Jaguar’s faster road to design success

"The design of a Formula One car is a 12 month process. It just happens that at some stage the season begins!” So says Steve Nevey, CAE manager at Jaguar Racing. He continues: “We’re not into reducing lead times really. Instead, we try to keep the design process going for as long as possible. If it takes four months to design the car, there is no benefit in cutting this to three. We just try to go through as many iterations as possible until it’s time to manufacture.” Jaguar Racing is based in Milton Keynes and has 350 employees – 150 in production. Nevey joined in 1996 from design software consultancy Matra Datavision (now under IBM). Before that he worked as a CAD/CAM trainer and lecturer at the University of Warwick for two years, and before that was with the Ministry of Defence in Devonport working on the Trident submarine design project. He joined Jaguar with a remit of creating a ‘paperless design office’ that ran solely on CAD software with no drawing boards. At that time, the firm had just 15 CAD seats (all Unigraphics) with no real PDM (product data management) software to manage the rate of engineering change at all. As for the manufacturing management side, it had employed an outside consultant to develop a customised MRP (early material requirements planning) and stock control system. As Nevey explains: “Most of the packaged MRP software at this time could not cope with split batches. We needed software that was flexible enough to do this. We often design products so quickly that we may have to scrap all six [product] sets because of a design change. Our customised software can handle this.” Clearly, there was work to be done. Says Nevey: “From a software viewpoint, the business was being run on MRP, accounting software and CAD. There was no email or Internet, no [software] integration and no link [network] to the race track.” By 1997, the company’s designers were using new CAD software integrated with a Nastran design simulation and analysis package from MSC Software to validate designs before moving on to manufacture. It was also using MSC’s Patran finite element analysis suite. But there was still no CAM (computer aided manufacturing) software as such. “By 1998, we had around 35 design engineers. This, coupled with the fact we had three race cars, meant that we needed some kind of PDM system to manage and control our product development processes,” says Nevey. So Jaguar invested in iMan PDM software from Unigraphics (now part of EDS). As he explains: “Before iMan, we had a legacy Unix system which controlled job release, work in progress and archiving.” Hardly full PDM and, as he says, “It was becoming difficult to manage: in fact in some assemblies, it was possible to have the same part with a different issue number. Our PDM now ensures that designers all see the latest version or revision.” Managing without would be a nightmare. More accurate predictions With the PDM system now fully implemented, a drawing office instruction is raised by the firm’s legacy manufacturing system. This includes bills of material, volumes and ‘dates required’ information. If the part is to be made in-house, production produces a route card and process sheet that stays with the job through the plant. As for scheduling jobs, Nevey says simple spreadsheets and Microsoft Project are adequate. “It’s now easy to pull solid modelling data through from Unigraphics to Patran and to the PDM system with minimal intervention. We’ve cut the number of physical prototypes and we can predict parts – especially smaller and tighter tolerance ones – more accurately than before,” says Nevey. That means speed, cost and business advantages. And in manufacturing itself, he says: “With the system, our NC programmers can start machining parts before the designer has actually finished. We’re not manufacturing any earlier but the designer keeps on fine-tuning the design for as long as possible.” In fact, Jaguar has also now gone on to implement a dedicated ISDN, dial-in intranet (managed by Ford and H-P) PDM connection for the trackside team for race days. “It’s relatively cheap and reliable. Most other teams have point-to-point ISDN which can sometimes be susceptible to reliability problems,” he opines. With that in action, technicians at the track can now interrogate live engineering data in near real time to get full history and traceability of parts and the rest for decision support during the race action itself.