Getrag is the world's largest independent supplier of automotive transmissions. Their industry leading portfolio spans automatic, manual, hybrid and dual clutch systems. These systems increasingly include sophisticated and proprietary embedded software that precisely controls the transmissions, leading to ever more complex product development. To ensure that their transmissions meet these new requirements, Getrag builds product development partnerships with many of its customers. Since its customers are also close competitors, Getrag has to protect the intellectual know-how for each of its customers, posing a challenging requirement for any enterprise PLM (product lifecycle management) system.
Getrag's Partnership with Ford
One of the partnerships that Getrag formed in 2010 was a joint venture, GETRAG FORD. Given Getrag's multiple partnerships with automotive OEMs, it had years of experience working with multiple PLM systems. The team at Ford also had experience working with multiple CAD and PLM products. That experience factored heavily in the process of selecting a PLM system for the partnership. In the end, the joint venture chose Aras as its PLM system.
Getrag was able to meet its requirement of replacing an unsupported legacy PDM (product data management) system with Aras to globally collaborate and manage multi CAD data. They were also able to automate their enterprise wide engineering processes for the program.
The success that Getrag achieved with its Ford joint venture led it to adopt Aras across the enterprise. As part of the PLM selection process Getrag professionals were able to download and evaluate a free version of Aras without having to contact a vendor. The Getrag team was excited about making so much progress even before they purchased or got involved directly with the Aras and was able to quickly prototype global processes and complex product structures with relationships to product information across mechanical, electrical and electronics as well as software and firmware.
Common wisdom has it that PLM implementation takes three years or more, but the joint venture needed a working system much sooner. Getrag were able to achieve this target with Aras using an Agile based approach.
Another factor in favor of Aras was the vendor's business model, which is based on open source software. With the free software, customers pay for support only as they actually implement their solution and use it. The Getrag-Ford joint venture team was more comfortable making incremental purchases as the solution was rolled out rather than making a single large commitment before the PLM implementation project started.
The Getrag PLM implementation process
With Aras, Getrag was able to follow an Agile process to implement by topic or areas where improvements were needed. The team approached the project with a series of "implementation sprints", enabling Getrag to identify important processes, automate them, then move on to the next. By the time the IT team moved to the next department, they had gained experience with the new system and was ready for the next "sprint".
Agile project cycles require customer or user buy-in for each deliverable. Getrag's implementation team was able to do this with the flexibility offered by the Aras architecture. Peter Schroer, CEO of Aras, explained it this way: "Currently all PLM systems use object oriented programming. Unfortunately, as you customize the systems to achieve the functionality your company requires, you are breaking the vendor's model. Aras has no hard core business objects. Instead, it is modeled on rules. The 1,200+ companies running Aras PLM systems, form frozen Chinese food vendors to automotive manufacturers, all run the same version."
Getrag did not have to rely only on hard core programming to customize Aras. They also used the drag and drop features in the graphical modeling environment to model the Getrag-Ford processes. The Web services platform in Aras enables flexible versioning, security and classification that is independent of objects.
Getrag-Ford extended their implementation of Aras to support the ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) of embedded software and firmware for their transmissions. The functionality includes software release planning, bug tracking, issue management, test planning and management, task tracking and reporting, all automated and integrated in the overall enterprise PLM. The success that Getrag achieved with the Ford joint venture led it to adopt Aras across the enterprise for the parent company.
Note: Aras has paid a fee to ENGINEERING.com to promote their PLM solutions. They have had no editorial input to this article. All opinions are mine. – Sanjeev Pal