Approximately two years ago, Magna and BJEV announced that they would be jointly developing and manufacturing high-quality electric vehicles for the Chinese market. The joint venture set up a greenfield state-of-the-art development center in Zhenjiang for this purpose. It operates under the name Magna Blue Sky NEV Technology (Zhenjiang) and employs about 420 people, who not only develop electric vehicle architectures for the joint venture but also provide engineering services to other customers. The Magna Steyr Group, which is headquartered in Graz, was responsible for implementation of the completely new IT infrastructure.

Magna Blue Sky’s engineers use the mechanical CAD system CATIA V5 from Dassault Systèmes together with the PLM solution Teamcenter from Siemens PLM Software. OpenDXM GlobalX is used to manage data exchange with partners and suppliers. The decision in favor of the world’s leading data exchange platform from PROSTEP did not require a long evaluation process as Magna has been using the OpenDXM products for years and now operates its own OpenDXM GlobalX installation in Graz. “It offers us even greater flexibility and security when exchanging data,” says Oliver Burlon, project manager for data exchange at Magna Steyr.

Working in close cooperation with the IT experts in Graz, PROSTEP’s PLM experts implemented the data exchange platform in Zhenjiang, defined appropriate templates for integrating exchange partners, and adapted the data exchange processes and authorizations to Magna Blue Sky’s specific requirements. A complex approval workflow was implemented to ensure maximum protection of intellectual know-how. It ensures that all exchange processes are approved in accordance with the multiple-eyes principle before the data is made available to partners and suppliers for downloading.

The OpenDXM GlobalX Teamcenter integration allows engineers at Magna Blue Sky to initiate data exchange processes directly from the Teamcenter user interface. This not only makes operation easy but also saves time when data is sent since the export of data from Teamcenter runs completely in the background and users do not have to wait when larger assemblies are being exported. They also have the option of making data from MS Outlook or Windows Explorer available for encrypted exchange with OpenDXM GlobalX.