Needham, MA December 9, 2002 PTC, a product development company, and Airbus today announced that PTC Windchill product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions are being used in the process to create and manufacture the Airbus A380, Airbus' 555 passenger super jumbo aircraft now under development.
According to the companies, the Windchill-based Airbus deployment allows the organization to manage product structure, change management, the overall release process, 2D and 3D visualization, and connectivity to other systems, including legacy systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP).
PTC said a new deployment of more than 600 seats, to be based in the United Kingdom, brings to more than 2,000 the total number of Windchill seats deployed inside Airbus today. The rest of the deployment is in France, Germany and Spain, in various departments such as Engineering, Manufacturing, Program Management and Non-specific Design.
The deployment is expected to increase to more than 5,000 seats in 2003 with a project beginning this month, the provider said. Windchill is used across the entire Airbus consortium, providing support for the multi-site organization spanning several countries. The second phase will also allow management of the federated product structure across all sites, effectivity calculation, and complete and direct integration of the various computer-aided design (CAD)/computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) tools on site.
The implementation of the Windchill-based backbone is a major collaborative milestone, significantly advancing Airbus' integration," said Rolf Stefan Scheible, vice president of Airbus Concurrent Engineering.
Airbus is also using 2,000 seats of PTC's CADDS 5 software, which has been used for the A340-500/600 programs, representing more than 60 percent of the CAD seats in the A380 project.
