Project Background

Lanzhou Taiji Ion Technology Co., Ltd. was established in April 2002 and is a high-tech enterprise under Sinokem Ion Medical Technology Co., Ltd.

The company currently employs over 400 staff, primarily composed of personnel holding bachelor’s degrees or higher. It is one of the very few enterprises in China that possesses the qualifications and capabilities for the design, manufacturing, commissioning, and operation & maintenance of medical heavy-ion accelerators (i.e., carbon ion therapy systems). The company has successively obtained ISO 9001 and ISO 13485 quality management system certifications and holds relevant credentials including Class III medical device manufacturing and distribution licenses, as well as a radiation safety license for Class I radiation equipment.

Project Objectives

The implementation of the SIPM/PLM project aims to achieve the following objectives:

Streamline and standardize the company’s engineering and R&D processes through this platform, enabling full digitization of business workflows.

Establish a product knowledge base to accumulate the company’s intellectual assets and ensure the accuracy, completeness, standardization, and security of product data.

Implement electronic management of R&D documents and enable digital signatures for engineering drawings.

Centered around the Bill of Materials (BOM), achieve integrated management of technical documentation and establish seamless technical information flows.

Ensure all drawings, process documents, and other technical materials are stored in the system before being released.

Generate product materials and BOMs directly from the PLM system.

Conduct all design-related activities within the PLM system, standardizing and institutionalizing the change management process to guarantee 100% system-controlled changes and full traceability of all technical data.

Consolidate both products and projects under PLM management, providing strong support for transitioning R&D operations from a project-based model to a product-centric approach.

Integrate data flows between PLM, SAP, and OA systems.

Based on the company’s current business landscape, the project will holistically plan R&D management, establish an appropriate product development process, and institutionalize these R&D workflows through the SIPM/PLM software platform.

Project Management

Carbon ion therapy systems are highly complex and physically large, requiring coordinated efforts across dozens of departments throughout the R&D process. The entire R&D and production cycle typically spans several years, during which significant challenges arise in cross-departmental collaboration and data synchronization.

To address these collaboration issues, Taiji reviewed and optimized its project management processes and developed customized project management templates aligned with its actual business needs. By implementing the Project Management module within the PLM system, these templates were standardized and institutionalized, ensuring a disciplined R&D workflow. During project execution, progress milestones are mandatorily linked to required deliverables, clearly defining the relationship between schedule and outputs—making the management of long-cycle projects more transparent and efficient.

When initiating a new project, existing project workflows are analyzed and consolidated into system-compatible templates, which are then loaded into the PLM system. For future projects, teams can quickly launch planning by selecting an appropriate template. Each newly created project includes detailed planning of the project team, phases, schedules (including milestones), and expected deliverables. Through direct assignment and decomposition of tasks from the master plan, responsibilities are clearly assigned to individuals, with defined timelines and estimated work hours—ensuring thorough and robust project planning. Additionally, built-in reports and dashboards enable real-time tracking of project progress, facilitating ongoing monitoring, optimization, and effective project governance.

Project status can be monitored and project execution analyzed through the project dashboard, facilitating effective project oversight and timely adjustments.

Equipment Management

Due to the large physical footprint and complex composition of carbon ion therapy equipment—with numerous newly introduced components—Lanzhou Taiji implemented a fixed-point numbering system for product equipment. During the R&D phase, this approach precisely defines the physical installation location of each component at the actual site, significantly improving efficiency in both equipment installation and after-sales service.

However, under the previous offline management approach, changes to equipment numbering involved complex technical requirements and coordination across multiple departments, often resulting in delayed or inefficient information synchronization. To resolve this issue, Taiji introduced an equipment numbering mapping function within the PLM system, converting paper-based records into real-time synchronized digital data. This effectively eliminated inconsistencies in equipment numbering information across departments.

Product Management

Given the high complexity of carbon ion therapy equipment, it is essential to ensure efficient cross-departmental collaboration without mutual interference. To achieve this, the top-level product materials are organizationally separated from the main BOM structure through a configuration list. These top-level materials are then categorized by functional subsystems—such as Magnet BOM, Power Supply BOM, Accelerator BOM, Ion Source BOM, etc.—resulting in 14 distinct top-level BOMs structured under the overall product.Each department is responsible for maintaining the BOM structure corresponding to its assigned configuration list. When transmitting data to SAP, these individual BOMs are automatically assembled into a single, complete BOM structure.

R&D Material Management

Technical documents related to materials—such as historical drawings, 2D drawings, and other relevant information—are data-linked to their corresponding parts, enabling engineers and technical staff to easily access and review the necessary information.

Material Inventory Management

By integrating with the SAP system, real-time inventory information for corresponding materials is retrieved from SAP, enabling design engineers to make informed assessments during design or change processes, thereby improving design efficiency.

Part Classification

The system automatically classifies parts based on their attributes, facilitating easier search and management for R&D personnel and enhancing the usability and convenience of the system.

Dynamic Part Query

The system enables separate queries for parts based on two statuses—newly added and modified—allowing users to retrieve data on different categories of materials by year and month. This functionality provides R&D managers with an intuitive way to view the parts generated by the R&D department in a given year and specific months, serving as a valuable data reference for managing R&D activities.

BOM Management

The system constructs the BOM structure based on part data and displays it in a BOM tree format, significantly improving the efficiency with which R&D personnel can view and navigate the BOM.

Materials

By leveraging the PLM system, design data and process quota (material consumption) information are separated from the BOM structure. The process quota data is not permitted to directly modify the design BOM structure.

A raw materials library is maintained within the PLM system, with material attributes and corresponding details managed systematically. Based on material characteristics, quota parameters and calculation formulas are defined. When performing quota calculations, users simply select the appropriate raw material through the quota function, and the system automatically computes the required quantity based on the predefined parameters and formulas—significantly improving the efficiency of process quota management.When synchronizing with SAP, the system reassembles the design BOM and the quota data into a complete BOM structure according to predefined logic, ensuring accurate and consistent data integration.

Design Software Integration

By implementing an interface with 2D design software, the BOM creation process has shifted from manual entry to automatically extracting BOM structure data from the title blocks and parts lists in engineering drawings. This ensures consistency between drawings and the BOM structure and significantly enhances R&D efficiency.

By using a unified design software platform, the system centrally manages 2D drawing files extracted via the interface. In subsequent design work, engineers can quickly locate required drawings in the system through the interface functionality, facilitating efficient reuse and reference during later-stage design activities.

Historical Drawings

For drawings that have not been organized and thus cannot be extracted via the interface, these will be uniformly organized and placed into the historical drawings archive. This centralized approach facilitates easier searching and retrieval by engineers. Additionally, the drawings will be marked to indicate their organization status.

Document Template Management

A standardized company-wide template library has been established, providing R&D personnel with consistent document templates. This reduces the time required to create documentation and enhances the standardization of R&D deliverables.

Technical Documentation

A technical documentation management module has been implemented, establishing bidirectional associations between parts and their corresponding technical documents to enable structured management of technical files.

Standard Documents

Enterprise standards, industry standards, national standards, and other reference documents required during the R&D and design process are centrally managed. This reduces the time designers spend searching for documentation and improves the efficiency of resource utilization.

Approval Workflow

Corresponding approval workflows have been established in the PLM system for different object types—such as parts, technical documents, drawings, and models—with designated approvers assigned to each approval node. This enables design engineers to quickly select the appropriate workflow, which is also displayed in a clear, visual format for ease of use.

Coding Management

Through the PLM system's coding management functionality, custom codes are uniformly assigned to all data objects within the system, replacing the previous manual process of requesting codes from administrators and significantly improving coding request efficiency.

Electronic Signatures

By configuring appropriate approval workflows for engineering drawings and Office documents, the system enables electronic signatures for technical documents and drawings. This streamlines traditional approval processes and reduces enterprise operational costs.

Change Management

After the implementation of the PLM system, all change management activities are conducted entirely within the PLM system. This ensures that only one authoritative, archived version of the data exists after each change. Every change is governed by a rigorous approval process, with complete records of the entire change procedure automatically captured and archived. As a result, changes are clearly defined and fully traceable.

Establishing a Knowledge Repository to Enable Organizational Knowledge Transfer

By leveraging the PLM system’s knowledge management module, the company has established a centralized knowledge repository, effectively capturing and preserving institutional knowledge to facilitate efficient knowledge transfer across the organization.

SAP Material and BOM Interface Integration

Through interface integration with SAP, material and BOM data are synchronized between PLM and SAP systems. This enables seamless transfer of R&D-generated materials and BOMs from PLM into SAP, breaking down data silos between systems and significantly improving overall enterprise operational efficiency.

OA Integration

By integrating with the OA system, users can open PLM approval-related data directly within the OA system to perform review and approval tasks. This enhances cross-system workflow efficiency.

WEB Dashboard

Using a WEB dashboard, you can quickly and clearly display the general status of research and development as well as project management through graphical interfaces.

Summary

Through this PLM implementation, the company has completed a comprehensive overhaul of its data related to document and drawing management, projects, processes, and more, establishing seamless data flows between PLM, SAP, and OA systems. Additionally, system-driven logical validations ensure the completeness and consistency of product data, significantly enhancing R&D efficiency. A digital collaboration platform built upon PLM has now been successfully established.