Boeing has customers lining up to buy its aircraft, with a backlog of 3,600 commercial orders worth $271bn. Its problem has been getting planes built and delivered.
In an ongoing effort to improve its product development process, Boeing is standardizing on Siemens' Teamcenter product lifecycle management software, a move that affects tens of thousands of employees. Boeing has been a Siemens PLM customer for some newer projects for more than a year, but now it plans to make it the de facto software for managing data related to each part and every engineering change for commercial and military aircraft, including replacing legacy product lifecycle management systems used for older-model aircraft.
It's a big move from the status quo at Boeing, which has customized IT and manufacturing infrastructure around each new aircraft model. That approach sets up silos of development and hinders global collaboration.
Source: Information Week, http://www.informationweek.com