Digital manufacturing drives PLM adoption

Having invested in mechanical CAD/CAM/CAE, tool manufacturers are looking at tools and solutions that can help them in collaborating on new designs, speed up product development and improve processes. AKHTAR PASHA analyses the installed base of PLM and says it will help manufacturers expand their addressable market

In the early 1990s enterprise resource planning (ERP) was the top IT investment priority in the manufacturing sector. Today, industry pundits believe that product lifecycle management (PLM) is the next big thing in IT for manufacturing. Looking at the companies that are adopting PLM there are good reasons to believe that we can expect strong growth from this segment. Discrete manufacturers using PLM include the likes of Mahindra & Mahindra, Brakes India, Aeronautical Defence Agency (ADA), which is using PLM in manufacturing India’s Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), Bharat Electronics (BEL), ISRO, L&T (HED) and Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC). There are a dozen more on the list.

PLM is an umbrella concept that covers everything from the creation [design] of a product and documentation of product designs and specifications, the manufacturing process and in-service modification until disposal—from cradle to grave. It will be essential to industrial users of IT in a connected, digital economy and hence important to companies that are in the digital manufacturing space. PLM is about putting products first and vendors such as EDS PLM, PTC, IBM and Cadd Solutions are focusing on this space.

Vivek Marwaha says that since core revenues from MCAD are declining or stagnant, vendors are turning to PLM for growth

These vendors realise that they can win big if they dominate this category. SAP and Baan—both strong contenders in the ERP space—see the emerging PLM sector as a potentially large market. As the field embraces everything from computer-aided design to supply chain management (SCM) and the planning and manufacturing functions enshrined in ERP, there are plenty of competitors out there. In the lead are EDS, PTC, Baan, SAP and Cadd Solutions, companies that are already deriving revenues from PLM. “Manufacturing is only 30 percent of the product development cost but the remaining 70 percent is locked during the design phase of New Product Development (NPD). One can bring down this cost significantly using PLM,” says Bhupesh Lall, director, PTC India.

Why PLM is important for digital manufacturing

Digital manufacturing concepts have been around for many years—their roots lie in lean manufacturing, agile manufacturing, just-in-time manufacturing, design for assembly, design for manufacturing, and concurrent engineering—concepts that have been floating around since the mid-1990s. In fact, new technologies today are beginning to deliver on many of the early promises of computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM), formulated decades ago.

Applications encompassed by digital manufacturing generally include tools for the definition, visualisation, simulation, and analysis of the step-by-step operations necessary to manufacture a new product. PLM helps in developing the flow of work on the factory floor, taking into account the speed, capacity, and output of various stations that make up the production operation.

The critical role of digital manufacturing in new product design (NPD) has been recognised by a growing number of PLM vendors. These companies understand that collaboratively developing the manufacturing process plan, concurrently with the design of the product, lets a manufacturer optimise his entire product lifecycle. The benefit lies in identifying and fixing production-related problems early in the cycle and developing a product design that can be produced as economically and efficiently as possible, tailored for each manufacturing facility. This is in stark contrast with the way most companies traditionally operate. Earlier designs were thrown over the wall to manufacturing, only for problems to be exposed. Remedying these problems through design modifications and engineering changes, resulting in scrap and re-work, cost the company its time and resources.

Vertical drivers for PLM

Collaboration and outsourcing is slowly growing in India. Digital manufacturers, including automobile giants such as GM and Ford, as well as companies such as GE, have set up virtual design centres in India. Caterpillar India has a design centre in Chennai. The design team collaborates with the worldwide Caterpillar network. As outsourcing is increasing these companies want to collaborate with Tier-1 And Tier-2 suppliers, starting from the design level to the finished product stage.

Additionally, free markets are putting pressure on manufacturers to bring innovative products to market in shorter product development life cycles.

According to Varghese K Daniel, three factors-product innovation, new product development and faster product rollout— have become the new rules of business to gain competitive advantage and to retain marketshare, and are forcing companies to invest in PLM solutions

Globalisation: At Bharat Forge’s Annual General Meeting, the company’s chairman, Baba Kalyani, was quoted saying that his vision is to be among the top three global players in his line of business and grow Bharat Forge’s international business. Several such companies wanting to go beyond national boundaries are facing pressure to cut the product development life cycle and look at global markets. PLM will help manufacturing companies increase their market share and expand their market reach. There are many instances where discrete manufacturing companies wanting to make it big in the global market have used PLM to good effect. Ravi Kathuria, general manager for Enterprise Solutions at Baan India says, “Using our iBaan PLM solution, L&T has been able to improve its delivery by 30 percent and has also reported a 60 percent increase in export revenue.” Says Cadd Solutions director Varghese K Daniel, “Product innovation, new product development and faster product rollouts have become the new rules of business to gain competitive advantage and to retain market share.” He adds that these three factors are forcing companies to invest in PLM solutions. Other challenges plaguing digital manufacturing companies include the problem of dealing with huge volumes of poorly organised engineering data, creating confusion in decision-making, which results in higher production costs.

Vivek Marwaha, country marketing manager, EDS PLM Solutions says, “PLM plays an important role as it sets the framework for collaboration.” As much of a product’s cost is associated with the initial engineering and design process, companies who implement PLM now can reduce spending earlier in the product lifecycle, by eliminating inappropriate designs that could increase cost later, during production.

“PLM solutions bring considerable value to the manufacturing vertical,” says Sreedhara, additional general manager-Product Design Group D&E/Military Radars at BEL. It puts in place a ‘system’ in a company that lets manufacturers develop new products faster in order to compete in the global market. As a part of this system, the fundamental issues of any engineering company—change management, project monitoring, concurrent/collaborative engineering and documentation are solved at the same time.

PLM market worldwide

The PLM market as such includes both traditional Mechanical CAD (i.e. CAD/CAM/CAE) as well as the collaborative Product Definition Management solutions. PLM is therefore a superset of all software solutions that facilitate digital design, simulation, manufacturing, collaboration and visualisation. According to a PLM Market Analysis report by consulting and research firm CIMdata, the overall PLM market was approximately $13.5 billion in 2002. Of that, about 67 percent was for authoring and analysis tools while 33 percent was for collaborative product development. Industry pundits put the PLM market in India to be in excess of Rs 350 crore.

L&T has been able to improve its delivery by 30 percent and it has reported a 60 percent increase in export revenue by using a PLM solution, says ravi kathuria

According to Marwaha, since core revenues from MCAD are declining or stagnant, vendors are turning to PLM for growth. While the growth of the traditional CAD/CAM/CAE market is somewhat slow, applications such as PDM, collaboration and visualisation have been posting good growth rates over the last few years, which is an encouraging trend. This is largely on account of the fact that PLM is fast getting accepted as an important enterprise application, and is seen as being critical to the achievement of business objectives, particularly for manufacturing organisations. Manufacturing companies are realising that while applications like ERP, SCM and CRM did help streamline processes and bring in operational efficiency, they did little to improve a manufacturer’s core functions within the product development processes. In fact, an important role that PLM applications are performing today is the integration of product information with other business functions and applications. The most intriguing suggestion from Dassault Systemes, another strong PLM contender, was that in discrete manufacturing SCM would be absorbed by PLM.

Market trends

The entrance of ERP contenders such as Baan and SAP into the PLM space is a significant market trend for two reasons—it offers immense business potential and manufacturers are accepting PLM. ERP and SCM vendors position PLM as an add-on module to their core category [ERP]. Kathuria says, “Manufacturers do not want disparate solutions. Rather they are looking at one fully-integrated solution that can lower their total cost of ownership. Therefore, it makes perfect business sense to be in the PLM market as well.”

If we look at the sheer number of PLM installations done by Baan India, it shows that ERP vendors are finding a new business opportunity in PLM. Around 20 percent of the company’s revenues came from PLM licenses in 2002. Kathuria adds, “The real value of PLM comes when manufacturing companies have implemented ERP.”

Vendor strategies

EDS is the market leader in the PLM space. Its Teamcenter product is being used by a large number of manufacturers like Tata Motors, Mahindra & Mahindra, Maruti, L&T, Indian Navy and NTPC as their collaborative design engineering framework. Marwaha says, “We have 2,500 live (in production) seats of our PDM/PLM products, apart from a large number of Teamcenter seats under deployment. While we are active in all industry segments, the bulk of users are from discrete manufacturing—automotive, aerospace and industrial machinery markets.”

PTC has broken down Windchill into six vertical solutions for specific needs. Windchill Project Link & PDM link and Control PLM are two vertical solutions for the PLM market. PTC presents PLM as the combination of systems for creating, collaboration and control, just as ERP is the combination of systems for finance, manufacturing and distribution. Baan has a fairly large installed base of ERP [150] and its strategy will be to sell iBaan PLM to its existing customers.

The sheer number of manufacturers using PLM in recent years is indicative of the fact that this market will be a major boost for the enterprise application software space. This movement is not just a marketing gimmick but rather a response to a growing demand from manufacturing companies that are enthusiastically implementing these solutions as part of their long-term competitive and operational strategies. These solutions can put India in top gear to become a manufacturing base in the years to come.

akhtar@expresscomputeronline.com

How PLM helps manufacturers

Helps establish a system through which different stakeholders in the product lifecycle, including those within the organisation and external ones such as suppliers, partners and customers can capture, control, evaluate and leverage product information and knowledge. Maintain smooth flow of product information across the entire product lifecycle. Helps streamline engineering processes. Maximises re-use of intellectual capital. Ensures that all value chain participants are working from the same product assumptions. Eliminates product lifecycle barriers by unlocking product information (that could be product requirements, project data, process data, design geometry, supplier data, product documents and other forms of product data) that is trapped in isolated application systems, and unifying them in a common product-centric framework. Overcomes geographic, organisational and technology boundaries to facilitate collaboration amongst product teams. Improves product innovation, cost efficiency, time-to-market and product quality by providing a real-time collaboration workspace CAD-neutral collaborative environment facilitates the team to configure, digitally mock up, virtually publish and study new product ideas easily. Source: EDS

Evolution of PLM

Over the years, as manufacturing organisations deployed CAD systems, large volumes of data were generated by these systems. The use of CAD systems and the engineering data they spewed out became an integral part of the product development process. This necessitated the design and engineering functions to put in place systems for effective data management, and implement engineering process workflows that would help control and improve the flow, quality and use of this data across an organisation. PLM/PDM addressed issues such as control, quality, re-use, security and availability of engineering data, while providing support for popular techniques such as collaborative engineering. Further, manufacturing organisations have been increasingly outsourcing design and manufacturing work, whereby the need to collaborate, and technologies to support collaboration have gained importance. PLM provided a framework for multiple entities to collaborate in real-time on product design and engineering decisions through 2D and 3D visualisation and interactive modification of engineering data. Manufacturers make extensive use of components in an effort to drive design re-use and achieve flexible configurations. As manufacturers built more of their products from components supplied by others, the need to establish manufacturer-supplier design collaboration was increasingly felt—and fulfilled by PLM applications.

Case study: BEL boosts product design cycle and processes

Bharat Electronics (BEL) was established in year 1954, its corporate office located in Bangalore. Its product design group designs and manufactures electronics and communication equipment used in radar and defence communications, telecommunications covering ground, air and navigational equipment and systems. In the civilian category, BEL offers radars for Air Traffic Control, solar traffic signals, solar lamps and electronic voting machines used by the Election Commission of India. Challenges BEL’s business challenge was the typical one faced by a discrete manufacturing unit. The company deals with large volumes (approximately five lakh drawings) of engineering designs. In the absence of a document management solution, the request for a printout of an engineering drawing (being a manual process) used to take four days to fulfil. The second problem facing the company was control of documents. Designs evolve by iteration. Getting approval for design changes had to go through three to four levels, back and forth, and freezing a particular design used to take 45 to 60 days. The bigger issue was tracking Work In Progress (WIP) [change management] because of which BEL’s production plan used to get affected. The third problem was at the production level where the company has to maintain ISO standards. Because of non-transparency in the system and the workflow being not automated, tracking the changed designs was difficult and at times old drawings used to reach the production floor, which resulted in errors and defective production. M S Sreedhara, additional general manager for Product Design Group/D&E Military Radars at BEL, says, “At every stage of product development, the cost to implement changes increases manifold.” Evaluating PLM In 1998-99 BEL decided to test a PLM solution in a pilot. It evaluated Metaphase from SDRC and found it to be a very high-end solution for its requirement and was not sure whether the solution would work for it. BEL also wanted a customised solution. It then decided to invest in Wrench from Cadd Solutions. The implementation began in early 2000. Benefits Post-implementation, BEL has been able to reduce the average time for approval of engineering designs from 40 days to just six. The approval time for a change request or proposal for drawing shrank from 60 days to 20. The other value of the PLM solution is that requests for printing documents and drawings are made online. Sreedhara adds that savings derived from PLM include reduction in time-consuming tasks such as sending information back and forth, being able to access shared data and restructuring the workflow to change what gets done and when. As a key component of PLM, digital manufacturing processes are being tightly integrated with product development applications, letting BEL effectively optimise product design together with production process plans early in the development cycle. Benefits include shortened development cycles, reduced manufacturing costs, improved product quality and greater manufacturing agility.