Exchanging the way we communicate

In 2002, including its alliance with Nissan, Renault produced almost 5.2 million vehicles making it the fifth largest automobile manufacturer in the world. The company’s stated growth strategy is based on three main priorities: innovation, competitiveness and global development. When Renault launches the design of a new car, it splits its engineering teams into design work groups, each focused on a specific section of the car. These work groups are formed and housed on site at the company and consist of engineers from both Renault and its suppliers. If possible, each unit is grouped within the same room. This unit cell structure is designed to optimise the collaboration within each group and minimise the travel time and costs associated with sharing the CAD/CAM files among all the parties involved during the entire product lifecycle of the new car. But there are limits of course to same-place physical collaboration during the design cycle. For example, suppliers and sub-contractors need to have access to their own internal resources and therefore need to be on the site of their own facilities. And, for many of the sub-systems in the car, the role of Renault is minor compared to the tier one supplier and so it makes more sense to physically base the supplier at its own site. The size and complexity of Renault’s collaboration issue is daunting. It 132,500 employees at more than 350 sites in 36 countries. There are: 5,000 engineering workstations; 50,000 viewing workstations; 1,700 suppliers; 140,000 files are exchanged each month; and 140GB of compressed data is exchanged per month. Catia is the company’s main CAD/PLM software, but it still manipulates more than 60 different software packages in its design process. The company already produces digital mock-ups at each stage of the design cycle, but it cannot easily share this data internally or externally. During the time between project milestones, it is very difficult to exchange 3D information that reflects advancements since the last milestone and as the next milestone approaches, the mock-up data becomes less and less accurate. The required exchange of digital information within each design work group has consistently been on the critical path of the schedules for the latest cars manufactured, ie. reducing the amount of time spent exchanging data will reduce the overall production cycle. So last year, Renault met with US-based company OKYZ to assess its 3D collaboration issues. Renault had three main objectives: it wanted to reduce the physical contact between its engineers and suppliers; it needed to be able to distribute as many CAD/CAM files to as many suppliers as was necessary; and it wanted to communicate new designs internally to non-engineering staff. In February 2002, Renault started to evaluate OKYZ’s patented Raider 3D engineering collaboration software. Two months later, approval was given to use Raider 3D as a base tool on Renault’s standard workstation configuration, of which there are 50,000. As of June last year, Renault had installed on more than 150 workstations. The company is planning to deploy Raider 3D Capture to its entire engineering community, ie. 5,000 workstations consisting of Windows, Solaris and Irix workstations. And it plans to deploy Raider3D Viewer to the entire internal user population that is involved in the product lifecycle of every new car, which represents 50,000 workstations.