McLaren Automotive - Laurence Allmark - Senior Product Quality Engineer

McLaren Automotive - Laurence Allmark - Senior Product Quality Engineer 4 years
As a company we’ve been using the tool for 7 years now. As a company, we started out as a basic model, it was very basic in the terms of the results, the analysis etc. And now we’re using quite complex [models] at several stages of the design process.
[We] get started right at the beginning of the project, when the car is just a styling theme. We work with the concept engineers on how we want to break up the panels and align those parts to each other as well as the structural elements parts of the car. We then move on to the design and development stages which is analyzing the gap and flush. That is the core part of what we do.
We approve all the engineering releases for all the parts. Confirm that all of the geometry, all of the GD&T matches what is in the 3DCS model. We then move on to preproduction phases, confirming we are actually building what we intended to build correcting any design engineering at that point before handing over the car to the series production team.
The advantage is being able to use [3DCS] at all different stages, and having customers at different stages in the project. We are at the point right now where people really trust what comes out of the tool. We get a lot of requests. We were very much fighting in our corner to get people to believe what comes out of the software.
Advantages along the pre-production phase for root cause analysis. We’ve only started to use the software to root cause the problems. We found that looking at the contributor lists really helped us get to the cause of the problem and propose solutions.
It has impacted our core metrics quite a lot as [they] have developed significantly over the last 7 years since we started to using the software, the metrics were very simple, very vague, whereas today, they go down to the very fine detail of, for example, how far we are allowing points to be out of spec at certain points in the program, so yeah we’ve come a long way in 7 years.