Automobile Safety Innovator Selects AutoVue
Viewing technology from Cimmetry Systems broadens impact of Autoliv’s PDM solution
Ogden, Utah – The products made by this technology-driven company are ones that most people hope they’ll never have to use: airbags, anti-whiplash seats, inflatable side impact curtains, and rollover protection systems. The company is Autoliv, and since the 1950s it has been coming up with one automotive safety innovation after another – saving countless lives in the process.
Autoliv has grown into a $4 billion global enterprise employing 30,000 people in 30 different countries – and captured one third of the seat belt and air bag market in the process.
So how does this world-class company maintain such a high level of innovation? Autoliv avails itself of the latest technologies so that its engineers can stay focused on the work at hand. A case in point is the company’s recent PDM initiative that manages hundreds of thousands of CATIA CAD drawings. A CAD viewer called AutoVue is used in conjunction with the company’s PDM system and lets Autoliv engineers around the globe see any drawing that they need in a matter of seconds, with literally the click of a mouse.
AutoVue used in conjunction with Matrix PDM system
Formalizing the checking in and checking out of drawings, as well as the review and approval process helped Autoliv to work more efficiently. However, the company still needed a strong graphics viewer to make its solution complete. “It was great to have all these files available to everyone, but if people couldn’t open and view them easily, what was the point? We needed a viewer that could be seamlessly linked to the PDM system. After all, without a robust viewing tool, the PDM system wouldn’t be that useful to us.”
He continues, “We abandoned our original viewing package – the one that we used with our original PDM system – in favor of AutoVue, and we’ve had excellent results. You name a country and we’ve probably got people there using AutoVue – we’ve got some 2000 users in all.”
“Although AutoVue was a relatively modest investment for Autoliv in terms of dollars, it has proven to proven to be a valuable resource for us.”
Makes CAD drawings more accessible
“The first thing we wanted to do,” says Sanford, “is reduce the need to have a full copy of CATIA everywhere. That was not so much because of the cost, but because of the time and effort that it takes to bring someone up to speed on a sophisticated CAD system.”
Sanford continues, “Many times, the design or manufacturing engineer doesn’t need access to CAD capabilities. They simply need to see the drawing…pan and zoom to a specific area…print it out… or perhaps make some notes on it. They can do all that with AutoVue, and they can learn to use the product in a matter of minutes. It’s that easy.”
Preserves “designer’s intent”
“With AutoVue, everyone is seeing exactly what the designer intended. The views, callouts, text fonts, and other details are all displayed exactly the way that the designer set them up in the first place.
“I’m just a casual user of AutoVue,” he explains, “and I myself am in and out of AutoVue twenty or thirty times a day. It’s a quick and easy way to take a look at an engineering drawing.”
Customization makes link between AutoVue and Matrix “seamless”
Autoliv has been very successful in customizing AutoVue to meet very specific needs. Even though an off-the-shelf integration with the Matrix PDM system was available, for example, Autoliv decided to write its own integration in order to deliver very specific functionalities to its users. “We wanted to take steps out of the process, and make it more seamless for the average user,” explains Sanford. “Here’s how the system works today: you type a drawing number into the PDM system from any Autoliv facility anywhere in the world, double click on the icon, and a few seconds later you’re looking at the drawing in AutoVue. You don’t have to copy the file to a different location, and you don’t have to fire up AutoVue manually. It’s totally seamless from the user’s point of view. They go directly from the PDM system to AutoVue.”
Markup capability debuts during summer of 2001
More recently, Autoliv turned to AutoVue’s customization capabilities and introduced a markup capability to its users. “By going into markup mode, users can change geometry, edit text, alter a dimension, add a note – do all of the normal markup type activities, “ explains Sanford. “When they’re done, they click the drawing icon, say ‘attach markup,’ and the markup is now linked to that original drawing in the PDM system. The next time an Autoliv person accesses the drawing from anywhere in the world, they would see a prompt to the effect, ‘the drawing that you have selected also has a markup version. Would you like to see that version too?’ Again, the goal was to make the task simpler, to make it essentially a one-step operation.”
AutoVue ‘compare’ capability turns heads
One AutoVue capability that Autoliv found particularly useful is the compare function. “This is a very exciting capability that we use a lot,” reports Sanford. “Using AutoVue’s compare ability, we can load up multiple versions of a drawing and very quickly determine what has changed.”
He continues, “AutoVue opens separate windows. You might see drawing revision A in the left pane and drawing revision B in the right pane. Different colors show elements contained in revision A but not in B, as well as elements contained in revision B but not in A. So it’s very easy to pinpoint what has changed.”
“Critical part of our PDM solution”
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