PROSTEP helps SONACA migrate to Teamcenter

PLM migration is always a challenge with a high risk to fail. This is especially true in the aerospace industry with its long product lifecycles and strict traceability requirements. Belgian aerospace supplier SONACA successfully migrated its various Enovia VPM configurations to a unified Teamcenter installation with the help of PROSTEP and its powerful migration platform OpenPDM, which is also used to integrate PLM and Sharepoint-based document management.

SONACA Group is a leading Tier-1 and Tier-2 supplier of advanced structures for civil and military aircrafts and satellites to the global aerospace industry, especially well known for its knowledge in the development, manufacturing and assembly of movable wing components. Based in Gosselies, Belgium, the company was formed in 1978 from the ashes of ceased military aircraft supplier Fairey. Today, it employs some 2.500 people, most of them in Belgium, and has manufacturing and assembly facilities in Brazil, Canada, China and Rumania. Trying to expand its global footprint, SONACA recently launched a public offering to acquire LMI Aerospace based in Saint-Louis, USA, which will add another 20 sites and 1.500 employees to the group.

The Belgian aerospace supplier is serving most of the premium aircraft manufacturers, being Airbus, Embraer, Dassault Aviation and Bombardier its main customers. SONACA develops, manufactures and assembles slats, flaps, parts of the fuselage and other structural components. When you eventually face the nose of an Airbus A380, remember that the upper shell above the pilot cabin is very probably coming from SONACA. Engineering is mainly done in Belgium, though the company also has a small design office in Brazil. In total, SONACA engineers have 130 CAD seats at their disposal, mainly equipped with CATIA V4 and V5.

In all mayor development projects, SONACA engineers are closely integrated into the customers’ processes, having to interchange mock-up and design data every week. “For this reason we must be compatible with our customers’ CAD and PLM environments”, explains Luc Detollenaere, Manager PLM & Digital Projects of the company. The problem is that these environments are not even uniform within one single customer, let alone different aircraft manufacturers. In the past, SONACA had to maintain 12 different Enovia VPM configurations and modify them any time a customer decided to update his installation. A very time consuming effort: 12 people were necessary to keep the PLM installation up to date.

Standardization on Teamcenter

About three years ago, SONACA decided to deploy Teamcenter from Siemens Industry Software as company-wide PLM platform for all projects, managing the data in a common structure instead of replicating the customers’ structures. The principal driver behind this initiative was the need to reduce the high maintenance costs for the heterogeneous Enovia VPM environment and the idea to facilitate the reuse of people, knowledge and other assets across projects. “Only the reduction of people in PLM maintenance justified the investment in the migration, even when we include license and implementation costs”, says Detollenaere. Total project volume was about five million Euro.

Teamcenter was first implemented to do some new projects like Embraer E2 190-195, but after a couple of month SONACA decided to start to migrate the existing-ones, beginning with the Embraer Legacy 450-500 project. “Our PLM implementation was very much driven by this project”, says Detollenaere. “Within two month we were able to manage the customers’ 3D mock-ups. Then we developed all the functionalities needed in the design office for delivering the Definition Dossiers, maintaining the existing validation process and lifecycle of the models with all the attributes and metadata linked to the parts.” The Definition Dossier is a kind of freeze of all relevant information for a project at a given time, including 3D CAD models, 2D drawings and many other types of documents.

Part of the implementation project was to re-establish the existing data exchange processes with Embraer, using the same OpenPDM connectors which had been used for migrating the data from Enovia VPM to Teamcenter as an intermediate solution. The final idea is to map the data directly to the Embraer structures. Anyway, data exchange with customers is complicated as every-one of them has its own requirements. In some cases, SONACA engineers upload data manually to a portal using CATIA links, in others they store them in a virtual customer platform installed at their site. Little margin for standardization and automatization.

PROSTEP as migration partner

It took about 12 month to have Teamcenter up and running. Whereas PLM implementation was done by Siemens Industry Software itself, SONACA choose PROSTEP as partner for data migration. The principal reason was that the company had a lot of experience with large migration projects and the necessary know-how to analyze and manipulate the data. “It is sometimes very difficult to understand our models because some parts may be used differently in one project than another”, explains Detollenaere. Another reason for choosing PROSTEP was the powerful tools and functions for automating the migration process and controlling the quality of the results.

With the help of PROSTEP, the PLM team migrates the different Enovia VPM instances step by step to Teamcenter, using agile methods to speed up the process. Usually it does not take more than three month and two sprints to move the project data to the new environment. What also helps to make the process agile is that OpenPDM comes with a standard VPM connector which can be easily adapted to the data structures of the different Enovia VPM instances, in order to import the data to the migration platform and map them to the new Teamcenter structure.

The data and projects from the old environment are not only stored in Teamcenter for documentation purposes, they are still used and undergoing changes. One of the first aircrafts SONACA developed components for in the early 80ies was the Airbus A320 which is still being built. “We need the Definition Dossiers for modifications and must deliver the data to Airbus in the same way the data were structured at that time”, says Detollenaere.

Migration is progressing within time and budget, being the first VPM implementation for the Embraer ERJ-145 one of the last-ones to be migrated. By the end of the year, when all data are in Teamcenter, the old environment will be completely disconnected to avoid maintenance costs. Enovia VPM was running on AIX workstations and an Oracle database, whereas Teamcenter is on MS Windows MS SQL.

Teamcenter SharePoint integration

What will definitely not be disconnected, once the migration is completed, is PROSTEP’s OpenPDM platform, because it will unfold its other capability as integration platform. SONACA has decided to install the software permanently and to use it for integrating Teamcenter and SharePoint, the corporate-wide document management solution. There are many people in the company that do not produce CAD data but need to use models, drawings, part lists etc., f. e. in purchasing. As they do not regularly work with Teamcenter, it is difficult for them to access the information. Based on the Teamcenter SharePoint integration and PROSTEP’s server-based PDF Generator 3D, the German experts for digitalization created a solution which allows to extract and convert all documents for the Definition Dossiers to 3D PDF. A 3D PDF container is automatically created any time the project reaches a new approval status. The Definition Dossier is then stored in SharePoint and can be viewed by any user with a standard Adobe Reader, provided he has the user rights to do so. He can navigate the product structure, have a look at the 3D mock-up and even pick some measures of a specific component.

The Teamcenter SharePoint integration is not a one way road because some people outside the design office produce quality or regulatory documents that the engineers need for their work. In the past, these documents were only referenced by annotations and had to be looked up in SharePoint. One of the integration scenarios PROSTEP specified allows for importing these documents in Teamcenter and linking them to the corresponding parts, which greatly improves visibility of the parts affected by, let’s say, a normative change. The links do not point directly to SharePoint but to a redundantly stored document in Teamcenter to enable engineers the use of a specific revision of the document and not just the latest-one.

Need for secure data exchange

The 3D PDF based Definition Dossier is not only though to facilitate communication internally but also with subcontractors, f. e. in the request for quotation process. SONACA collaborates with more than 100 partners worldwide, some of them machining the parts, some making tooling and some other producing special parts like the rubber seals. In the past, a dedicated data exchange team managed the communication with subcontractors and kept track of the documents shipped to them which is important for compliance reasons. “It took some time and effort to maintain data exchange under control”, says Detollenaere. Nevertheless, engineers still sent some documents per mail without security and traceability.

Once the Teamcenter SharePoint integration is in place, SONACA will therefore start another project with PROSTEP to implement PROSTEP’s secure data exchange solution OpenDXM GlobalX. It does not only support the encrypted exchange of native CAD data and big documents like the Definition Dossier over a web-based platform, but also integrates seamlessly in MS Outlook to easily enforce compliance with the data exchange requirements. “Our goal implementing OpenDXM GlobalX is to enable end users to interchange data directly with subcontractors and to have a better control and a higher security of what we send out”, says Detollenaere.

SONACA will also expand the scope of PLM putting Manufacturing BOM in Teamcenter and interfacing it with SAP. The idea behind is to be able to reconcile M-BOM and E-BOM more easily, as Detollenaere concludes. “Our vision is to link tooling, NC programming and all resources to the part in Teamcenter and to provide the work centers with all information for manufacturing execution. This is our way to prepare for Industry 4.0.”