Case Study
How Toyota Motor Europe Developed A Flexible Digital Thread With Systems Thinking
Connecting data, connecting processes, connecting people
The team needed a way to define and maintain a “single source of truth”—a digital thread—accessible to everyone in the division and with a clear context of the pedigree and accuracy of the data. What they were looking for was the ability to improve modeling lead time and workload and raise the quality of MBD models delivered to the organization.
The goal for the vehicle performance engineering division inside Toyota Motor Europe became to initiate a digital reorganization of existing engineering data to be tool-agnostic. This enables automated and reusable system-level MBD engineering data models with full integration into a PLM platform.
At-a-glance
Toyota first began selling cars in Europe under an official distributor agreement in 1963. Since then, the company has matured into the leading Japanese car manufacturer in the market. Based in Brussels, and staffed by 2,700 people of 63 nationalities, Toyota Motor Europe now handles the wholesale marketing of Toyota and Lexus vehicles, parts and accessories, and manages Toyota’s European manufacturing and engineering operations.
The engineering division leadership recognized that without a new data management platform, the existing process was not sustainable.
Quality, maturity, and connectivity of the data were often unclear.
Spreadsheets were devoid of any connection to the rest of the product data and were not managed under configuration control.
Result
The distributed engineering teams of the vehicle performance division can now remotely, rapidly, and efficiently create, review, and edit the data, increasing confidence in the data quality and the consistent simulation models generated by a repeatable automated process.
Solution
The original spreadsheets are now replaced by the “single source of truth,” the digital thread in the Aras Platform that covers the engineering data for vehicle dynamics performance.
Challenge
Design engineers relied on complex spreadsheets and manual exchange of data to collaborate with the engineering teams.
Every automotive manufacturer today has been impacted by the increasing complexities that continue to grow inside modern cars. Designing a car is already a complex task. Designing a car that needs to handle tomorrow’s requirements is an even more daunting experience, and the approach toward vehicle development must evolve.
To handle the complexities of both present and future car designs at Toyota Motor Europe, their vehicle performance engineering division is working with a system-level Model-Based Design (MBD) approach.
When the vehicle performance engineering division started incorporating MBD into its digital engineering practices, it had already defined the related teams and processes for designing and manufacturing.
The MBD team relied on complex spreadsheets and the manual exchange of data among the engineering teams, which was unsustainable due to the number of architectural variants and related simulations.
The digital thread ties everything together
The original spreadsheets are now replaced by the “single source of truth,” the digital thread in the Aras Platform that covers the engineering data for vehicle dynamics performance. The variant-design-simulation relationships are managed within this system-centric digital thread regardless of where the system and design details are authored.
The distributed engineering teams of the vehicle performance division can now remotely, rapidly, and efficiently create, review, and edit the data, increasing confidence in the data quality and the consistent simulation models generated by a repeatable automated process.
Have access to libraries for reusable data models and their items down to specific data types.
Compare different versions
of data structures.
Separate data from its presentation with Excel-like ease of viewing and editing the data structure.
The key to success was a clear vision of how the digital thread should support MBSE/MBD and engineering data management and how a flexible PLM platform can support TME’s continuous improvement processes.
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28%
decrease in process lead time
41%
reduction in time
expenditure
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