Accelerating speed-to-product innovation with Teamcenter on Azure for a Swedish powertrain OEM
The Challenge
Secured integration of fragmented data across diverse IT infrastructure
Our client, a leading Swedish powertrain OEM recently established new entities in both the EU and China. To support this expansion, the parent OEM aimed to address the challenges of consolidating and migrating data from its existing on-premises infrastructure to the latest global PLM system on Azure.
The implementation was required to ensure minimal operational disruptions, enable real-time synchronization across sites, efficiently handle diverse large-scale data and manage associated licensing expenses.
This was followed by the need to:
- Safeguard business-critical data and prevent any unexpected data losses
- Navigate challenges with buying, maintaining and upgrading advanced IT infrastructure in-house
- Go-live with the business-critical PLM functions within stringent timelines
The Objective
Strategizing product transformation with a unique PLM implementation on the cloud
The client turned to HCLTech to leverage our global expertise in the R&D and IT transformation space to better integrate and manage data for a unified, smooth user experience. They needed a customized approach to help support the heterogeneous mix of processes across the new organization for faster data accessibility on the cloud.
The scope of implementation included:
- Greenfield Teamcenter deployment: Establishing a new, efficient Teamcenter system on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform
- High-quality data accessibility: Seamless data integration across systems for unparalleled accessibility
- Optimized cloud deployment strategy: Developing a strategy that maximizes resource utilization while minimizing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for IT systems
The Solution
Seamless cloud-based Teamcenter deployment for a faster time-to-market
The client leveraged a smooth cloud-based deployment of a Teamcenter system to eliminate silos and effectively manage their product lifecycle processes. By utilizing xLMCloud for R&D and transformation, the new company seamlessly migrated system-critical data with a customized data model with Teamcenter on Azure for streamlined resources across different geographies, ensuring a right-sized infrastructure.
These capabilities powered the smooth integration of CAD, Polarion and ERP tools with Teamcenter, providing global user accessibility anytime, anywhere, accentuating system resilience in the face of operational changes. The implementation significantly minimized downtime as processes remained uninterrupted with Azure Virtual Desktop allowing continuous access to CAD tools during maintenance periods.
Implementation approach:
- The Azure Virtual Desktop implementation supported the rapid deployment of flexible UAT infrastructure while maintaining different test environments for CAD and PLM user groups. This was followed by benchmarking comprehensive GPU performance for better optimization and cost-efficiency for the CAD user group.
- Addressing limitations in the core infrastructure teams for domain and operations services during the program inception, as well as limited security and network management resources, we employed Azure's cloud-native services to maintain momentum and meet record timelines. The team addressed the need for an organization-level domain server setup by implementing Azure DNS, enabling progress on configuration and setup tasks.
- Our team of experts also significantly contributed in designing time and cost-optimized data transfer solutions for higher and lower data volumes to ensure smooth collaboration with parent and supplier organizations. The implementation also fortified the security of production-critical data with daily data/storage backups with efficient restore policies. These automated backup initiatives strengthened the security of the developer environment, in a faster and convenient way.
The Impact
Charting progress in new markets with rapid data integration and reduced costs
With an enhanced PLM system, the client leveraged a technically-rich solution to support the heterogeneous mix of channels and:
Implementation approach:
- Achieved a 20% reduction in infrastructure costs
- Delivered a faster time to market
- Ensured a smooth and incident-free go-live.
- Reduced infrastructure procurement time from several months to 1 week via cloud-based provisioning
- Decreased SQL licensing costs (from 2 Enterprise to 2 Standard Edition licenses)
- Reduced costs by about 25% quarterly on non-production infrastructure, using automation and collaborative governance processes, between June-August, 2024
- Achieved restore time of 30-40 mins (from 1-2 days) for the sandbox environment through automated restore capabilities, ensuring a faster and more flexible development.
