Given these tough economic times, I see a great focus on interoperability in the coming months. I met a functional test engineer from Boeing today at AU. His job is to make sure that any new design of the Boeing 737 works properly.
He shared some interesting information regarding the production of Boeing’s most popular airplane. The manufacturing process for each 737 has been reduced to one day, with 31 planes produced on average each month. There’s a 2,000 plane backlog, which ensures the company’s sustainability going forward, but there’s a strong focus on innovation given the growing competition from Airbus.
The focus of his attendance at this year’s event was the Sustainable Design track. Similar to the geospatial and BIM space, there’s a growing revolution for intelligent design and streamlined modeling processes in manufacturing. The designers at Boeing use CATIA for plane design, but Autodesk Inventor is the preferred tool for test engineering. Daily interoperability pains between the two systems forces a recreation of the intelligence inherent in the design because only solids can be brought over in an export, instead of all the data and intelligence that exists in the design environment.
In boom times companies can overlook the inefficiencies of their modeling and design processes, but now with revenues shrinking there will be an increasing interest to streamline. Tough economic times are good times to innovate, consolidate and optimize processes. Interoperability and a focus on workflow are key components to increasing efficiency.
