CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
4 September 2007
Implementation Investments
Lowrance Improves Design Time of Marine Electronic Products by 50 Percent with PTC® Product Development System
PTC announced that Lowrance, a leading designer, manufacturer and marketer of high-quality sportfishing SONAR and Global Positioning System (GPS) mapping instruments, has improved the design time of its marine electronics products by 50 percent with the PTC Product Development System (PDS). One of PTC's earliest customers, Lowrance recently used Pro/ENGINEER design and simulation solutions to develop a family of marine electronics products in only six months, cutting in half the time required using the company's previous design methods.
In 1957, Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Lowrance introduced the world's first sportfishing SONAR instruments that were capable of locating individual fish. Today, with 50 years of continuous manufacturing experience, the emphasis at Lowrance still remains on quality and technological innovation to provide the ultimate in high-performance fishfinders, navigational, and safety devices to fisherman and recreational boaters. In comparison to the old, two-tone electronic displays of the past, consumers now expect superior color monitors loaded with even more features that can be easily viewed in outdoor, direct-sun environments and handle the harsh marine environment. In response to this shift, Lowrance challenged its engineers to include features such as 600 by 800 pixel color graphics and internal hard drives up to 30GB in a new family of marine electronic devices that combine sonar capabilities with GPS and mapping features. In parallel with the design initiative, Lowrance began to investigate how to streamline its design process to facilitate simultaneous work on multiple projects to accelerate time-to-market of new products.
Lowrance turned to PTC to help them leverage the breadth and scalability of the PDS to help execute these initiatives. The integral design and simulation capabilities of Pro/ENGINEER enabled Lowrance engineers to concurrently design the marine electronics as linked assembly models that reference many of the same parametric component models. This approach increased the ability to maximize modularity and component reuse among the three new products. Since the designs were coupled, common components only had to be changed once to update their references in all of the products. An additional benefit to designing these products using a single system is that the electronics could be analyzed throughout their development to ensure that they satisfied strict performance requirements - reducing the reliance on costly and time-consuming physical prototype testing late in the process.
"Planning for component reuse gives us the ability to simultaneously design and test across all three new products," said Steve Swisher, senior design engineer, Lowrance. "Using the old system it would have taken one year to design, test and deliver to the market these products versus the six months that it took with the PTC Product Development System. We were also able to reduce our costs typically associated with multiple physical prototype development and multiple quality control cycles. We look forward to continuing our work with PTC as we develop more innovative products for our market."
The PTC PDS also helped Lowrance drive collaboration among its industrial designers and mechanical engineers. With the old system, design information was handed off from industrial design to mechanical engineering at one defined point in the process. This resulted in a slow, manual process to check, provide feedback and correct any design changes that sometimes occurred after a physical prototype was created. Using the PDS, both groups can work on the same model and it allows the mechanical engineers to provide timely feedback to the industrial designers who have the goal of creating a physical prototype right the first time.
"Once organizations develop a process to take advantage of the benefits that component reuse and collaboration deliver, they are in a better position to beat competitors to market with new, innovative products," said Chad Hawkinson, vice president, product strategy, electronics, PTC. "The PTC PDS was created to give organizations like Lowrance the ability to optimize its product development cycle in order to remain flexible and competitive in their markets."
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