As part of this mission it is the engineering support authority for many of the US Army’s vehicles, a role which requires accurate and complete data from the vehicle original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

In the particular case of the Humvee®, supplied by AM General, the ¬transfer of product data has been a largely manual process feeding into TARDEC’s Windchill® PDM system.

A solution was required that could:
• Improve the quality of data received and eliminated ¬manual re-entry.
• Bring out differences between ¬as-built definition of the delivered ¬vehicles and approved design.
• Better position the Army for the ¬through-life management of the vehicles.

Benefits
• Elimination of manual data entry leading to improved data quality.
• Acess for the first time to the ¬as-manufactured data.
• Ability to compare the approved ¬design and as-manufactured design.
• Access for the first time to the serial number structures of delivered ¬vehicles - a key starting point for improved through-life support management.

Savings
• Reduction in the time and effort required to take delivery of OEM data.
• Better management of provisioning data leading to reduced spare part costs.

Solution
The pilot approach was to establish a Share-A-space® capability within TARDEC’s demilitarized network zone to receive data from AM General electronically.

Production data exported from SAP® was mapped into PLCS which was then imported into Share-A-space®.

Design data from TARDEC’s Windchill® system was imported as a STEP file. AM General also supply provisioning data in the form of Mil Std 1388-2B.

This data was mapped to PLCS and consolidated with the two sets of design data in Share-A-space®.

A web-services client was provided as a plug-in to Windchill® to enable browsing of the three consolidated data sets. This allowed comparison for the first time between the as-designed data and the data used for manufacturing.

Lastly, serial numbered structures for over 400 vehicles were exported from AM General’s SAP® R/3® to PLCS and imported into Share-A-space® to show individual product configurations.

 US Army: Full Service Life Cycle Engineering Support