CAD/IQ Helps Solve Boeing's Legacy Data Challenge

Charles Lee, Integrated Product Lead for Boeing IDS Rotorcraft gave a presentation on "Mylars to Models: Managing Legacy Data Migration" at the 2008 3D Collaboration and Interoperability Conference. Lee explained that he was part of a team assigned to a two-month program to take 2D legacy drawings and migrate them so they could be implemented in a modern 3D CAD infrastructure. He said the goal of the presentation is to give other individuals trying to meet similar challenges an understanding of what he learned while working on the project.

"The goal is to give you an understanding of the things that made us stop and go 'hmm, I wish we'd known that at the beginning.'"

He explained that the Chinook aircraft design project was originally a mix of legacy data that dated back to the 1960's.

"With this particular program everybody thought it would be kind of easy. The program manager said, 'we will just send this out to an engineering service center and we can get them to crank this out for us. They'll give us back some 3D data and then we'll have them come in and load it into ENOVIA. And we'll be done with it.' That didn't work out so well," Lee remarked.

He said the team started off with a 1300 hundred part package that was sent out to two different suppliers. The majority of the package was made up of Mylar parts or Mylar-Mylar 2D definitions, "reduced to meshes" which are 3D models augmented by 2D drawings and model base definitions (MBD). The team then set about categorising the parts by data-type and complexity while the suppliers identified which parts they considered simple and which could be defined as complex.

"As we expected, the Mylars took a long time to do, we had to go back and re-master all the 2D definition," said Lee.

Lee said that individuals embarking on a similar venture should keep in mind that Lee and his team sent the parts out to the suppliers, knowing the Mylars were going to be a mess.

"There was a pretty short learning curve to get this up and going. We lost some time to training folks as well."

He explained how there was no magical deus-ex-machina solution to get them past these hurdles. When Lee's team got the data back from the suppliers, they were forced to recreate the views and attached them to the original overlays, to see how they compared. He adds that this was also a very time consuming process. For the few parts that were in 3D and the MBDs models, Lee's team relied upon ITI TranscenData's CADIQ tool. CAD/IQ was used to check for potential errors. Lee explained that typically the team found the Mylars did not have huge drastic problems, but "It's not a huge difference. But if it's off - it's off."

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