Kawasaki Heavy Industries finds ‘rapid sharing’ PLM streamlines engineering process

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With 34,000 employees on six continents, KHI is a leading manufacturer of equipment for the aerospace, energy, industrial equipment, power, transportation and shipping industries.

It recently made the decision to adopt a single product lifeycycle management platform, driven by the desire to improve efficiency and enable the rapid sharing of process innovations in core areas such as CAD data management, Bill of Materials (BOM) management, document management, design data management and infrastructure system collaboration.

KHI chose to run Aras Innovator, taking the option to do so on a private cloud environment to maximise the speed of deployment, and as you’d expect with a story announcing the roll-out of new tech – it has performed well.
Since adopting the platform KHI says it has reduced the cost for creating a new PLM production environment by 51 to 83 per cent, and cut the time taken to deploy a verification environment from several weeks to as little as a day.

A more standardised and unified product development environment, improved collaboration and information sharing between disciplines, lower setup and management costs, and the ability to respond faster to changes in the business environment have all been listed as positives.

The company credits the improvement, in large part, to the self-sufficiency enabled by the new software: “The company head office develops the templates for KHI groups as common infrastructure, then we help deploy it in each company,” said Yutaro Mishima of the corporate planning division of KHI.

“Each company or affiliated organisation can develop their system based on their own purpose and scope of work in a short period of time using the common template which was created at the headquarters.”

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