IBM case study
Brawn GP and IBM make a winning team:
helping to deliver competitive advantage
through better product lifecycle management
Image © Brawn GP
Overview
■■ The Challenge
■■ The Solution
■■ Key Benefits
To create a competitive car in time
IBM managed a team of nearly 40
•• The BGP 001 – the first Brawn GP
for the start of the 2009 season,
people, including representatives
car designed entirely in CATIA and
Brawn GP needed a partner to help
from Brawn GP and consultants
ENOVIA – has enjoyed
rapidly re-engineer design and
from Dassault Systemes and other
considerable success in the 2009
manufacturing processes around
parties, to implement and
Formula One season.
new software and the new Formula
customise CATIA and ENOVIA
One technical regulations.
software with the aim of meeting the
manufacturing processes have
team’s unique needs – running it in
helped the aerodynamics team
parallel with the existing PLM
reduce cycle times and test more
solution and managing a complex
components more rapidly, making a
phased transition that involved
vital difference to the car’s
significant technical, cultural and
organisational change.
•• Streamlined design and
performance.
•• The team can manage redesigns
quickly thanks to the relational
design capabilities in CATIA,
enabling them to enhance and
optimise the car throughout the
season.
Business Benefits
•• The BGP 001 has enjoyed
considerable success in the 2009
Formula One season.
•• Streamlined design and
manufacturing processes have
made a vital difference to the car’s
performance.
•• The team can manage redesigns
quickly, enabling them to enhance
and optimise the car throughout the
season.
Brawn GP is a motor racing team and constructor based in Brackley, UK, which
competes in the FIA Formula One World Championship. The team is led by Ross
Brawn and employs 450 people, the majority of whom are engineers who design,
build and develop the team’s Formula One car to help drivers Jenson Button and
Rubens Barrichello win Grand Prix races.
Success in motorsport depends on the ability to gain competitive advantage
through the rapid and cost-effective realisation of superior design. Nowhere can
this be seen more clearly than in the high-pressure environment of a Formula
One team, where a new car must be built each year to meet rigorous design
regulations, and modified throughout the racing season to deliver the best
possible performance.
The key to success is efficient Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) – managing
each component of the car from conception through design, modelling,
manufacture and testing to installation in the car itself and maintenance through
“IBM deserves great
credit for supporting
us through this
period of major
technical, cultural
and organisational
transition. We hope to
continue working with
them to maintain our
success.”
David France
IT Director
Brawn GP
the course of a race or season. It is vital to optimize PLM processes from end to
end, to keep cycle times short and give the team the right components to build the
fastest car they can in the time available.
As part of a corporate standardisation exercise, Brawn GP was committed to
migrating to a new PLM and computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/
CAM) solution, built around CATIA and ENOVIA software from Dassault Systèmes.
The team needed to introduce the new solution and help designers transition to
the new tools in a way that would create as little disruption as possible – which was
especially difficult because design needed to continue between each race and
throughout the close season.
Making the most of regulation changes
It was particularly important to get the new solution into full production in time to
develop the 2009 car and take advantage of significant changes to the Formula
One technical regulations, as David France, IT Director at Brawn GP, explains:
“When there are major changes in the technical regulations, it levels the playing
field and represents a real opportunity for smaller teams like Brawn GP to gain
ground on more established rivals. Everyone has to redesign their car rather
than just making tweaks to the previous year’s model – so it can make a massive
difference if you get something right.
“We saw the changes to the technical regulations for 2009 as a chance to get
ahead, so we had to get the new PLM solution running smoothly to give us the
support we needed to design the BGP 001 car. We chose IBM to help us make the
technical, cultural and organisational changes required to achieve this.”
A winning partnership
IBM took the lead in the PLM implementation project, managing a team that
included consultants from IBM, Dassault Systemes and several other technology
specialists, as well as key representatives from within Brawn GP.
“IBM is widely respected as a technology company, but this project wasn’t just
about the software,” explains Matt Harris, Head of IT at Brawn GP. “We had to win
the hearts and minds of our 200 design engineers and persuade them to work in a
new way. IBM won our respect and confidence quickly, and integrated so closely
with our own staff that it was sometimes difficult to tell which members of the team
Key Components
were Brawn GP and which were IBM.”
•• IBM Global Business Services:
Product Lifecycle Management
This close relationship helped to reinforce the idea that the move to the new
•• IBM Global Business Services:
Supply Chain Management
solution was a team initiative – not something imposed on the design engineers
from outside by IBM. This fostered a positive collaborative approach: a problem
•• Dassault Systèmes CATIA and
ENOVIA
for the team was a problem for IBM, and both companies worked together to find a
solution.
Making the transition
IBM and Dassault Systèmes implemented the PLM solution and helped to
integrate it with Brawn GP’s legacy software, running both systems in parallel
throughout the 2008 season and sharing data between them. This made it
possible for IBM and Brawn GP to manage a phased transition to the new solution,
with different design and manufacturing teams moving to CATIA and ENOVIA at
different times, minimising the disruption to the team’s operations.
“The transition was easier for some of our departments than others, and IBM did a
good job of working to the requirements of each,” says Matt Harris. “For example,
the aerodynamics team was one of the first to embrace the new system, and IBM
helped them make some major changes to their working processes to fit in with
the CATIA software. At the other end of the spectrum, the main design team found
that it needed the software to be adapted to its unique requirements, so IBM and
Dassault Systèmes carried out the required customisation work.”
The 2008 car was designed during the transition period, using a mixture of the
legacy PLM solution and the CATIA and ENOVIA systems. By the time work started
on the 2009 model, the transition to the new way of working was complete. The
BGP 001 car is the first Brawn GP car to be designed and manufactured entirely
using the new solution.
Flexibility to handle late changes
Brawn GP’s engineers are already reaping the benefits. By introducing relational
“IBM is widely respected
as a technology
company, but this
project wasn’t just
about the software. IBM
won our respect and
confidence quickly, and
integrated so closely
with our own staff
that it was sometimes
difficult to tell which
members of the team
were Brawn GP and
which were IBM.”
Matt Harris
Head of IT
Brawn GP
design techniques – which use computer modelling to show how minor changes
to a single component could affect other components – it is possible to handle
late changes much more effectively, with less risk of unforeseen consequences.
For example, when the team had to install the Mercedes-Benz engine just seven
weeks before the start of the season, relational design helped them make the
required changes to related systems without major problems.
Faster manufacturing
Relational design also helps the manufacturing department. At one point, the
team needed to build fourteen new gearboxes as quickly as possible. Seven
were allocated to the in-house manufacturing department, and the other seven
to a more expensive external manufacturer. With more resources at its disposal,
the external manufacturer is typically able to fulfil orders more quickly – but in
this case, a number of late changes were made to the design and Brawn GP’s
manufacturing team was able to take these on board quickly and build its seven
gearboxes significantly ahead of the external team.
Transformation at a glance
Brawn GP worked with IBM to
re-engineer its end-to-end PLM
processes – enhancing its design and
engineering capabilities and reducing
development and manufacturing
cycle times. Relational design, faster
manufacturing and an improved ability
to handle late changes have helped the
team to build a highly competitive car
and to win a number of races in the 2009
Formula One season.
Better aerodynamic performance
With the concurrent design capabilities of CATIA, Brawn GP’s designers can work
as a team to make changes and improvements, knowing they are always working
with the most up to date version of a part and that their latest changes are reflected
in real-time in the design. This saves time and improves accuracy, ensuring they
get the best car onto the track each week at a faster pace than the competition.
In particular, improvements in design and manufacturing cycle times have also
been a major advantage for the aerodynamics team, which has been able to
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design and test more components in less time than ever before – helping to
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optimise the aerodynamic profile of the car and maximise performance.
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“Aerodynamics is a science of millimetres and tiny modifications, so the more
iterations you can do in terms of design and the more testing you can do in the
computational fluid dynamics system and the wind tunnel, the better,” says David
France. “The whole aero package has been a major factor in our success so far
this season, and the ability to develop new components faster is an important part
of that.”
“With CATIA we have greater flexibility for shape design, enabling us to achieve the
required aerodynamic performance, which is critical on the Formula One track,”
says Giuseppe Papagni, Team Leader – Aerodynamics Design at Brawn GP.
Giuseppe further states that “the parametric technology and feature-based design
capabilities of CATIA allow Brawn GP to produce about twice as many variants
of a part design as we could with the previous solution. With a greater volume of
variants to test in the wind tunnel or with computational fluid dynamics, we can
reach a higher-quality finished product that goes to the track.”
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Advantages achieved with CATIA and ENOVIA such as design re-use and
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automation, improved surfacing, concurrent design and 5-axis machining,
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Moving into the lead
have not only reduced design and manufacturing time, making the team more
competitive on sheer speed, but also have improved the quality, safety and
Photographs may show design models.
© Copyright IBM Corp. 2009. All rights reserved.
reliability of Brawn GP’s car on the track, ensuring the team stays ahead of the
competition.
Brawn GP has had an extremely successful run in the 2009 Formula One season
winning a number of races and gaining further podium finishes.
“The team’s unprecedented success against larger and more established
rivals is testament not only to the skill of Ross Brawn, our drivers Jenson Button
and Rubens Barrichello and the whole race team, but also to the ingenuity and
innovation of our engineering teams, who have created a very fast and highly
competitive car,” concludes David France.
“We’re still adapting to the new solution, but even though our team is 40 percent
smaller now than it was before the Brawn GP era, we’re still managing to stay at the
front of the field. IBM deserves great credit for supporting us through this period of
major technical, cultural and organisational transition – and we hope to continue
working with them to maintain our success.”
PLC03011-GBEN-00 (October 2009)