One of the first steps in cutting vehicle production costs is integrating the design chain. So says Volvo Cars of North America Inc., which last week unveiled a Web-based collaborative design system that makes it easier to cull information from legacy systems and share it among its numerous project teams during the vehicle design process.

The Rockleigh, N.J.-based automaker said the new system will help minimize delays in releasing new vehicles and cut costs by ferreting out the valid product possibilities earlier in the design process, said Henrik Aberg, computer systems creator at Volvo's Monitoring and Concept Center.

Volvo's collaborative design system was built using Centric Innovation software from San Jose-based Centric Software Inc. Pricing for the product starts at $100,000, plus an additional access fee of $1,000 per user. Volvo officials wouldn't say how much it will cost the automaker to implement the new software system.

Volvo, a subsidiary of Ford Motor Co., began piloting Centric Innovation in January and hopes to fully roll out the system by year's end at its Monitoring and Concept Center in Camarillo, Calif.

The software is integrated with Volvo's computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) systems and is used to evaluate alternative vehicle designs and conduct project reviews online, as opposed to building physical mock-ups of prospective vehicles. The system tracks design changes and notifies engineers whose specifications are affected by those alterations.

The Centric system will also help tackle the complex challenge of pulling data from different CAD/CAM systems and then updating those changes across the systems, Aberg said.

Volvo currently uses three different types of CAD/CAM systems for different phases of the vehicle conceptual design process. But some engineers, such as an aerodynamicist, might need to pull information from all three systems, which is a very complex process.

Making it easier to share data among the systems should shave time and costs off the design process, Aberg said.

Volvo may expand the system to include design shops in Sweden and Dearborn, Mich., as well as external suppliers, officials said.

Thilo Koslowski, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn., said that including suppliers in the collaborative design process will further reduce costs and speed up the vehicle design process.

"When manufacturers design a vehicle, they talk to suppliers all the time. But currently, this happens in one-to- one meetings," said Koslowski. "The marketplace is demanding new vehicles in shorter amounts of time, so the automotive industry has to be faster."

» posted by ITworld staff

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