BAE Systems' High-Speed, Low-Risk Transition to PLM

Faced with an aging design management system, BAE Systems decided to treat this challenge as an opportunity and make the move to PLM. They selected the Siemens Teamcenter PLM solution and partnered with CSC and Siemens to implement the product.

We were responsible for implementing the system infrastructure and for proving that it would meet the performance demands of BAE Systems’ engineers.

Testing and validating

The CSC Performance Engineering practice was tasked with testing assumptions, validating designs and driving the improvements needed to make the PLM system work effectively in the BAE Systems business environment.

Working with Siemens and BAE Systems, the Performance Engineering team identified improvements to the proposed technology architecture approach. CSC’s Performance Engineers worked with the Siemens team to find and develop an alternative approach that would deliver the availability required by the client at a lower cost.

No growing pains

Following this intensive period of collaborative working, the new PLM solution went live within BAE Systems in early 2010. Unusually for a mission-critical system of this scale and complexity, there have been no growing pains or problems with system response times or stability.

In addition, around £1 million of savings have been made on the deployed solution, when compared to the predicted costs for the original architectural design.

'High-performing solution'

“With our existing design system going out of support in the near future, we had the opportunity and incentive to rethink our approach and move to a more comprehensive, lifecycle-based system. CSC’s Performance Engineering practice played a key part in validating this approach, in identifying potential issues and in making sure that we would receive the high- performing solution we needed,” says Graham Malley, BAE Systems PLM Programme manager.