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The product
   
 

Customer scenario

In-Service Information Management
The Company started delivery of their combat vehicle to the army of a foreign country one year ago. The customer, the country’s defense material administration, has been in close collaboration for a couple of years with the Company in the final preparations for delivery. Prior to the delivery there has been close contact with partners and suppliers of materiel and parts to be manufactured locally in the foreign country following an offset deal of the type now commonly used in the defense industry. This resulted in the Company having 15-20 partners of which none was really known before the sale and of which some will not be used for any other customer.

The Company looked for ways in which they could manage this complex and changing Extended Enterprise. The option of controlling the information in the partnership via existing in-house software tools was not really viable.
A solution was needed that could:
Manage shared information like:

  • Product structures, drawings, documentation
  • Maintenance manuals, plans
  • Product individual configuration incl. individual documentation Keep track of changes and restrictions. Be used in maintenance follow-up.
Solution
In order to accommodate the need for a comprehensive view on the information a Share-A-space™ server was set up. All partners and the customer access the Share-A-space™ site to get the latest updates but also to write Work Requests and feed the area with maintenance follow-up information. The Company then evaluates and distributes the proposed changes to the parties concerned for comments or approvals. After approval is given, the Share-A-space™ site is updated.
Used Functionality
The basic functionality used in this project include:
  • Storage, viewing and versioning of documents. The document can contain any number of digital files representing the actual doucment content.
  • Management of access rights and roles ensuring a correct handling and updating of data.
  • Notification and tracking of performed changes.
  • Part structure history tracking.
  • Multiple identifiers of product definitions
By extending the Basic Share-A-space™ installation with the ”Physical Product Configuration Module” and the ”Physical Product Maintenance Management Module” The Company is now also able to support functionality like:
  • Multiple identifiers of product individuals.
  • Management of serial numbered Physical Products and its relation to the product design, i.e. part version.
  • Management of Maintenance Tasks on Physical Products.
  • Maintenance Task planning and follow-up.
  • Keeping track of the association between Maintenance Tasks and Engineering Changes.
Benefits
For the Company the use of Share-A-space™ has meant that the once complex set of information flows is now controllable. In the scenario all the partners now have access to information coming from a multiple set of sources PDM, CAD, ERP and homemade solutions.
All of the information is placed into context via consolidation giving the partners an agreed and common place for their joint information set. In a business case like this, agreed information may be more important than the latest information, considering the implications of using non-synched information.

Also the marriage of design and in-service information in this case increases the speed in which changes can be managed and implemented throughout the partnership. The main force behind the Company’s drive for a common and consolidated information-set come from managing cost and making new business. The Company claims that the costs for post-delivery customer support operations are 6-8 times higher then the product design and manufacture costs. They also consider that 60-80% of post-delivery customer support operations costs are a direct result of product design decisions. With the Share-A-space™ solution implemented, lead time for Customer approval of Engineering Changes has been shortened from weeks to days.

In-Service_Information_Management.pdf


 
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