Oct 11 2007
iRise Fusion ‘07-Simulation for Application Design at GM
Rich Frost, from General Motors presented a case study on GM’s implementation of iRise. He initially compared using simulation in product design to simulation in system design. “We simulate before we cut metal with our vehicles and now we simulate before we cut code for our systems”.
GM views it’s product design centers as influencers of global collaboration. The product design centers are used for new vehicle design and for simulating components. The net result is that they are now developing award-winning cars through global involvement with customers and are getting to market faster with increased quality.
Rich outlined 4 reasons to use simulation for system design:
- business complexity
- business clarity
- collaboration
- speed of development
At GM, all new systems are designed for now designed for global adoption and implementation. Other complexities impact GM include: 327,000 employees, products are sold in 200 countries, there are 176 manufacturing plants in 34 countries consuming 14 million pounds of raw material daily, they have 14,000 dealers which all operate as independent businesses and they have 160,000 unique part numbers.
Global adoption at GM drives collaboration. They have set iRise as the enterprise standard for GM, Suppliers and Joint Ventures. iRise has also been integrated into Standard System Delivery Process.
iRise allows GM the ability to quickly simulate functionality and to:
- demonstrate live working models with logic and process flow
- engage customers to see systems come to life early
- discover missing, unknown and unclear requirements
The interactive model iRise simulation also forms an integral part of the final RFP.
The global benefits include visual confirmation of requirements and process in a language neutral and collaborative environment.
Rich outlined one of the “sample projects” at GM, a dealer system designed to replace more than 250 legacy systems. Partnering with CapGemini and using their rapid design and visualization approach to visualize and harmonize processes globally, GM was able to quickly observe users, document findings, generate requirements, develop design insights and create visualization in under 6 months.
The project resulted in 500 simulations reviewed in 50 global sessions. They reduced process time reduced by 65% and discovered that 94% of all processes were globally common. Rich commented that they wouldn’t have been able to identify so many common processes without simulation. Finally, the well-defined system enabled GM to reduce training time through quicker adoption.