Automotive Tier 1 supplier Johnson Controls has up-leveled its automotive interiors design operation with the Teamcenter design platform from Siemens PLM Software. The company's Automotive Experience division is rolling out Siemens PLM software across its 200 plants worldwide.
“When we looked at the design of the seats and door panels Johnson Controls was working with, it was a hodgepodge of spreadsheets, prototypes, and paper templates,” Steven Luby, president and CEO of Vistagy, a division of Siemens PLM, told Design News at the 2012 Siemens PLM Connection Americas Users Conference in Las Vegas. “They didn’t really have software to manage this.”
It takes 5,000 data points to define a car seat. (Source: Siemens)
The seats were difficult to design with the existing tools, plus they offered little in help for improving efficiency and productivity. “In trying to design seats with all the different layers of material, it was incredibly painful for them,” said Luby. “We looked at the problem and told them we could provide an environment where they could go to 3D.”
The first thing Siemens did was to bring Johnson Controls design engineers into the process of setting up the system. “We started talking with them about pieces, and seams, and foam. We let the engineers define the system their way, with their materials,” said Luby. “Now they have the visualization and documentation that allows them to bid on a seam in less than a day. It used to take them three weeks.”
The bidding process is just one of a wide range of tools designed to improve Johnson Controls’ design efficiency across the globe. Once the Siemens platform is fully implemented, all units will be integrated with uniform design tools. “We gave them productivity tools, and those tools are starting to transform what they’re doing,” said Luby. “You make a change and push a button, and all the manufacturing data updates, all the documentation updates, the BOM updates.”
Sanjay Rishi, Johnson Controls' group vice president of information technology, said in a statement that the company was seeking a scalable and comprehensive PLM solution when it chose Siemens PLM.
The ultimate goal for Johnson Controls is to drive down costs while improving service and performance to its OEM customers. “The driver for Johnson Controls’ adoption of Teamcenter was efficiency,” said Robert Jones, senior vice president of industry at Siemens. “They needed their design system to be uniform from Detroit to India.” Jones said that the improved design system makes Johnson Control’s Automotive Experience division a better customer for its OEM customers. “They can do more innovation and take more products to market."
Nice customer win for Siemens. I'm actually surprised such a major automotive OEM supplier was not further down the pike in implementing PLM. PLM, while still not as widely understood in some manufacturing sectors, is pretty well entrenched in the automotive and aerospace markets and in use at most of the major automotive OEMs. Interesting that the Vistagy folks seem to be the driver on this deal. Vistagy, a maker of tools for composite design, was recently acquired by Siemens. Perhaps the need for a tool for effective material composition was the final straw that drove Johnson to pull the trigger on a move to implement PLM on an enterprise scale.
Yes, it is surprising Johnson controls was not further along in PLM, Beth. I think they finally got on board in part out of pressure from their OEM customers. At one point an automotive executive joked that our cars are fromt he space age now, but our seats are still from the 1970s. Since Johnson Controls is the largest seat maker, the company's adoption of PLM may begin to changed that.
Beth, it is amazing, but it takes a long time for tools and techniques like PLM to become widely adopted. It is like ERP, where many companies were not up to date until recently. Finally, the high end corporate market is getting saturated. In the software and systems development area CASE tools are still not as widely used as they should be. I was working for a company in the early 1990s. The statistics they quote about project failure rates and other indicators have not changed much since then. And they have sold a lot.
So, it is good to see PLM more widely used. Effeciency improvement is what really drives wealth in a society.
You're right, Naperlou, adoption can be painfully slow, and ERP is a good example. Plant software is another good example. Seems like the mandate for adoption doesn't come down until it becomes a competitive or cost imperative. My guess is that OEM customers prompted the action at Johnson Controls.
I, too, am a little surprised, Beth. The Detroit automakers are already very advanced in this area, and it would seem that the tier-one and tier-two suppliers have to move with the OEMs down a parallel path.
It is always surprising to me, who has covered PLM and other enterprise software for years, how much adoption rates always lag behind what the industry perception is. Naperlou is right that implementation of PLM on an enterprise scale is a huge endeavor, not so much for the software implementation (although that's difficult), but for the huge organizational and process change it invokes. That's often why companies are slow to get on board. That and high cost, due mostly to associated consulting fees.
Did I read this right? They didn't even have 3D yet? Sounds like they were milking the old for all it was worth to show better short term numbers. Their engineers probably need to be rejuvinated as well. Sound like a big project.
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