Out-of-the-box PLM? CEVT Banks on It!
Photo credit: engineering.com“Out of the box” and “PLM” were once considered a contradiction in terms, but not for Chinese automotive company Geely Group’s subsidiary, CEVT (China European Vehicle Technology), based in Gothenburg, Sweden. According to the engineering.com article, written by Verdi Ogewell, Volvo Cars, CEVT and “Platform Thinking” in Automotive Product Development, out-of-the-box Teamcenter is the foundation for its PLM platform.
“Founded in 2013, CEVT quickly became a success. This success came partly by virtue of the way the company built its PLM platform (based on Siemens Teamcenter), which was implemented and commissioned in a record short period of nine weeks, and partly thanks to the high-class products they created, both from design and manufacturability perspectives.”
As a new business founded to supply the Geely Group’s automotive companies – including Volvo Cars – the challenge was to very quickly develop a product development platform, and they came up with the concept of CMA (Compact Modular Architecture).
Photo credit: engineering.com“CMA is a platform designed for smaller vehicles, allowing bolder design and the integration of new technology. This applies to the next premium cars in the Volvo 40 series, for example, but is also ideal for the development of other cars produced within the collaboration of Volvo Cars and Geely.”
The CMA platform strategy has paid off, as evidenced by CEVT’s growth from 100 to 2,000 employees in three years. When asked about their primary competitive advantage, CEVT’s PLM manager Erik Grans pointed to their choice of out of the box PLM using Teamcenter, because it has the capabilities they need without costly customizations that need to be maintained over time.
According to the engineering.com article, CEVT uses the out of the box MCAD integrations, specifically for CATIA and Creo. Additional Teamcenter capabilities that CEVT has adopted include advanced BOM management and systems-driven product development, which encompasses not only mechanical, but also electrical and software domains.
“All the different systems in a vehicle need to be developed in a way that allows the systems not only to coexist, but to work together as well. This requires an approach that combines systems with integrated product definitions and reconciliation of the parameters included in a framework.”
Would you like to learn more? Read the full engineering.com article about CEVT’s out of the box PLM solution, Volvo Cars, CEVT and “Platform Thinking” in Automotive Product Development.
