Applying PLM in a formula student racing car design process

Field research on PLM application is difficult, because companies don't like scientists to play with their system or with their processes. At Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e) the University Racing Eindhoven (URE) team decided to use the Siemens PLM Teamcenter license of the university to improve their performance. This was recognized as a unique opportunity to not only observe the use of a PLM system but also to experiment with implementation parameters and to compare the effects of alternative settings. This paper reports about the first phase of this research: implementing the PLM system. It describes the concepts used to formulate the requirements to the PLM system implementation. Although the 2008 car has been designed without use of the system, the finial design has been loaded into the PLM system as reference for the next year design.