Gilmour Space is Australia’s leading venture-capital-backed space technology company developing and launching new Australian-made rockets and satellites to orbit. It started its rocket program in 2015. The company has made considerable progress in developing innovative hybrid propulsion technologies that will enable lower cost access to space.

The challenge

Prior to implementing Duro, the team used SharePoint to manage documentation. However, as Gilmour’s team and activities expanded, they faced challenges with configuration management. To find the latest designs, engineers had to download and email files from various engineering tools. The lack of a change control process also meant that anyone could edit the documents; and it was difficult to track changes, find particular designs from a point in time, or return to a previous baseline.

When evaluating PLM vendors, Gilmour wanted to ensure that they could easily manage design revisions and the change control process. Cost and the flexibility to integrate with Gilmour’s internal systems and third-party tools were also important factors.

The solution

Today, Gilmour Space uses Duro to manage their state of designs and change control processes. Duro is integrated with its CAD, MES, and requirements management tools for sharing data and increasing transparency across the product lifecycle. Many different team members access Duro daily to find design revisions, upload components and track documentation. Gilmour uses Duro to do the following:

    • Maintain a single source of truth for product data: Duro is used across all engineering departments. Anyone can login to understand the state of any design. Changes are reviewed weekly for approval and are rolled in as new revisions before getting moved into Gilmour’s production software.
    • Promote and release designs through CAD integrations: Gilmour integrates Duro with its CAD tools, SolidWorks and Onshape, which allows engineers to quickly sync and release designs into the central source of truth (Duro PLM). It’s easy to track BOM and component property changes (such as mass or material) in CAD as the integrations are seamless and new information is automatically populated into Duro from the CAD tools.  The integrations are used to organize and submit new engineering releases for approval; once approved, the new revisions and released documentation are populated into Duro.
    • Share requirements and manufacturing data across platforms: In addition to integrating Duro with CAD, Gilmour has also integrated Duro with the First Resonance’s Factory Operating System, ION. Parts from Duro are automatically duplicated into ION every six hours and validated. Whenever anything changes in Duro, the order details are immediately pushed across to ION. This allows the manufacturing group to start their planning and define their work schedule.

Results

The partnership has enabled Gilmour to reliably predict and track production timelines. It enhanced:

    • Predictability: By being able to track cost, mass, and lead time of parts for the launch vehicle, Gilmour is now able to reliably predict and track production timelines.
    • Collaboration: All users of our engineer data can easily find information about any part of Gilmour’s products. They can quickly find the latest revision to work on.
    • Traceability & compliance: The team gained full traceability of changes between different versions of the launch vehicle. All the relevant information is easily surfaced for review by regulators to get launch permission.
    • Repeatability: Gilmour has captured the entire BOM for launch vehicles within Duro. They have enough information about materials, parts and assemblies that it’s possible to copy-paste rocket designs and speed up the iteration process.

The future vision

The goal of the partnership is to use software, including Duro, to give the engineers more time for design. Gilmour plans to use data from Duro with other platforms to simulate different scenarios and quickly discover the impact of design changes on mission requirements. Today, Duro’s sourcing data showing mass, price and availability to help them factor in parts data to their design. Adding even more intelligence could show how a design change would impact orbit and mass. This type of integration with high fidelity modeling and simulation would be used to catch potential issues and ensure engineering changes have the biggest benefits.