Magna Steyr is one of the world’s leading automotive engineering suppliers of niche vehicle production, assembly and concept development, as well as a leading supplier of powertrain modules and all-wheel-drive systems. "Grid technology from IBM and Platform Computing reduced the time required for our clash testing from 72 hours to 4 hours and contributed significantly to enhancing our design quality," said Dr. Heinz Mayer, Magna Steyr.

The IBM Grid Offering for Design Collaboration: Clash Analysis in Automotive, Aerospace and Defense helps automotive and aerospace design engineers use Grid technology for more rapid evaluation of design alternatives during sub-assembly clash analysis. Developed in cooperation with Platform Computing, the offering includes CATIA and ENOVIA application software. It helps reduce the time required to capture, compile and analyze clash research data and can accelerate product development and time to market.

"Clash analysis is an integral part of our PLM Solutions, and critical to our customers' success," said Dominique Florack, executive vice-president, Strategy, Research and Development, Dassault Systèmes. "The combination of Dassault Systèmes' ENOVIA Clash Management offering along with IBM's Grid technology can provide a unique competitive advantage. We are working with IBM to leverage the power of Grid computing to help our customers take maximum advantage of PLM."

According to independent market analyst IDC, Grid computing in the Manufacturing Sector is projected to be a $2.6 billion market opportunity by 2006. IDC projects the total Grid opportunity at more than $13 billion by 2007, a compound annual growth rate of 83 percent.

"Increased bandwidth, the acceptance of industry standards and sophisticated software are the key enablers of Grid computing and IBM has embraced each component within our Product Lifecycle Management portfolio," said Scott Hopkins, general manager, IBM PLM. "Leveraging Grid computing, our supply chain customers are taking guess work and costly errors out of product design to position themselves as innovative partners."

"As automotive vendors outsource more and more design work of mechanical and electrical components to their supply partners, dealing with more complexity in less time becomes a major competitive advantage," said Merten Slominsky, General Manager, Industrial Manufacturing, Platform. "Magna Steyr has realized that integrating leading PLM and PDM software with Platform's Grid software can produce substantial gains in quality and time to market for their core business. As a consequence, their application produces results up to 18 times faster, delivering outstanding oductivity gains."

IBM also announced new Grid projects at Cetim, the French technical center for the mechanical industry, which will use Grid technology in design and fabrication; at the Institut Français du pétrole (French Petroleum Institute or IFP), an independent research center for oil exploration, and at OMRON, a Japanese electronics manufacturer, to speed product development.