Shineray Group

According to Gong Daxing, the chairman of China-based manufacturer Shineray Group, today’s average Chinese consumer is not looking for a luxury new energy vehicle (NEV). Instead, they are looking for something more practical: an electric car with a long range that is simple and affordable.

“Some crazy developers choose to equip the cars lavishly, and turn them into products that will cost 300,000 to 400,000 yuan (€37,872 to €50,497),” he said in an open letter published earlier this year. “This is unacceptable for the target consumers who just want to spend 100,000 yuan (€12,650) on this sort of car. As a consequence, it defeats the original purpose of this category of vehicles.”

That’s why Shineray – which manufactures cars, motorcycles and machinery – has unveiled the SWM Giant Tiger Edi. This seven-seat electric SUV costs less than 100,000 yuan and has a 1,000km range.

At a time when many of China’s NEV manufacturers are struggling to stay profitable – it’s predicted that the number of electric car makers in China will shrink from about 200 to between five and 10 in the coming years – Shineray’s ability to create an affordable NEV, alongside other new energy vehicles, is quite the accomplishment, owed largely to its investment in modern technology that has delivered new levels of efficiency.

But it hasn’t always been this way. Just a few years ago, Shineray realized that its manual approach to managing the bills of materials (BOMs) for its vehicles was holding it back.

Each BOM type – including the engineering bill of materials (EBOM), the manufacturing bill of materials (MBOM) and the service bill of materials (SBOM) – for each vehicle type was managed by different teams and archived on a network disk server without any organizational structure. Whenever a modification was made, another BOM copy was created, increasing the risk of mismatching engineering data which could span tens of thousands of parts. These inconsistencies made it very difficult for Shineray’s employees to manage changes and customization requests. What’s more, it was costing the business downtime every month because errors weren’t picked up on until production.

With this in mind, Shineray wanted a single integrated platform that could create accurate BOMs, streamline collaboration between disparate teams, make it easier to customize its products and facilitate more effective change management. At the same time, the solution needed to be compatible with its existing CATIA V5 design tools which were also used by many of its customers and suppliers.

Shineray sought advice from local Dassault Systèmes business partner Yaotang Technology.

After taking time to fully understand Shineray’s needs, Yaotang recommended Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform. This includes ENOVIA – a product lifecycle management (PLM) solution to support collaborative project and data management and to unify Shineray’s separate engineering, manufacturing and software teams – and POWER’BY, which allows Shineray to connect its CATIA V5 data to the platform, achieving integrated BOM management.

Implementation was straightforward, thanks to Yaotang’s assistance. The partner was on hand to answer day-to-day queries and to deliver ongoing training.

Shineray’s data is now consistent and connected, and engineering, software and manufacturing departments can access a single source of truth. With improved data quality comes BOM consistency.

With POWER’BY connectivity, changes in the BOM are immediately reflected in the CATIA V5 model and, if needed, the product structure of the whole vehicle can be visualized via a DMU (digital mockup). The ability to share the DMU internally, and with the customer, at the earliest stage of product development, has made for much more effective cross-team collaboration and has ensured any errors are picked up before the production stage, significantly reducing downtime.

Overall, by enabling continuous design optimization and the ability to track product development progress in real time, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform has improved production efficiency. Ultimately, Shineray believes this has helped it to react quickly to new market opportunities, resulting in its strong position in the global NEV market.