Approximately two years ago, Magna and BJEV announced that they would be jointly developing and manufacturing high-quality electric vehicles for the Chinese market. The joint venture set up a greenfield state-of-the-art development center in Zhenjiang for this purpose. It operates under the name Magna Blue Sky NEV Technology (Zhenjiang) and employs about 420 people, who not only develop electric vehicle architectures for the joint venture but also provide engineering services to other customers. The Magna Steyr Group, which is headquartered in Graz, was responsible for implementation of the completely new IT infrastructure.
Magna Blue Sky's engineers use the mechanical CAD system CATIA V5 from Dassault Systèmes together with the PLM solution Teamcenter from Siemens PLM Software. OpenDXM GlobalX is used to manage data exchange with partners and suppliers. The decision in favor of the world's leading data exchange platform from PROSTEP did not require a long evaluation process as Magna has been using the OpenDXM products for years and now operates its own OpenDXM GlobalX installation in Graz. "It offers us even greater flexibility and security when exchanging data," says Oliver Burlon, project manager for data exchange at Magna Steyr.