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| Case Study |
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Improved engineering change order process helps large
equipment manufacturing company slash time-to-market |
The quest for engineering excellence drove a large aircraft engine company to improve its systems and
processes for effectively managing engineering change. It sought Patni's services to replace its stove-piped
legacy system with an integration-ready application and cut down time delays for delivering superior
products ahead of the competition.
The Client
The client is a Fortune 100
Company which manufactures equipments
for the aerospace and defense industry.
The Challenge
The client had successfully maintained its position as a market leader through rapid
commercialization of inventive thinking. To achieve this, the client had been
focusing on continual improvement of its systems and processes that supported new
product development and engineering change order.
The client stored the engineering data of assemblies and part lists in a mainframe
system. This enabled management of the complete history of all change documents,
and various product attributes. Though the system replaced the paper trail that
usually accompanies the engineering change, it still posed the following challenges
to the client:
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Difficulty in accessing data or Bill-of-Material information: Data access,
archiving and retrieval of previous releases/revisions of the Bill-of-Material
from the mainframe system was slow. Moreover, the maintenance cost for the
mainframe system was very high |
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Inconsistent data quality: The mainframe system shared data with the supply
chain management, cost management, and spares management systems. The
disparity in the data models of mainframe and other systems led to poor data
quality. |
The above challenges had an adverse impact on the speed of product development.
The client recognized that discontinuing the mainframe system would enhance the
competitive advantage and decided in favor of developing an integration-ready
application to support Engineering Change Management.
The Solution
The client partnered with Patni to replace its legacy application with a new-generation system
in order to improve its engineering change management process. Patni completed the
development of the new application using a J2EE platform. The new application worked in
conjunction with the client's existing PDM system, MatrixOne EngineeringCentral. In addition,
Patni was also responsible for transferring the product structure data to the
EngineeringCentral application. A total of 15-17 days were spent to migrate the data
pertaining to the earlier and recent versions of product structure.
Patni developed 28 interfaces with different systems like the shopfloor systems and cost
management systems which had a critical significance in the product development life cycle.
As the client stressed on the need to develop technological capability aimed at generating
real-time reports, Patni accordingly built a data warehouse to meet the client's need.
The Technology
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Legacy - Mainframe |
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MatrixOne Engineering Central package |
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eMatrix 10, J2EE, AEF framework |
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Data warehouse - ORACLE, Informatica |
The Benefits
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During the data analysis phase, Patni used Six Sigma
techniques which helped the customer in improving the data
quality |
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The solution provided an integrated product structure and
process across various product development groups |
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The solution helped the customer to reduce the time-tomarket. |
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