Thales Optronics has held on to its technological lead while updating its design tools, to produce increasingly complex products for the defence industry.

Part of the Thales Group's defence business, the Optronics Systems division employs a team of around 1000 at its site in Yvelines, southwest of Paris. Combining optics, electronics, sensors, image-processing algorithms and the most advanced software available, optronics systems are primarily used to obtain exceptionally high-quality images in realtime. Optronics systems are installed onboard all manner of military craft: on airborne platforms used by the aviation industry for navigation and reconnaissance, in armoured combat vehicles used by the defence industry, and in ships operated by the navy.

In the defence industry, as in any other sector, striving for productivity gains is critical. For this reason, the management team at Thales Optronics pays particular attention to any new solution offered by the suppliers of CAD and PDM tools.

Olivier Dez, manager of the engineering department, is a true believer in the future of the collaborative work environment. He accepted the challenge not only of updating Thales' CAD system but also of experimenting with collaboration technologies and investigating PDM packages. Once it had evaluated the available off-the-shelf solutions, Thales Optronics selected both Pro/Engineer and Windchill to replace its current systems and to be used by the entire company as a collaborative PDM tool. In reality, Dez comments, the engineering department relies on the entire arsenal of PTC tools. These tools were selected primarily to accommodate an organisation and methodologies that are the critical links to the success of teams fulfilling different roles.

The 75 individuals using PLM fall into two major work groups: those who use the software tools directly and interface with internal clients; and another group comprising three teams (BE Technologies, BE Team and BE Dossiers) that play an equally important function within the organisation.

The first team, BE Technologies, is staffed by business experts who determine functional needs, including requirements for design review, functional dimensioning, and tolerancing. The second team, BE Team (technology, electronics, and methodology support), provides assistance with the applied methodologies in Pro/Engineer, and Windchill, and supports connection to print servers and the Pro/Intralink industrial archival servers. BE Team ensures that these tools are suitable for the activity of the engineering department, and must therefore remain in close contact with IS management and PTC. This team also works with subcontractors to provide smooth interaction with the engineering department, especially related to the quality and reliability of the services provided. The third and final team, BE Dossiers, ensures data continuity and is responsible for enforcing configuration-management rules required for all defence equipment.

"We plan to capitalise on the momentum of this success by deploying the Pro/Mechanica, Pro/Cabling, and CE/TOL modules, as well as Pro/Ficiency, the solution PTC offers for evaluating the skills of Pro/Engineer users. And lastly, we are in the process of evaluating the Wildfire version of Pro/Engineer, which, when used in conjunction with Windchill, should help us boost our project efficiency even further."

As one might well imagine, the initiative to modernise the PLM tools in use at Thales Optronics was both a strategic and ambitious undertaking. But more ambitious yet was the fact that this migration was to occur on an actual high-profile program, not a pilot. Why take such a risk?

Dez's response to this question is that the choice really was not his to make. Not only were orders waiting to be filled, but all of the teams converging for the project, the PTC teams included, were waiting for their marching orders. The new tools were actually deployed in tandem with the scheduling and design of a pod to be installed aboard several aircraft. High stakes indeed, considering that no less than 150 000 engineering hours went into the pod's design.

During the deployment phase of Pro/Engineer, the engineering department, a veteran user of CAD solutions, benefited from the expertise of PTC's consultants and the ATB (Associative Topology Bus) migration solution. Among the most significant of Pro/Engineer's advantages was the ease with which design elements could be created and, more importantly, modified. "In view of the success we had achieved, we quickly decided to move forward and roll out Pro/Engineer for the thermal-camera design sector," explains Dez. Based entirely on Web technology, Windchill requires low deployment costs and thus enabled Thales to organise communication in the company around product data and achieve productivity gains. Thales found that telecommuting is, in fact, more efficient than outsourcing solutions. Using virtual meeting places, digital-modelling, and videoconferencing tools, meetings are more organised, and requests can be formulated in advance. In addition to productivity gains, users find the system easy to access.

For more information contact Dayne Turbitt, productONE, 012 673 9311, www.prodone.com