Increasing globalization and aggressive OEM purchasing strategies are driving intense competition in the automotive powertrain market. Therefore, in order to win business, Integral Powertrain must offer benefits to OEMs whilst maintaining the product quality levels now required across the industry.

A full powertrain engineering program can cost as much as €300 million, and may take up to 48 months to complete. In this context, reducing the cost and time of powertrain engineering development programs becomes a necessity to gain competitive advantage.

Integral Powertain has reduced development lead-times for concept design by up to 40% thanks to V5 PLM solutions from Dassault Systèmes. By encouraging design reuse, exploring more design alternatives and providing early-validation tools, CATIA V5, ENOVIA SmarTeam and ENOVIA VPLM help Integral Powertrain designers to make better decisions and reach optimal, error-free designs in a shorter amount of time.

Thanks to ENOVIA SmarTeam and ENOVIA VPLM solutions, design changes, workflow mechanisms (Smartflow) and multi-model links (in ENOVIA VPLM) can be easily managed enabling multiple users to gain simultaneous access to a full and up-to-date representations of data. Also, the flow of information around the business is controlled and data management is automated, ensuring that designs adhere to defined rules.

Other benefits have also been realized. For example, engineers can find information approximately 70% faster through the use of data management, and Engineering Changes (EC) cycle times have been reduced by about 25%. In fact, overall, the manufacturing engineering cycle time has been shortened by 25%.

Costs for powertrain engineering programs have been significantly reduced thanks to Dassault Systèmes V5 PLM solutions. This has been achieved through improved concept design, where CATIA V5 has been able to automate repetitive design tasks through the application of intelligent design templates. Also greater engineering validation has been possible by using digital mock-up and other verification tools, such as finite element analysis.

Based on CATIA V5 template-based design, Integral Powertrain has been able to capture its powertrain engineering knowledge. These templates, called “Automated Intelligent Engine Design” (AIED), are used for many significant engine design investigations. Even if a customer’s project is not developed within CATIA, the time savings and engineering robustness far outweigh the additional time spent translating models to and from CATIA.

Early-validated designs also mean less costly downstream design modifications and fewer physical prototypes. “The more virtual simulations that can be conducted mean less physical prototype testing, and therefore save time and money,” says Roger Duckworth, Engineering Director, Integral Powertrain. Finally, faster design enables Integral Powertrain engineers to be more productive. Application of CATIA V5 template-based design, design in context, digital mock-up and other features has reduced overall concept design leadtime by more than 40%.

The benefits achieved through the successful deployment of the Dassault Systèmes V5 PLM solutions is significant and has enabled Integral Powertrain to win projects by offering a unique advantage over it’s competitors.
Dassault Systèmes’ partner Intrinsys brought Integral Powertrain his expertise to deploy and customize the solutions to suit the needs of the business and more importantly to define working methodologies to optimize the value of the tools. Consequently, Intrinsys are now involved in helping other businesses to deploy Dassault Systèmes solutions, across a wide range of industries.

One of Integral Powertrain’s mid-term objectives is to accelerate concurrent and collaborative engineering to their supplier base with ENOVIA SmarTeam solutions. “Our aim is to have all of our suppliers either using ENOVIA SmarTeam, or having access to ENOVIA SmarTeam, so that we can collaborate more effectively by giving our suppliers greater accessibility to our live database, rather than a copy of the data,” said Darren Cairns. Finally, Integral Powertrain would like to expand their use of CATIA V5 templates into the area of tooling design and business processes, not only for the automotive industry but also in the aerospace market.

More about Integral Powertrain
Integral Powertrain Ltd. is an automotive powertrain engineering consultancy based in Milton Keynes, UK. Founded in 1998, Integral Powertrain’s core business units include Powertrain Engineering, Tooling Design, Motorsport and a specialist PLM division named Intrinsys.
Today, Integral Powertrain has prestigious customers among OEMs, engine manufactures, and Tier 1 suppliers including Aston Martin, Bentley Motors Ltd., DaimlerChrysler AG, General Motors, Jaguar Cars, MG Rover Group, Nissan Motor Co., JCB, Harley Davidson, Ford and Cummins Engines.

www.integralp.com
www.intrinsys.co.uk