Terrafugia was founded in 2006 by award winning MIT-trained aeronautical engineers and MBA's – who also happen to be passionate private pilots. Taking advantage of new Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations in the Light Sport Aircraft category, Terrafugia developed the Transition® Roadable Aircraft to provide private and sports pilots the convenience of a dual-purpose vehicle for flight and road use.
The Transition addresses head-on the issues private and sport pilots face: cost, weather sensitivity, high overall door-to-door travel time and a lack of mobility at destination. It is a two-place Light Sport Airplane that takes off and lands at any of the over 5,000 public-use airport around the country, folds its wings in about a minute, drives on any surface road – including highways – and can park in a single car garage.
Challenge/Situation:
Maintaining Complete Production Documentation for FAA Requirements
The Transition Roadable Aircraft will be compliant with the FAA’s Light Sport Aircraft (LSA) standards as well as the National Highway Safety Administration’s (NHTSA’s) Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards for Multi-Purpose Passenger Vehicles. All manufacturers of LSA are required to maintain complete “Production Documentation,” including parts lists/Bill of Materials (BOMs). When new revisions of the standards become accepted by the FAA, old production vehicles still need to demonstrate line item compliance to the standards in effect when they were shipped. Initially, Terrafugia was managing their product information in a paper-based manner with automotive and aviation specifications contained in large manuals and BOMs tracked in Excel spreadsheets without any association to each other. The company needed to track this detailed and dynamic data in a more controlled and efficient manner to ensure adherence to the LSA requirements.
“We consider it a best practice to have a digital BOM under change control,” stated Douglas Quattrochi, Vice President of Operations for Terrafugia. “A Product Lifecycle Management tool was therefore a very natural need for us.”
Goal/Strategy:
Intuitive, Configurable and Cost Effective PLM Solution
Terrafugia set out to find a PLM solution that could meet their needs for product information management, particularly BOM and change management capabilities, at the right price. The company evaluated three vendors and found that the Empower PLM solution from Omnify Software was the perfect fit. “As a small company with very limited resources, we needed to make sure that the PLM solution we purchased was intuitive, immediately configurable to our needs, and an excellent value,” said Mr. Quattrochi. “We found all of this with Omnify Empower PLM.”
Terrafugia’s product definition team found the Empower PLM interface to be straightforward, aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate. “We were able to configure the software to our needs based on the recommendations we received during our training, and we found a licensing solution that could be tailored to our budget and timeframe,” added Quattrochi.
Customer Success:
Producing Prototype BOMs is a Breeze
The robust BOM and revision management capabilities of Empower PLM allowed Terrafugia to take managing parts list information one step further. The company now tracks old and new production vehicle information electronically and with associations in Empower PLM. This facilitates compliance with the LSA requirements. “We created a BOM for the current version of the LSA standards for new vehicles and are also able to track past revisions of vehicles pointing to past revisions of the standards,” stated Mr. Quattrochi. “We use associations and documents to create a bi-directional cross reference between requirements and parts.”
The BOM Attribute feature of Empower PLM also helps to track the weight of each part to determine the weight of the entire vehicle/aircraft-a very important aspect of aircraft development. The BOM Attribute field is user defined and can help to track important notes such as component weight. All Terrafugia vehicles are custom ordered therefore each build is a variant of a Parent BOM. The variant BOM lists all customer configured items. “We use BOM Attributes to store the weight of each component, giving us the ability to know exactly what each aircraft weighs,” said Mr. Quattrochi. “The ability to leverage this field gives us greater insight into the BOM and better design control.”
The Transition® is still in pre-production. “While we can’t make productivity comparisons, it’s safe to assume that we simply couldn’t have produced our prototype Bill of Materials with the tools we had before,” stated Mr. Quattrochi. Chief Operating Officer for Terrafugia, Anna Dietrich, added that, “We’re looking forward to growing with Omnify and integrating it with other requirements sets and production processes in the future.”