How a championship-winning race team cut engineering cycles by 30%

Advanced project management software speeds performance improvements to the track

In a world where split seconds spell the difference between winning and losing, Team Penske’s engineers are under constant pressure to boost the performance of their cars.

But Team Penske’s engineers were frustrated. They were using a variety of manual tools to track bills of materials and manage other logistics.

An estimated 65% of their time was spent moving Excel files back and forth from one place to another, and 35% was spent on other tasks, including designing parts, getting parts to the cars and to the track, and getting the cars to the track.

If the team hoped to continue its remarkable track record — more than 400 major race wins, 16 Indy 500 wins, and 29 National Championships — they needed to spend less time on management and more time engineering faster cars.

Defining transformation

Team Penske hired DXC Technology to enhance their engineering process. We started with a “digital transformation workshop” where we optimized the team’s engineering software to identify workflow inefficiencies and opportunities.

DXC Technology helped Team Penske upgrade and customize its product lifecycle management (PLM) software and optimize its PTC Windchill solution. The goal: Help Team Penske engineers use their time more efficiently and productively. The workshop expedited processes and improved the team’s overall performance.

Getting to work

Team Penske engineers applied learnings from the workshop in their newly optimized software environment. Now they can collaborate without interfering with each other’s designs. That’s key, because turnaround times on required design changes are often measured in hours.

By streamlining tasks and consolidating engineering data center facilities, Team Penske has reduced costs, doubled the accuracy of component library parts and improved design quality and speed.

Racing ahead

A productive engineer is a happy engineer. The Team Penske Racing engineering team now spends less time on tedious management tasks, and more time designing and building record-setting cars. They’re able to use common tools to reduce translation and data migration errors, in record-breaking time, and to help them continue to win on the race circuit.

*This success story was originally written by HPE Enterprise Services, which is now a part of DXC Technology as of April 2017.