Boeing explored the possibility of developing an 'Extended 747' which was to be a 'double deck' aircraft much as the A380 is today. During the initial studies they were aware that their current Data Management System was inadequate tor large new projects and they requested a review of other system including that of Computervison - the Optegra system. One issue they were increasingly finding difficult was to locate all the places in the aircraft that a particular component, supplier, materials, inspection machine (etc) had been used. This was leading to increasing problems when the need to find, as an example, all of the bolts that they had a field fatigue failure on so that they could identify the impact and ground the necessary aircraft until repair work could be carried out.
Based upon the issues which were shared with us we needed to develop some focused functionality to make use of the data sources they had and the geometry visualization tools Computervision were developing for large assemblies. We quickly identified that if we could bring Boeings metadata into a single database and link to the source CATIA data we could reasonably develop a robust method to visualize the 3D CAD data in a large assembly environment using the results from an SQL query on the database.
Boeing had shared an anecdote that they had a team of six engineers working for six months on locating all the bolts of a particular material which they were aware would experience fatigue issues in the future. During a demonstration of the system we developed during a four week engagement we were able to show that we could issue a SQL query ro search for the bolts in the database and visualize them in 3D graphics by highlighting them in a particular color on the full assembly geometry of the aircraft. The total time to issue the search and display the results was less than 5 minutes - a significant reduction in effort. This project was a major part of a negotiation which lead to Computervision's Optegra being select as the Data Management system for the development of the Boeing entry for the Joint Strike Fighter program.
I was the Project Manager for this activity but was also an architect and developer of the solution developed. As a result, I was awarded the 'Technical Sales Manager of the Year' and a very nice trip to Tahiti!
