CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

3 March 2009

Implementation Investments

Design Department Saves Days of Work by Using a Virtual Night Shift

Theorem's TPM process manager reduces CAD translation times from 2 days to 4 hours, and personnel requirement from 5 to 2.

The ability of Theorem Solutions TPM process management tool to radically reduce both the cost and time required for CAD translations in the automotive industry has been conclusively demonstrated at Cosma International, a Worldwide supplier of automotive components. By automating its data exchange and data translation processes with TPM, Cosma has reduced the number of personnel required for the process from 5 to 2. Moreover, the time for translation of large batches of files (which previously took 2-days) has now been reduced to between four and six hours.

A division of Canadian automotive component manufacturer, Magna International, Cosma specialises in chassis stampings, bumper beams, and metal body panels primarily for light trucks and sport utility vehicles (SUVs). The company's customers include many of the world's largest automakers, including BMW, Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Toyota, and Volkswagen.

With a diverse base of global manufacturers as customers, Cosma has to handle product data in myriad of CAD formats, including NX (Unigraphics) and CATIA V4 and V5. What this means in practice is that when requests for product data come in from supply chain partners or external customers, the data co-coordinators at Cosma have to go into each individual CAD application to translate the data into the requested format, a tedious and time-consuming manual process.

“Historically, translations were done on the data co-coordinator’s own systems, so when they were doing translations, they were pretty useless otherwise,” said Dave Truchan, Director of Information Technology at Cosma.

In an effort to reduce the time required for these translations, Cosma decided to deploy Theorem Process Manager (TPM), a process management and automation tool from Theorem Solutions. TPM automates, manages, schedules and controls tasks or processes helping to eliminate manual intervention and monitoring. It helps companies maximise their investments in software and hardware resources by enabling batch intensive tasks to be undertaken during off-hours when computers are usually idle.

The TPM system at Cosma is tied to the company's PLM system and automates the data exchange and data translation processes. Before automating the process, Cosma had five people working on data translations within the company; today this has been reduced to two.

Aside from manpower savings, the company has also realised significant time savings over the previous manual process. “Time-wise TPM has been great,” says Truchan. “Our data co-coordinators now just batch out jobs, so it's really reduced translation time significantly, and the co-coordinators can work on different things while TPM is in the background translating.”

The TPM system at Cosma runs on a dedicated server. When requests come in, Cosma data co-coordinators simply ‘drag and drop' files to add them to the job queue. The data is processed by TPM, and then the data co-coordinators are automatically notified when the jobs are completed. They, in turn, notify the person who requested the data. Currently the TPM server is processing translations 24 hours a day.

“The co-coordinators are now batching off 25, 50 or 100 files to the server, and then they are going about doing other things,” says Truchan. “I'd be reluctant to say it's a 100% improvement but it almost is; and our overtime is almost non-existent.

What used to be considered good to get a two-day turnaround, we're now doing in four to six hours. Our turnaround time now is phenomenal because the people are doing what they need to do all the time. That's been the biggest benefit.”

Cosma has plans to expand the use of the TPM system in the future to process other time-intensive computing tasks, while freeing computing and manpower resources to accomplish other tasks. “Currently we're running TPM on just one server, but we do know we can do this on multiple servers, 24- hours a day, if need be,” says Truchan. “We know all the bells and whistles are there; we just want to get it in flow first.”

The company is currently embarking on a new large engineering project. TPM will play a larger role in this project, helping process and generate JT files, not just STEP or IGES files. “When that comes about, we'll need to utilise people's workstations from 7 P.M. to 6 A.M. or whenever they are not here,” says Truchan. “We really look at TPM as a very large part of this new engineering project because being able to visualise the parts that engineering is sending out to the divisions, to the people who are actually making it, is so important to them.”

According to Patrick Shutter, system administrator, Cosma also has plans to deploy TPM to assist the analysis group with sharing product data with design collaboration partners within the company. “It would be a huge perk for our analysis group, because they share their data with so many groups that to have one common system would be a huge benefit and to have it batched would be awesome for them.”

Summing up the role of Theorem Solutions in the deployment of TPM at Cosma, Hai Hoang, the company's manager of Information Technology said that: “Theorem has been a great partner in this; they have bent over backwards and have done above-and-beyond the support of typical salespeople. Without them, I don't think we would have had the success with TPM.”

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