Coast Composites is based in Irvine, California, and provides tooling systems to the commercial and military aerospace industries. Like most of the companies in its market, Coast faces pressure from OEMs to reduce prices and production time. The company brought in IBM Business Partner RAND Worldwide to implement CATIA V5 as its design application platform to improve communication with its OEM customers who also use this solution. In addition, ENOVIA SmarTeam product data management software has enabled Coast to consolidate all design and manufacturing information in a single system accessible to all of the company's engineers and designers.

“We're always dealing with new designs and data for new products, because we're often helping to build plane number one of a new line, not number 1,001,” said Coast President Jerry Anthony. “When we're working on a new military or commercial airplane program, for instance, a mold tool can change 10 or 20 times throughout the design and build processes. Change control is huge and ENOVIA SmarTeam is a way for us to do it very effectively.”

“RAND really led us to this technology and they've been a tremendous help in both the transition of all our legacy data and in getting Coast's users trained,” continued Anthony. “Their support was critical in implementing CATIA V5 and ENOVIA SmarTeam smoothly.”

Coast Composites particularly leveraged CATIA V5 KnowledgeWare Solutions which allow users inside and outside the company to capture expertise and best practices.

Designers can explore more design alternatives, automate goal-driven design optimization, ensure design consistency and quality, and promote brainstorming and innovation.

“These extraordinary results also come from two other factors; the extremely powerful ability to customize an application through 'Knowledgeware'; and Rand Worldwide's unique ability to apply knowledgeware to solve difficult business process problems,” said Brian Semkiw, CEO of RAND North America.

“In today's market, most of an aerospace company's fortunes ride on how well it communicates with the major OEMs like Boeing and Airbus, and how quickly it turns those customers' requirements into workable designs,” said Alex Zeltcer, general manager, ENOVIA SmarTeam. “Coast Composites has turned that new need into a competitive advantage by adopting CATIA and ENOVIA SmarTeam so it can instantly communicate every change to its OEM customers while receiving updated designs back. That makes Coast able to meet its customers' needs without sacrificing its own profitability.”

“Our Aerospace OEM customers are becoming acutely aware of how an integrated PLM extended enterprise leads to increased performance and reduced program risk in the supply chain,” said John Porter, vice president Product Lifecycle management solutions, IBM North America . ”Coast Composites has demonstrated how adoption of IBM PLM Solutions helps to win new business and improve performance on existing work packages.”

CATIA V5 and ENOVIA SmarTeam are the foundations of Coast Composites' generative mechanical design (GMD) program, which embeds process and manufacturing data into every 3D part and system model Coast's engineers develop. Using ENOVIA SmarTeam to embed data in the CATIA V5-generated product model data enables Coast to manage changes made during the design process, either by its own engineers or by its OEM customers' engineers. By automatically communicating the change to everyone in the design process, the GMD program enables Coast to automate communication and workflow, reuse existing know-how and designs, respond to customers more quickly, and reduce design/NC programming cycle times on key projects by 30 to 50 percent.