Boeing: Design Anywhere, Build Anywhere, Share Freely

One of Boeing's primary goals for the near future is as ambitious as it is pithy: design anywhere, build anywhere. Collaboration, key to that goal, is no small task for a $51 billion company that took on a slew of databases and design tools that didn't communicate with one another. Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas Corp. and Rockwell International Corp.'s aerospace and defense businesses in the mid-90s. That's why for the past three years, Boeing has been working to reduce its design and production cycles through widespread use of an advanced engineering environment based on Dassault Systemes' CAD-CAM system Catia. George Muellner, president for PhantomWorks, which oversees Boeing's R&D, is helping to lead that charge.

"It used to be that when you were designing airplanes, engineers would go through multiple iterations of designs, from concept to drawing to CAD systems." Aerodynamicists, structural engineers, tool engineers, and others all used different databases, and valuable time was wasted. Three years ago, the best-case scenario was somebody carrying a disk with design information. "In most cases, someone was shipping paper drawings."

Today, Boeing is much closer to its anytime, anywhere vision. The company is spending $60 million a year just on the development of its advanced engineering environment, Muellner says. "It allows you to not only work paperless, but to bring suppliers into the process. While engineers are designing a system, they can send 3-D models out to suppliers, and also use technologies that allow you to consider the maintainability of a system."

The company is also using collaboration to help achieve a stronger global presence. More than 200 Moscow-based Boeing engineers are using the advanced engineering environment to design commercial aircraft parts. "They can literally collaborate with engineers in our Wichita Kan., commercial group or with suppliers." While all new Boeing planes will be designed digitally, Muellner doubts that Boeing will achieve a completely paper-free environment. "We have a lot of legacy programs around--we're still building 757s and that's not doneusing digital databases." And Boeing has a commitment to support its models as long as a minimal number of them exist.