Magellan Aerospace shows future for collaboration

To create a future you must first think about what will shape it," advises Brian Little, executive vice president of Magellan Aerospace (UK), formerly Mayflower. His starting point: it's no longer possible to run a business the old way – collaboration, proactive information sharing and risk management are now essential for survival. Magellan is an aerospace systems supplier that designs, engineers and manufactures aero engine and aero structure components – from detail kit supply to Class One structural subassemblies. Products range from intricate valves to single piece spars exceeding 18 metres in length. But the company operates in a market that is changing fast as OEMs rationalise suppliers and push responsibility down the supply chain, forcing efficiency, responsiveness and more time compression. Successful suppliers have to offer a full and fast service, and that has meant spreading collaborative product lifecycle management (PLM) across extended enterprises. Which was a problem. "Whilst there has been collaboration across organisations since the early 1990s," says Little, "it was relatively immature in terms of the linkages on the commercial side – and not underpinned by the IT infrastructure." Improve risk taking Typically, he observes, companies have been applying technology to automate hitherto manual operations and do more things faster. "This improves your ability to make more mistakes, which brings more problems to fix. Instead, they should have been asking 'how do I use this solution to enable me to improve my risk and opportunity management?'." That's what Magellan has done with the help of IBM. For its work, notably with the Airbus A380 and now also the 400M, it has used IBM PLM Solutions and implemented a Smarteam PLM system as the foundation to manage its suppliers. That in turn has led to the Aerospace Supplier Collaboration (ASC) industry template, which also involves Catia CAD/CAM and IBM WebSphere middleware. Engineering project manager Paul Nokes takes up the story: "In this much fiercer competitive environment we need to keep everybody … on the front foot. Our suppliers and manufacturers need to have as much information relating to their part of the project as we do … so that any potential delay is eliminated at the outset. It's also all about risk mitigation: as we move towards more collaborative joint ventures we have to take on more risk." Part of Magellan's solution has come from Catia v5 itself. Although OEMs traditionally wait until the last minute to issue final specifications, suppliers and sub-contractors can get to work ahead of time. "Catia v5 works very well with preliminary data," observes Nokes. "You can develop the design to completion, swap in final surfaces or specifications when they're released and rebuild the design in a couple of days." But that's not enough: manufacturers and subcontractors need to be able to add their value the instant the design is released to manufacture. "We needed to figure out how to get a phased delivery of information to our suppliers," says Nokes. "They needed to know about billet sizes, material specifications and even NC programming before we got to formal release." So Magellan came up with DMIR (design maturity information record), which is about creating and disseminating knowledge and understanding so that everyone internally and externally knows what's going on. "On the one hand we're trying to get all the modelling done, get the interfaces agreed and design the components – and design engineering are pushing that programme," says Nokes. "On the other, manufacturing are trying to pull information from us to get their parts of the project up and running." Making that work necessitated providing information around configuration data – which involved a considerable paper trail. Says Nokes: "In 2004 we knew we needed to get a PLM system in place to support the kind of things we were doing on the Airbus A380 project for two groups [manufacturing in Wrexham and design in Bristol]. On future projects we would have to do the same thing for up to 12 design and manufacturing groups. It was this realisation that prompted us to get more computer automation. "We were looking for an electronic system that could incorporate Catia v5, configure all our data to manufacture, incorporate Microsoft Project and other planning software and reconcile our push/pull working. We were also looking for a single PLM solution." And that was Smarteam, chosen largely because of its flexibility. "We can write our own processes and implement them in Smarteam. Plus Smarteam is designed for Catia V5 [and] there is also a Unigraphics plug-in." In fact, the system can bring in data from all CAD environments used by its customers. Last year IBM worked with Magellan and other aerospace organisations to develop a set of Smarteam processes and templates to form a pre-configured PLM environment, since dubbed ASC. Magellan specified and tested ASC for its work for the A380. Says Nokes: "Our part of that is the False Rear Spar, which is the component that supports Spoiler One, Spoiler Two and Flap Track Two, and there are aft ribs that connect back into the Rear Spar. We delivered all of these parts for the first prototype build… What we were able to do was release information 'at risk' to our manufacturers so they could manufacture parts early so that we all kept within the programme." What's special about this, according to Little, is that whereas most data management solutions have grown up around automating functional interaction, this is cross-supply chain interaction. "We haven't yet got enough senior managers throughout the extended enterprise who understand that a large part of their job is to get out of functional management and manage cross-enterprise interactions and activities," he observes. "The single biggest competitive advantage that I have is our mindset as we deploy ASC." ASC now enables users from across the globe to dial-in and view the status of work packages or design stages. They can see and download released data and request more if it has reached an appropriate stage. "Whenever we respond to a request for information it is delivered with a qualification saying it is 40% complete or whatever, so the recipient can plan and estimate risk," explains Nokes. In fact, most manufacturing suppliers are within the Magellan Group so access is via the internal WAN. Nevertheless, a significant part of the ASC involved IBM middleware for external communications. "We could have cobbled something together," says Nokes. "But it would have taken a lot longer and tied up our whole IT department. The beauty of the IBM solution is that it uses standard components [so] it's easy to support." Little concurs. "I spend less of my time worrying about the solution itself," he says. "It's more about how do I change the measures, the culture and the organisation in a very focused business way. What we're looking to ASC to do is to improve our relationships with Airbus, Boeing and other companies, because they start to see it will help them." And he adds: "My job is to keep IT off the critical path. Too many people consider IT as a bottleneck and too many IT people say things take months to implement." And the hard benefits? "ASC is much more than just making sure that everyone is in-step," says Nokes. "We have achieved at least a 30–40% reduction in time between concept design and component delivery." Little is just as enthusiastic: "Overall we have seen a 10–20% reduction in our engineering costs, in the first instance, and that is without really exploiting what's possible. It has allowed us to increase our profitability by about 15–20%."