As a start-up racing to bring the first battery-powered vehicle to South Africa, Optimal Energy would seem to have a leg up: It’s starting with a clean slate when it comes to product design and development.

Although having a blank canvas to work on has given Optimal Energy an opportunity to develop processes that are lean and more efficient than those of many of its established automotive original equipment manufacturer (OEM) competitors, it also has required the company to go back to the drawing board and revisit fundamental vehicle design principles. That has posed a challenge for Optimal Energy as it aims to accelerate development cycles and introduce the Joule electric car to the market in a timely fashion.

The solution was to put systems and processes in place that would allow the company to leverage deep automotive domain expertise and talent spread around the globe while practicing concurrent engineering in a highly disciplined way. Because the disparate global team has access to “a single version” of design data, the vehicle’s diverse modules and components—not to mention the manufacturing facilities that will be used to produce the car—can be architected simultaneously without encountering any of the lag time or error-prone data translation that typically occur when distributed development teams leverage separate systems and employ a more serial engineering process.

Optimal Energy, a privately owned South African company founded in 2005, has a clear vision in mind. Its goal is to deliver world-class solutions for urban transport by creating an electric vehicle industry in South Africa and expanding globally from there. The vehicles are to have a high degree of local content, meaning that 60% or more of various sourced components are to be produced in South Africa and that the cars will be built in South Africa by local workers. The Joule, Optimal Energy’s first model, is slated for availability in the South African market in 2013 with a global expansion planned for 2014. Unlike many electric vehicles, which are quite small, the Joule will have ample room space with its five-seater design along with a top speed of 135 km/h and a nominal range of 300 km on a single charge.

A Global Team of Partners

Because Optimal Energy is developing the Joule from scratch, it is not locked into particular packaging configurations or ergonomic setups like most car companies, which typically reuse a core set of packaging as a basis for a new vehicle launch, including newer electric offerings. As a result, the Optimal Energy design team is free to explore fresh concepts, such as rethinking how a person sits in the vehicle, and experimenting with novel ways the user would interact and communicate with the car.

Although this design freedom is liberating, it also presents a challenge in light of the time constraints to get the Joule to market. Optimal Energy does not have its eye on being first out the door, but an aggressive schedule is critical because the development program must be completed in the time it might take an established OEM to retrofit an existing vehicle design for the electric market. To establish some sort of headway, Optimal Energy decided early on to focus internally on its core intellectual property and domain expertise—the drive system, the energy storage system, and the software controls for the Joule—and outsource design of the components outside its specialty area to key partners. For example, a German manufacturing partner is working on the mechanical aspects of the vehicle and the battery is being designed in a joint venture with a Korean firm.

Although these outside firms provide the deep automotive domain expertise to jump-start Optimal Energy’s fledgling development process, the far-flung nature of the engineering team can make collaboration a struggle. Even at the onset of the project, eight or nine systems were employed to manage the different aspects of the Joule, and it was challenging to keep everyone on the same design page, let alone ensure that all parties were working off the same data. The existing process also did not do much to alleviate the possibility of design miscues since individual components for the Joule were being handled by different teams that were using nonintegrated systems and the engineering process was being conducted on a serial basis.

A Big-Picture Approach

Two years into the development effort, the team made a case for taking a bigger-picture approach. Since the company was early in its life cycle, it was determined that no system or process was so entrenched that it could not be modified—or scrapped, if necessary—to yield better results. The engineering team decided to trade up the existing nonintegrated systems in favor of a single Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platform that could serve as a central repository for all information related to the development of the Joule. Such a decision ensures that all data—from the initial design requirements to the maintenance documentation needed to service and support the vehicle once it is available in the field—will be housed in the same platform, with collaborative technologies delivering easy access to team members regardless of their geographic location.

A key consideration was to choose a PLM system and provider that had deep automotive domain expertise, balancing the desire to take advantage of a clean-slate design while keeping time-to-market considerations a priority. The team determined that Dassault Systemes’ CATIA computer-aided design (CAD) package, ENOVIA PLM platform, and DELMIA manufacturing software best met that criteria, especially since many core design partners already were using the Dassault software platform.

In fact, one of the primary decisions keeping the Joule effort on course was to model the engineering processes around the out-of-the-box processes defined by the Dassault PLM suite whenever possible. Once again, the team weighed the benefits of starting fresh or relying on proven automotive domain expertise to give it a head start. In critical areas such as engineering change orders (ECOs), for example, it was more efficient to use proven practices rather than taking the time to customize the software and reinvent new ways of working. The rationale was that precious development time was better spent on refining and optimizing Optimal Energy’s core intellectual property and electric designs than on doing a custom engineering software deployment.

This approach is working for a number of reasons. Because the team hails from different industries and different companies, there was no emotional attachment to a particular set of design tools and thus little pushback in getting members to embrace new software. Because Optimal Energy is a start-up with little to no process in place, there were few, if any, change management issues related to adopting new engineering processes. Finally, the decision to go with an already entrenched development platform kept training to a minimum while ensuring that the far-flung Joule team was “speaking the same design language.” These are all important steps in avoiding design miscues that can hamper a development project.

Perhaps most important factor is that the single, integrated PLM platform is paving the way for Optimal Energy to fully embrace concurrent engineering despite the fact that the team is globally dispersed. Without such an approach, it would be impossible to hit the aggressive delivery targets and compete with established OEMs that already have a foundation in place to take ownership of the nascent electric vehicle market.

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