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PLM: A Strategy for Increased Manufacturing Productivity
Makes possible 25 to 50 percent productivity improvement in tool-making
alone
By Tony Hakola and Michael Horning
Article provided by ENOVIA Corp.
People often describe Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) as a technology. It
is more appropriately described as a strategy for making companies more
innovative and productive by applying a number of technologies. These tools
enable manufacturing companies to capture, use, and build upon the
intellectual property created by design and manufacturing engineers, and to
do so all the way from the concept of a product to the very end of its life.
A few years ago, it became apparent that manufacturing companies needed
technology to capture essential data, usually embodied in engineering
activities and documentation, to make it available when required to those
who needed it, and still to keep it secure.
By mid-2002, CAD-using engineers
complained that the hardest part of their jobs was finding data they needed.
They had to search through files, load pictures of models, and hunt for the
right one. That difficulty extended through the enterprise, where
manufacturing engineers needed to design and build tools based on similar
data, and non-engineering people, such as financial department people trying
to figure out cost data on a particular configuration, dealt with similar
problems.
To solve those problems and
replace frustration with efficiency, PLM needs to leverage design data by
making it more available for collaboration and use across the extended
enterprise. By doing so, it brings together design engineers, manufacturing
engineers, maintenance engineers, and non-engineering personnel and
departments who manage material requirements, cost, sales and marketing –
and extends data creation to include manufacturing. PLM also ensures that if
any single individual should leave the enterprise, his or her knowledge
remains.
More than product design
PLM is about more than product
design. To be competitive in the current world economy, companies need a PLM
strategy centered on an integrated product model that incorporates
manufacturing data. To enable such a system, the company needs a software
infrastructure – a layer that interfaces with the operating system. PLM
applications come next, and these break down into two layers – a pure
application layer and a layer of common components that apply across PLM,
where configuration and document management belong, those things typically
thought of as PDM applications.
An example of increasingly
comprehensive PLM capabilities comes from Dassault Systemes (Suresnes,
France), which has developed a PLM tool set consisting of three major
components: CATIA for computer-aided design (CAD) and manufacturing (CAM);
ENOVIA for PDM as well as communication and links for all the other tools;
and DELMIA for manufacturing process management. Each product can work
independently, but when they work together, they use relationships
established in the design process to speed and ease the work of
manufacturing and many other company departments. An array of visualization
and collaboration tools work within and between the major software segments
to assist users.
Using the V5 architecture,
Dassault Systemes has created an advanced environment for knowledge creation
and management that allows organizations to define, plan, and simulate both
product and process design. Companies can prove out their designs and
manufacturing processes before investing in materials, fixtures,
manufacturing equipment, and other fixed assets needed to support
production. As the system component that recognizes relationships in design
definitions and transfers them to manufacturing, ENOVIA is a key part of
this environment.
Managing Manufacturing Data
Just as it manages design
engineering data, ENOVIA manages manufacturing data. Relationships between
CAD models and tool design – or sheet metal bending and NC cutting paths –
requires relationship with design engineering data.
Every company has its own process
for timing when design data becomes available to manufacturing engineers. In
the case of parts that remain constant from one version to another, with
possible minor changes, tooling can be started early. Some companies wait
until the entire product design has been approved, others make it available
at 70% of completion. But whenever the company triggers release,
manufacturing engineers get design models from which to work.
CATIA V5 supports both product
and process information. The CAD model contains design, material, and
manufacturing process data associated with each part – which the tooling
engineer can access to design the tool. He can take advantage of the
ENOVIA-CATIA relationship by bringing a part for which he wants to design
tooling into his own session of CATIA. Within CATIA, he has access to the
CAD program’s relational design capabilities. Relational design makes it
possible for design engineers to access performance and manufacturing
requirements and reconcile them with the design nearly automatically – and
then keep that data related to the design when it goes to manufacturing
engineers, who use it to create tooling.
So, if the product to be
manufactured is a car assembly, the manufacturing engineer who needs to
build a tool to manufacture the frame, for example, can bring the frame
design into his own CATIA session. There he can extract overall design and
part definitions, the relationship data associated with the CAD model, and
necessary data from an engineering Bill of Materials.
The manufacturing requirements
data associated with the CATIA model assists meeting key tool-making
requirements – such as clamping and repeating build operations over and over
at a high level of quality. It also determines the areas where extremely
high quality and adherence to tolerances are most critical, and makes it
easier to design a tool to produce that quality. Having that information
made available virtually automatically saves time in designing tools. In
fact, it results in an approximate 25% productivity increase in tool-making.
Even more time savings come from
relational design when the designers want to make changes in an existing
product. Because the relationship already exists in the CAD model, it takes
very little human intervention to update the tooling in accordance with the
design change. All the manufacturing engineer has to do is check to make
sure the update meets his needs. The productivity improvement related to
tooling updates is about 50%. The same is true for sheet-metal bending or
the NC cutter path.
Overall manufacturing can benefit
equally from V5 tools, because the same information that smoothes the path
between design and toolmaking can also be leveraged by DELMIA, which defines
the manufacturing process, plant layout, fixturing design, and application.
With DELMIA tools, the manufacturing engineer can simulate the entire
manufacturing process, before incurring manufacturing costs.
The combination of the three
solutions really enables concurrent engineering. Process simulation can
suggest possible product changes that may enhance manufacturing. ENOVIA
makes it possible for design and manufacturing engineers to collaborate on
any changes needed to make the agreed improvements.
Impact Analysis with ENOVIA
ENOVIA connects design and
manufacturing by reaching out, obtaining necessary data, making sure all the
links among different data are valid, and maintains the relationships in
relational design and manufacturing. It does even more when changes to
designs are contemplated.
Because it can access so much
data related to manufacturing, ENOVIA can perform impact analyses and tell
management how much manpower, resources, and money it will cost to make a
given change. For example, it can identify the parts of the manufacturing
process that will be impacted by a specific change and come back with a
report saying that it will take, say, five people working on a specific
process at a particular station for one week to make the change, along with
one other person changing tool-paths with CAM.
This data makes it possible for
management to see the full scope of work prior to approving a change, and to
make a far more educated decision about whether or not to go ahead. This can
make the difference, for example, between a change that costs $10,000, and
one that costs $1 million.
Overall savings, efficiency, and
productivity
The time and cost savings
discussed, along with much greater ability for design and manufacturing
engineers to work together more easily, show the overall benefits of PLM
built around an integrated product model. If a company aims for enhanced
innovation, along with improved manufacturing efficiency, quality, economy,
and consequent productivity, a sound PLM strategy coupled with technological
tools that capture, relate, and distribute the required data has become
essential. By integrating all these tools in the V5 architecture, Dassault
Systemes significantly enhances engineering productivity and improves the
manufacturing process.
About the Authors
Tony Hakola is the director of
technical marketing at ENOVIA Corp. Michael Horning is a senior applications
engineer for ENOVIA Corp.
About ENOVIA Corp.
Created in 1998 as a wholly owned
subsidiary of Dassault Systemes, ENOVIA Corp. develops product life cycle
management solutions, including: product lifecycle management applications,
collaborative solutions, service and after sales support solutions, and
digital mockup software. Since 1998, ENOVIA's success has grown the IBM
Product Data Management customer base from under 100 customers to over 1300
customers worldwide. ENOVIA Corp. is located in Charlotte, North Carolina,
USA.
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