Pratt & Whitney

Configurations are critical

Pratt & Whitney (P&W) has built more than half of the 34,000 commercial aircraft engines in service today and more than 40,000 military engines.

The company is also a major player in the field of rocket engine development as well as the production of gas turbines for power on land and propulsion at sea. Because its products are mission-critical and stay in service for decades, configuration management (CM) - knowing the exact part configuration of each and every engine - is a vital engineering activity. "In terms of safety, certification and customer support, configuration management is essential and we expend a lot of effort in that area," says Vito Moreno, manager, technical applications, P&W Information Technology.

Previously, P&W used a combination of mainframe and server-based CM systems to manage product configuration during the development, production and aftermarket segments. These proprietary CM systems were costly to maintain in terms of hardware, software and IT support. Another problem with this approach was that it took a great deal of effort to keep the various CM databases (bills of material) in sync. "We relied on manual oversight to make sure all the bills of material (BOMs) were consistent. We spent an inordinate amount of time doing that,"

When top management set ambitious goals for reducing time to market, lowering development costs

and minimizing post-certification engineering, it became clear that a more integrated and streamlined

way of handling product data was necessary. As Moreno explains, "We needed to eliminate the

redundant, manual effort involved in CM and get it off the mainframe to reduce the cost. We wanted

a single system, based on modern web technology, that could manage product data throughout the

entire engine lifecycle."

Shift to commercial software permits paradigm shift

Rather than develop the new CM system in house, P&W decided to evaluate commercial product

lifecycle management (PLM) software. By that time, the company had standardized on Unigraphics

(now called NX) as its product development system. Because the solid modeling technology within

NX was capable of defining an entire engine down to the smallest part, engineering management

made the decision that NX models would become the sole description of new engine configurations,

making NX data the source of all BOMs in the new CM system.

That