Industry Summary Articles

By implementing the industry-specific Electronic® PLM solution by Minerva and Aras, the technology company saw a dramatic reduction in time spend on managing electronic drawings.

Racal Acoustics produces in-the-ear headsets, press-to-talk devices, field telephones and handsets, all specifically tailored to military, paramilitary, and first responder markets.

Operating in an industry driven by innovation requires a high level of efficiency of processes and responsiveness to the new technologies in the niche. Thus, it was of high importance for the Racal Acoustics´ team to eliminate all ineffective procedures that doesn’t add value and increase the time to market of their products.

With the growth of their portfolio, they increased the volume of data and files they had to work with. Rather often, assembly information was lost due to splitting the information into different files. Therefore, the need for CAD management - along with PLM - for configuration management was greater than ever.

“Information was often lost because it was not linked to the initial CAD, and CAD itself became corrupted because we had to separate files into individual part numbers, so some assembly information was lost,” says Chris Moore, Head of Product Development at Racal Acoustics. He continues: “It was taking 4 to 6 weeks to release the product because of the process. We looked at that process and we found that we had up to 26 steps in the process, of which 18 did not add value. But we had to do it because of the way we handled our files.”

The solution was found

Part of the Esterline Corporation, Racal Acoustics serves a global customer base with unique needs in various changing markets. Therefore, the company needed a solution to improve their efficiency of controlling engineering drawings and improving their time-to-market time.

After a lengthy research phase, Racal Acoustics chose the Aras Innovator. The Electronic® PLM solution was chosen on top of the Aras platform because it covers 95% of their requirements.

“The company had run several feasibility studies between 2006 and 2014 of which all stated that we need to move towards PLM to improve our efficiency of controlling engineering drawings. All of those feasibility studies pointed to the use of Aras as being the most cost-effective product for a company of our size,” says Chris Moore.

“The improvement is even higher than 600%”

As he previously concluded in his research, the implementation of the Electronic® PLM and Aras will lead to significant efficiency improvements in managing electronic drawings as well as in producing data pack’s.

“I predicted about a 600% efficiency saving in the management of electronic drawings and I believe I have achieved something like that. If I am pulling a product from the past and trying to do modification on it, the improvement is even higher than 600%,” says Chris Moore. He continues: “I have also improved the production of the data pack by taking the manufacturing data from the PLM system and producing a single ZIP file that I can send to the manufacturer. I did that by using Aras and Excel. The efficiency of producing data packs increased by over a thousand percent because now, we have it at the press of a single button.”

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