Increasing outsourcing:
The current trend in the automotive and aerospace manufacturing industry is to out- source parts from specialized suppliers who provide more cost effective and/or quality products than those manufactured in-house.

Globalizations:
Alliances exist on a global basis to ensure maximum benefit from location advantages for example cost, quality and proximity to raw material or markets. These factors have driven the need for better utilisation and management of product related data, across the supply chain and throughout the lifecycle of a product.

Contechs for example have remained strong in a competitive worldwide industry by applying and implementing some advanced engineering focused IT solutions.

One significant solution applied allows Contechs to control and make most efficient usage of all data which exists and flows through the company. Contechs manage and fulfil projects for OEMs and their suppliers as well as for their own in-house initiatives, and are in a position to understand how PLM solutions can be utilised to realise true commercial benefits.Contechs provides aerospace, defence, transportation and several other industries with a comprehensive design, engineering, materials handling, manufacturing, trimming and IT services resource. Utilising the IT Services business unit Contechs has become a technically advanced enterprise. IT Services deploy products and services which are offered not only internally but to other organisations around the world.

The company's services cover almost the complete lifecycle process from initial concepts through to product manufacture, using all mainstream CAD applications, such as ALIAS, ICEMsurf, CATIA, IDEAS, Unigraphics, analysis and manufacturing tools, coupled with an IT andcommunications infrastructure that meets the

needs of many worldwide manufacturers and their tiers of suppliers. From this vantage point, Contechs' engineers are exposed to the changing nature and increasing complexity of engineering data, its management, life cycle and vital position in the average manufacturing process.Until recently, Contechs was almost exclusively an automotive engineering design company but are increasingly developing products in aerospace, defence, marine and other transportation industries. The internal IT Services division allows diversity within the whole organisation by facilitating the integration of the OEMs and suppliers, enabling them to meet criteria set and in more cases raise the standard in performance. Due to the vast range of markets, products and tools used, PLM has been introduced, not only as business efficiency but as business necessity.

A Unique Vision?
Contechs are required to integrate with OEM's PLM systems on behalf of their customers or indeed themselves for their own design and engineering work, whilst tier one and tier two suppliers have to quickly follow suit once OEM's make PLM strategy decisions, and a lot of work now involves system integration for downstream suppliers.

This enables Contechs to see the PLM strategies of various OEM's in the context of their effect through the supply chain. Through the Contechs IT Services business unit, Contechs has provided consultancy services to accord with their customer’s PLM systems. Since PLM has different faces in different circumstances and various standards prevail there is no shortage of providing IT hardware, software and consultancy solutions.

The development of PLM is as much a cultural leap as a technological one. For example, in the design context, traditionally, engineers within a supply chain created engineering models as discrete data sets that were exchanged, released and eventually stored. The lifecycle of the model was considered unimportant, as was its relationship to other data. Now with the advent of PLM, every aspect of the lifecycle process can be viewed in the context of the broader picture.