and in the U.S. In the future, manufacturing shall take place around the globe.

There is a huge respect towards this task. “If you staple the technical documentation of a plane, this pile of paper will be three times higher than the Eiffel Tower”, says Marc Diouane, head of Europe at PTC. This bulk of information needs to be structured and to be made available. This is a process that will decide on sustainability.

Today a passenger plane has a lifecycle of up to 40 years. Airbus is obliged to store this data for this entire period. “Therefore, the entire lifecycle of a plane also needs to be calculated in development”, says Diouane.

EADS intends to benefit from that: In the future, a significant increase in revenue and margin shall be generated by service business, by maintenance, by training, or even by the own operations. Because nowadays airlines or military no longer ask for plane but rather hours of operation in the air. This is a key component of “Vision 2020”, the long-term planning at EADS.

In short-term the PTC solution has to speed up mainly the A350 project at Airbus. The smaller brother of the A380 shall be ready for market in 2013 and defy Boeing’s competitor “Dreamliner”. More than a dozen suppliers from all over the world have real-time access to the digital model. At the same time the Airbus management wants to get insight into the current state of development almost every day. EADS cannot afford to have a second “cable salad” like with A380.