For over 150 years, the Czech company Škoda Transportation has successfully developed and produced rail transport technology worldwide. In the Czech Republic alone, more than 4500 employees produce low-floor trains and trolley buses, hybrid vehicles for environmentally friendly local transport as well as trains and locomotives. In addition, Škoda Transportation is represented by subsidiaries and joint ventures in Germany, Finland, Hungary, Russia and the U.S.
Supported by AUCOTEC's Czech partner TECHNODAT, the company had been working with AUCOTEC software for years when it decided to take the next step in 2013 and chose the database-driven platform Engineering Base (EB) for the fundamental modernization of its engineering processes.
Under pressure
© Škoda TransportationThis was due to the increasing pressure to constantly complete projects faster. The new system was intended to significantly reduce manual data transfers and consistently coordinate projects which were edited at different sites within the Škoda Group depending on capacity. Another objective was to optimize the documentation of electrical engineering diagrams and the corresponding production data. The new platform was also to be used to standardize the increasingly different tool environments in the subsidiaries and enable them to meet the needs of different departments from the vehicle concept to production and service.
"Much more efficient processes"
"We looked around the market thoroughly," said Zdeněk Sváta, Technical Director at Škoda Transportation. "EB was able to provide the best solution to our needs. EB's openness, multi-user capability and the consistent linking of different object representations in the various documents were the main deciding factors in addition to the already positive experience with AUCOTEC."
The complete documentation of electrical part of a train project for Deutsche Bahn was the company's first real application of EB. This project confirmed the existence of other advantages, as Sváta reported. One of the most important of these advantages is the ability to work alphanumerically in lists. Mass data handling is greatly accelerated by filter, evaluation and sorting functions. Users also appreciate the change tracking, the time-saving conversion to different representations in all documents and reports as well as the intelligent navigable PDF.
Sváta’s conclusion: "By switching to EB, our processes and handling of documentation became much more efficient. Every planned train that is completed further improves our standardization. Thus we have already started to expand the solution, from the 3D connection to the PLM link."
