USE* Digital Labour Time Methodology

We are proud to have helped Jaguar Land Rover radically improve their approach to creating workshop manual data. Our work here provides a good example of how USE* chooses to focus on what will best benefit our customers' business.

Jonathan Quaife, USE* Managing Director

In 2006 USE* (then trading as UK Service Evolution) began to work with Jaguar Land Rover to assess the viability of creating service repair labour times from digital CAD data and without reference to prototype or pre-production vehicles.

The Challenge

CADCAMCAE has been used by automotive OEMs for decades to design vehicles. From component design, the application has spread from component engineers across to crash teams who virtually simulate impacts, to manufacturing, who build the cars on a virtual production line to make sure the build process is ergonomically sound.

In 2006, working with USE* Automotive, Jaguar Land Rover Service Operations began to explore the possibility of using Jaguar Land Rover’s in-house DBA synthetic algorithms (similar to MTM, MODAPTS or MEKBY) to predict labour times for a service method derived from the 3D CAD environment rather than a physical vehicle. These times are used to regulate warranty payments to dealer for in-warranty repairs. With prototype vehicles (traditionally used to create technical literature) costing upwards of US$150,000 the potential to save money was huge.

The Solution

USE* engineers were brought into the Jaguar Land Rover technical publications team to run a pilot on the Freelander 2 workshop manual. Working alongside the authoring team, over 700 digitally-derived procedures and warranty times were created at the same time as the traditionally authored work. The only equipment required by the USE* team was a CAD station, unlike the rest of the authoring team, who needed two prototype vehicles (diesel and petrol variants), vehicle lifts, a dedicated illustrator and digital camera to photograph each step of the repair process, a full suite of workshop tools and a computer each to write up the method.

Its Benefits

The pilot on the Freelander 2 was a resounding success. An immediate benefit was that all of the images used in the Workshop Manual were produced directly from the CAD data. Therefore there was no need for a digital camera or a dedicated illustrator. Authors simply took snapshots of the CAD data as they were working, and at the end of each study annotated the images.

There were also significant benefits in relation to the use of prototype vehicles. Although physical verification is still necessary for some procedures, digital methods reduce the reliance on prototype vehicles, freeing up workshop space and also guaranteeing that the latest data is being used for analysis. By planning the authoring of procedures effectively, the studies that do require physical verification can be scheduled at the end of the design and test cycle, when the vehicles are more readily available, and much cheaper.

Projects can also be completed in a significantly shorter timescale. When using prototypes to develop workshop manual procedures, only two authors can work on a vehicle at any one time, so jobs are effectively queued until other procedures are developed. In relation to this, another benefit is that every variant of a vehicle can be analysed, so trim level, hand-of-drive, fuel type, transmission and market specific models can all be checked for differences, simply by loading different sets of digital data. A team working with the support of CAD data can be as large as required, hence reducing the lead time for the production of the workshop manual.

Our Achievements

The pilot on the Freelander 2 has shown that there is a new way of working when it comes to Workshop Manual production. The comparison of the digitally derived methods against those produced using the physical prototypes showed a highest deviation of 7%, with an average deviation of less than 1%. This sort of deviation would be expected if two authors carried out the same procedure on a vehicle, hence proving that digital methods are accurate enough to play a major role in all future Jaguar Land Rover Workshop Manuals.

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