Farnborough, July 18, 2006

Rolls-Royce a Hit with Farnborough Audience

The third in the current series of MDMC Workshops was held on July 18, 2006 alongside the Farnborough Air show. The event attracted the largest group of participants of the series so far, including airframe manufacturers, gas turbine OEMs, materials suppliers, Tier 1 suppliers, and R&D organizations. The audience were engrossed by the keynote presentation from Dr Malcolm Thomas at Rolls-Royce.

The event began with Granta’s Richard Painter providing an overview of the business cases developed and used by members in making their decisions to join the Material Data Management Consortium (MDMC). The presentation informed an open discussion on the varied needs of the audience.

Many of these needs were similar to those covered in the keynote presentation. Dr Malcolm Thomas is Director of Materials and Mechanical Behaviour at Rolls-Royce plc, responsible for materials across the four business streams within the company: aerospace, marine, energy, and power. He reviewed the specifics of the Rolls-Royce business case and briefly described the implementation of an enteprise materials information management system.

Dr Thomas' presentation, delivered to an engrossed audience, described the plan to implement materials information management software in different business areas and geographical locations, resulting in thousands of engineers, analysts, and designers worldwide gaining secure access to controlled materials data. He outlined the benefits derived by Rolls-Royce from its membership of the MDMC, particularly through relationships and discussions with the other Consortium members. 

These benefits include:

• direct influence over the capabilities and developments of the Consortium software, GRANTA MI
• exchange of experience and discussion with other experts in the field
• expanded understanding of materials information management beyond Rolls-Royce techniques
• a chance to “look see” and gain detailed understanding of the system before the full purchase decision
• cost sharing for development of specific functionality
• cost reduction against list prices.

Dr Thomas concluded by urging involvement with the Consortium, adding that Rolls-Royce was actively encouraging its supply chain partners and collaborators to adopt GRANTA MI as the materials information management standard, easing data transfer issues, assisting partnering and collaboration, and saving costs.

This presentation was followed by a brief overview of the GRANTA MI software and a detailed technical discussion about the performance and capabilities of the system.

The Material Data Management Consortium (MDMC) is a collaborative project of leading engineering organizations established to address this issue. It has identified and solved many of the key practical challenges in enterprise management of materials data and guided the development of a new system, GRANTA MI, that meets these challenges. The ultimate goals of MDMC members are to reduce risk and liability and to save millions of dollars in improved design efficiency.