3. PLM in the aviation industry
3.1. Aircraft design
As mentioned earlier, the automotive and aerospace industries are the biggest adopters of PLM. The high degree of penetration of PLM in the aerospace industry is due to the fact that their products have long lifecycles, are very complex and have nearly no possibility of physical prototyping [13], [14] and [15].
In general, PLM has a major positive impact on business:
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IBM-Dassault's PLM Solution, ENOVIA VPM, enabled Dassault Aviation and its 27 partners in North America and Europe to collaboratively design the Falcon 7X business jet. Furthermore, 7 months were sufficient to assemble the aircraft instead the usual 16 for comparable aircrafts [16].
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UGS PLM solution's was deployed in the development of the Boeing 7X7 series of commercial aircraft and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). A Lockheed Martin-led coalition of military aircraft manufacturers and suppliers around the world designed as many as 5000 aircraft using Teamcenter™ with just three design variants to satisfy the operational needs of the USAF and RAF at the lowest cost of sustainment for a 30-year life of fleet. Lockheed Martin reported a 35 percent cycle time reduction and anticipates the manufacturing time to be reduced by 66 percent [17]. Lockheed has two primary partners, Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems, plus up to 1000 suppliers in 30 countries.
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Pratt & Whitney used Tecnomatix solutions in order to limit the development of its engines to within 3 years which was considered competitive. Besides that, the design is service friendly and minimizes downtimes by making maintenance operations as simple as possible [18]. The engines were designed such that no other components need to be removed for a line-replicable component to be replaced. During development, maintainability issues were addressed via 3D visualization and since there was no need for a physical mock-up development time and costs were significantly reduced [18].