General Motors transforms design output on global PLM

General Motors, which is six months into a three year upgrade roll-out of its universal UGS Teamcenter PLM (product lifecycle management) environment, due to provide shared real-time data across all functions for 60,000 users globally, says the system is already proving its worth. Diane Jurgens, director of global product development information and systems, says that vehicle development times, for example, have fallen from 40 months to 18 months, and in some cases 12. She also says that vehicle output is up 33%, and that world-wide last year, the system helped GM to launch more new product than ever: 48 vehicles and 13 powertrains. Jurgens says it’s not all down to the IT, but that changing from 24 CAD systems in 1996 to one for all of vehicle engineering, powertrain and fabrication everywhere (UGS NX), and latterly managing it all on UGS Teamcenter PLM, has transformed much of the organisation. “For us, collaboration now goes beyond engineering – the community includes starting with the creative processes, the concept vehicles,” says Jurgens. It flows through engineering, manufacturing engineering, and the support functions, finance and purchasing. We now have alignment of all functions.” She says the improvements have been the result of a symbiotic combination of business process re-engineering and IT. “Those together have helped reduce the timeframes – and it’s not only how fast we can go, but the volume of programmes we can execute.” Jurgens says that learning the new systems is going well, including beyond engineering. “Training is different for each of the roles and we have web-based training and the GM University. “But, for the most part, the tools are easy to use… The user interfaces have evolved quite rapidly: everything is converging on a Windows like GUI that people are familiar with. It’s a huge benefit.” And she adds: “Regardless of the size of an organisation, the case studies show that working in a digital environment pays off. Have to have the business case, but enough evidence so how fat and effective can we do it.”