With a worldwide customer base and 230 manufacturing and assembly plants in 32 countries, automotive and aerospace parts supplier Adient is reliant on accurate data translation to ensure its seating is produced precisely.
Designing seating for the automotive and aerospace sectors requires close attention to ergonomics. A deep understanding of how human bodies behave at rest and in motion and the way they interact with machinery is necessary to create a seat that offers optimal comfort, safety and wellbeing.
As with the other key components in a vehicle, a complex mix of factors – such as material stresses and durability, strength, noise and vibration, and weight – are all important considerations for seating engineers. Get the balance right, and the seat becomes a key touchpoint likely to help sell that car or leave passengers feeling positive about their flight.
Adient, a global automotive and aerospace seating and interiors specialist, produces whole seating systems, from fabrics to frames and from trims to tracks, and supplies almost every major automotive company in the world.
Automotive OEMs often choose to divide components between one or more seating suppliers in order to maintain a diverse supply base. In order to lower costs and promote part interchangeability, Adient practices a high degree of standardisation and modularity, a strategy that also works well for the car companies, spreading parts and systems throughout their own vehicle platforms.
At the same time, Adient must manage a market and manufacturing workflow full of variables that need to be streamlined. Data relating to the design, test, production and review stages must all work well together, since any out-of-sync data could negatively impact product quality, as well as manufacturing speed and cost.
Language challenges
That’s a tall order, given the wide range of companies that Adient supplies. “All the OEMs we serve use different CAD systems—or varying versions of those systems,” says Ramanamurthy H Pentakota, global director of IP, technical services and operations at Adient. “They also have their own types of certifications, specifi cations, and how they want to fi t this or that annotation to which data layer.”
With this in mind, a clear process is needed to support collaboration between 5,600 employees, spread across 12 core development centres and connected to more than 230 manufacturing and assembly plants across 32 countries.
“Generally, there are no uniform standards across all the different supply chains, because OEMs follow their own standards, which suppliers must then adapt to fit,” says Pentakota.
At Adient, he adds, fidelity to the company’s own Integrated Model Creation Process offers a clear path forwards.
“We try to standardise on a single CAD platform in-house, specialise in two more, and then faithfully recognise the original data from another 25 to 30 different CAD and analysis environments that send information to us,” he says.
In order to support better interoperability for its design and PLM workflows, Adient engaged with Elysium and uses its software platform, which enables it to translate and package all data for different OEMs and suppliers.
“The validated modelling data that Elysium facilitates is a key part of our integrated process approach to Model- Based Definition (MBD) and a Model-Based Enterprise (MBE),” says Pentakota. “Some time in the near future, a robust, all-digital, MBD/E environment will help us better integrate the mobility devices, sensors and mechanical systems required for autonomous vehicle development. That’s our direction.”
Data preparation
Naturally, the best seat designs and components find common use across automotive firms. In fact, one company might even specify a system used by a competitor.
There may also be several suppliers of seating fabrics and foams that need to integrate their products with Adient’s metal structures, typically back frames and track assemblies. The complexity traditionally surfaces in the exchange of data, where issues of geometric dimensions and tolerances (GD&T) and assembly fit come into play.
For example, one company might produce source data and require deliverables in NX, while the Asian assembly plants for each OEM may work in three different versions of Catia. Producing an API-based Master Model via Elysium in both NX and Catia allows the original geometry and manufacturing instructions to be preserved as intended and the Asian versions of Catia to be validated to their NX and Catia masters. This standardises resources in hardware, software, skilled designers and best practices in a single system, while still achieving deliverables in multiple other systems and flavours. To date, Pentakota estimates that Elysium tools have saved Adient at least 10% in data preparation and iteration costs, and 10% of costs related to automated validation, adding, “This is very significant!”
Translating the future
Shorter engineering development cycles are moving the automotive industry away from 2D toward 3D MBD/E processes that serve end-to-end automation from design to manufacturing and marketing.
“Robust translation and validation of source information – and insight into that data – is what will keep Industry 4.0 and true automation on track,” says Pentakota. By embedding rich data, such as all the combinations of processes that create a drill hole, with materials and suppliers, costs, and other profiles, he explains, will take GD&T to the next level of product intelligence.
“Manufacturing process intelligence is baked into the CAD model, so that machine software picks that up and actually does the programming, optimised and without error.”
With smart seats for autonomous vehicles in the planning, Adient is already thinking about feedback loops that report on posture and ergonomics and support the use of e-commerce in improving the passenger experience. Translating this data for designers is where innovation will accelerate and where comfort for future passengers sits.
This article first appeared in DEVELOP3D Magazine
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