Abstract
ABSTRACT
One of the biggest hurdles when deploying a PLM solution is data migration - part metadata, BOM and CAD data (files) as well. The challenge is even bigger in a highly heterogeneous environment, when the company provides engineering, manufacturing and services for multiple customers, and has a multitude of supplier companies as well. This is usually the case for Tier 1/2 Automotive supplier companies, where each customer (OEM) imposes its own standards, conventions and processes, and the company has to accommodate all major CAD platforms. The migration tools provided with PDM/PLM platforms (including Teamcenter Enterprise and Teamcenter Engineering) cannot deal with such complexity and ultimately the customer will invest a major effort in data migration, cleansing and normalization, not always with the best results. The challenge doesn't end with the migration. The PLM solution has to be integrated in Enterprise-wide business processes, and as well with supply chain processes usually driven by OEM's. The paper presents a successful development and usage of a data mining, normalization, migration and collaboration tool - "Bomerang". It is currently in use at an automotive tier1 supplier company, where it performs engineering data mining, reconciliation and normalization for multiple data sources, applies automatic checkers for data integrity, applies business rules for achieving the desired data format and eBOM, and migrates the processed data in Teamcenter Automotive Solution (TcAS) via Enterprise Services. It is highly configurable and flexible, and the integration in a new environment is basically achieved through external configuration (regex, XML, rules). The tool is a J2EE, XML and WebServices application built on top of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework.