Aiming for the top
Xuji Group Corporation designs and produces electrical power systems, and manufactures automation, relay protection and control equipment. Xuji Group has more than 20 subsidiary companies and nearly 5,000 employees. The company, which is a state-owned enterprise, has recently entered into other fields, such as integrated electromechanical equipment, environmental protection engineering and e-commerce.

 

Xuji Group has an ambitious goal: to become one of China’s leading suppliers of power system equipment. To achieve this, management first outlined several areas where they saw a need for improvement. One was the unorganized nature of engineering data, which limited its re-use. Another was a lack of control over aspects of the product development process, such as engineering change orders. Software configuration management also needed improvement, and in situations where equipment was used in more than one system, multiple versions sometimes conflicted.

 

Choosing a PLM partner
These challenges pointed out the need for a product lifecycle management (PLM) solution – technology that could provide the process management and information management capabilities the company needed to develop products more efficiently. After a thorough evaluation that considered functionality and performance, capacity for integration with other applications and the qualifications of the vendor, Xuji Group chose Teamcenter software from Siemens PLM Software as its PLM solution. During the evaluation process, the company found Siemens to be exceptionally good at understanding its needs, and the experience of Siemens in the PLM arena weighed heavily in the selection of Teamcenter.

 

Existing engineering information has now been imported into the Teamcenter vault, where it is now more easily accessible and more often reused during new product development. Changes to the data, such as engineering change orders, are now managed by Teamcenter as well, for greater accuracy and transparency, as is the software development process.

 

Broad implementation, big impact
The Teamcenter implementation spans from R&D to engineering, providing transparency on overall project status to improve the company’s ability to innovate and increase productivity. Teamcenter extends the value of Xuji Group’s existing ERP and CAD applications, and other software (including the company’s own visualization solution), by seamlessly linking these applications to the extended enterprise.

 

“Our relationship with Siemens helps us leverage experience from foreign countries’ best practices and strengthen our corporation’s position as the leader in the China power system industry,” says Wang Jinian, president of Xuji Group Corporation. “Through implementing Teamcenter solutions, we expect to streamline our R&D and operational processes, leading to an increase in competitiveness. Our objective is to surpass our global competitors, which we are confident we will achieve in the near future.”

 

With Teamcenter, Xuji Group now has the information infrastructure in place for future growth. As a result of the Teamcenter implementation, the company expects to increase revenue by 100 percent over the next six years by shortening time-to-market, improving product quality and reducing costs. Future plans include extending the use of Teamcenter PLM to subsidiary companies. The company also plans to integrate Teamcenter with its computer-aided software engineering tools.