Lotus Cars cuts 150 hours design work to eight minutes on back of PLM

Already a Catia V5 CAD user, it bought Dassault Systemes Delmia for manufacturing engineering, and Enovia SmarTeam for collaborative PLM. “When working on one 2006 project, we completed a design with only six engineers and implemented a change request in eight minutes. Before, in a similar case, it took 14 designers to create an underbody and 150 hours to change the material thickness,” says Dave Balcombe, head of information management at Lotus. “With our PLM toolset, we recently turned around a new vehicle layout in under 24 hours. The customer proposed the idea at the end of one day, and we presented the project the next at a 9:30 am meeting.” Delmia, for example, is providing an integrated virtual manufacturing environment that Lotus’ engineers use to spot issues and find solutions before production, saving time and money. This alone has reduced the number of physical prototypes the team requires to validate vehicle assembly. Similarly, SmarTeam has centralised data and organised intelligence into nodes linked to different vehicle zones. Consequently, when Lotus engineers begin a new vehicle design, they can get a head start by transferring knowledge nodes right into the next model.