As the Australian Defence Force (ADF) sought to modernise its land assets and vehicles, military vehicle design company Supacat began consulting with PhoenxPLM digitalisation experts to devise a response to the project.
Established in Australia in 2012, Supacat is a compact prime in land systems servicing the Asia-Pacific market. The company does a lot of the design and development of military vehicle technology and components. It has its own vehicle platform that it provides to Defence, and it supports Rheinmetall with its defence projects such as LAND 400. Supacat’s core competencies are engineering and integrated logistics for products.
PhoenxPLM is a leading consultancy partner for digital transformation for manufacturing businesses in Australia and New Zealand. It identifies opportunities across all industries participating in the manufacturing sector. Everything it does is focused around aligning business goals with outcome-driven technology built for digital transformation.
David Kretschmer, Rheinmetall Partnership Lead at Supacat, and Kevin Metcalf, Principal Engineer and Teamcenter PLM Lead for Supacat, discussed the processes and engagements that the two firms collaborated on and then discusses what success looked like as well as what’s next for Supacat.
AMT: What is the LAND 400 project?
David Kretschmer: In 2016 the Government announced support to modernise Australia’s defence capability. What that came to look like was a $270bn budget, and within it, provision to upgrade the Army’s armoured vehicle family. There are several projects within the armoured vehicle modernisation program, such as the LAND 400 Phase 2 project which, will replace the ASLAV (the Army’s current Australian Light Armoured Vehicle) with Rheinmetall’s eight-wheeled Boxer Combat Reconnaissance Vehicles. Supacat assisted Rheinmetall with the demonstration of their vehicle to the Australian Army, and we now support them in the design and production of these vehicles.
AMT: What Government Funding and Support was available?
DK: The Government is committed to ensuring Australian businesses like Supacat are at the heart of the $270bn investment in defence. Defence companies bidding for contracts were required to demonstrate commitment in their tender responses by building a team of Australian businesses, such as Supacat, into their bids and project activities. There were also a range of grant funding initiatives to support small-and-medium enterprises to enhance their capabilities. Supacat was successful in applying for a Sovereign Industrial Capability Priority grant to help fund the implementation of Siemen’s Teamcenter PLM platform.
AMT: Why was it necessary to embark on a digitalisation project, and why did you end up choosing Teamcenter?
DK: For Supacat, digitalisation enhances our capability to work on largescale defence engineering programs.
Teamcenter enables us to scale and handle a larger volume of work without the risks and inefficiencies of manual processes. The governance and management of technical data was a big part of it. Teamcenter has allowed us to move away from manual processes – we can now rely on consistent version control and approval workflows.
Teamcenter in our world can be likened to Microsoft Word. You can’t do your job without Microsoft Word. Teamcenter is our Microsoft Word; it is enablement software.
My team needs the right tools to do the job properly. Automating workflows and data management routines has been a big win for the business. Teamcenter allows our team of engineers to deliver more and deliver better, which is obviously good news for our customers.
Kevin Metcalf: The security element and speed of Teamcenter were the two most appealing benefits. The ability to segregate individual projects and more finely control staff access has enhanced security and protection for intellectual property (IP). We have more control over the project now, whereas that had been challenging to manage across various departments when working with Windows Explorer.
Supacat had been considering Teamcenter since we first started using Siemens NX CAD, which is close to five years now. It had always been something aspirational for the business. As our projects got larger, the burden of manual workflows became unsustainable. We were using Windows Explorer and spreadsheet to manage the checking, approval and release of product, which was incredibly manual, slow and prone to error.
AMT: Was there internal resistance to change?
KM: Implementation has been very well received by the team. The team was included in the requirements and design phase, and we also engaged PhoenxPLM to run user training for everyone. We were sensible with the scale of the initial deployment. Teamcenter has so much functionality, but we kept to the basics, focusing on good data management and key workflows. One of the success factors was not overwhelming the team with functionality. We have laid strong foundations for future enhancements.
The benefits of Teamcenter were immediately felt by the team. There were even some unanticipated benefits. The design engineers have much better integration with the CAE analyst engineers because Teamcenter has automated so much of the handover of technical data. Before Teamcenter, we had rudimentary version control and inter-team communications. There was often a lot of discussion and emails, and it would take up to a week to transfer a project across to the CAE team. Now, the CAE team logs into Teamcenter and there are very few follow-up emails. This has been a significant improvement to the speed and accuracy of technical handover between the two teams.
AMT: Tell us about how the implementation was undertaken.
KM: We started with the foundational basic workflows that PhoenxPLM put together for us. We also came up with a number of workflows that were different from the original requirements as we learned more about Teamcenter’s functionality.
PhoenxPLM provided a lot of coaching in parallel to their implementation. I went on their administration courses, which, with assistance from PhoenxPLM, allow me to develop workflows myself. We are now able to make improvements to existing workflows and develop new workflows. I’m looking to extend Teamcenter workflows further into our CAE analysis team, and into our supply chain/production management team.
Teamcenter has enhanced our ability to manage technical configuration baselines. Our manual processes limited the traceability between what the design team created, what was sent to the CAE analysis team, and what was delivered to the customer. Before Teamcenter, we were copying multiple files and putting date stamps on things. We now take digital snapshots of the design at various points in time and have full confidence they’re going to be accurate, and version-controlled.
The CAE analysis team can now start work from a technical baseline and get notified of any changes made to the design. This allows concurrent engineering design and analysis activities. The productivity gains are significant. Not only do we have better design feedback and iterations – the customer benefits from reduced project delivery times. Speed and accuracy of data have been by far the two of the most significant benefits we have realised.
DK: Prior to Teamcenter, it would take several weeks for the team to deliver a technical snapshot to the customer. Once Teamcenter was in, it took Kevin a day to provide a snapshot. And we had full confidence the snapshot did not contain configuration errors. There are two immediate payoffs from that enhancement. My project costs are reduced, and the customer receives an excellent outcome. As a business supporting large defence projects, that outcome cannot be overstated.
KM: Prior to Teamcenter, we would manually extract information from NX into a spreadsheet to track the status of every single part within a product. Not only were we double-handling information, we also had to maintain that spreadsheet over the project to keep it up to date so we knew what the status of everything was at that time, and how close we were to completion.
We estimated that maintaining that BoM (Bill of Materials) spreadsheet was about three weeks of full-time effort on a large project. With our Teamcenter implementation, we’ve ensured that the information inputted into the CAD environment gets mapped across to Teamcenter and is visible in the Teamcenter Structure Manager. This has replaced our spreadsheet and the manual BOM management processes. Not only have the time savings from this change been significant, but it has also eliminated another source of potential quality issues.
AMT: What does the future look like for Supacat?
KM: There is more we can do to improve our CAE analysis processes. For example, we’re looking at extending workflows and developing more automation routines. Document management we have only really lightly touched on, and there’s more we can do in that space. There is also functionality in NX CAD that would be beneficial in future projects, particularly Weld Assistant Tools.
DK: My focus is on our customers, and that’s where my strategic priority lies with Teamcenter. I’m very happy with the implementation and the benefits gained so far. Kevin has a solid roadmap for extending Teamcenter functionality, and PhoenxPLM will continue to support our Teamcenter journey. Teamcenter is a great asset – we’ll continue to leverage it further for our endeavours in supporting defence capability.
There is a lot more functionality that Teamcenter has that we’d like to use, but we’re taking small steps and making sure we implement everything at the right time, getting the most benefit out of what we are using.