WRENCH helps BHEL trim product design cycle time

WRENCH PLM has helped BHEL reduce design document movement time by 35 percent and cut advice processing time by 50 percent, a perfect example of how Indian product manufacturers can bring products faster to market by reducing the time spent in designing products, says Akhtar Pasha

The main criteria for selection of the PLM software was the assessment of the capability of the vendor to customise the processes as followed in BHEL, and good product support, says Rajesh Gupta

Bharat Heavy Electricals (BHEL), Hardwar, designs and manufactures a large number of products such as hydro, gas and steam turbines, turbo generators, condensers and motors. Products manufactured at BHEL’s Hardwar unit are

mostly engineered-to-order. Implementing WRENCH PLM from Cadd Solutions helped BHEL cut down product design cycle time, and in improving its change advice system, thereby bringing out products faster to market.

Business challenges faced by BHEL

The Engineering Design department of BHEL prepares engineering drawings, which are then approved by its technology arm before releasing the same for manufacturing. It is a critical process as the technology cell first studies the feasibility of manufacturing the components in-house. The check-prints of a drawing are sent to the technology section as paper printouts. The technologists work on these paper drawings, adding comments and remarks. The process was complex and time-consuming and following up on these drawings was a tedious process. Some critical problems BHEL had to contend with are given below.

Managing engineering drawings was cumbersome

The engineering information systems of BHEL that manage drawings and their revisions, print requisition, microfilms and cardex systems were not automated—they were manual, paper-based systems. Drawings were created using AutoCAD and were managed using Motiva DesignGroup. Motiva was used as a vault and it was not integrated with other drawing-related online database systems like combined bill of material (CBOM), print requisition systems and the revision management system. Users have to enter the profile data of components (title block data) both in the drawings and in Motiva manually. The basic problem was that in Motiva, users were not able to see all the drawings of an assembly at one go.

Additionally, each assembly deals with multiple components, their specifications and properties. BHEL needed a system that would not only enhance the design approval process but also fit with existing online drawing-related database systems. Rajesh Gupta, senior deputy general manager-IT, BHEL says, “Generally bill of material (BOM) systems are part of PLM systems but in our case we already had a combined bill of materials (CBOM) system with which our new PLM system was required to be integrated seamlessly.”

Additionally, the BOM was de-linked from the engineering drawings. Gupta adds, “The engineering information management systems uses the CBOM for material procurement and shipping list.”

Complicated change advice system

A change advice (CA) was raised manually by the designers. The CA was first sent to the technologist for approval (by hand). The technical services department, after receipt, used to assign a change advice number to it. Then it was routed to the microfilming section (MF) for microfilming. After this it was sent to the central technical archive (CTA). The CTA issued the drawing if it was a manual sketch, otherwise a red mark was put and it was sent to the printing section for releasing the electronic drawing for change. After making changes, the drawing was submitted and the change advice form was sent manually to technical services. MF and CTA activities were repeated. “The main drawback was that this process was extremely slow and time-consuming. Also, tracking the change advice both by engineering and technical services was a big pain. Since the CA system was semi-manual, activities such as allotment of change advice number, generation of print request of the changed drawings were done in isolation and were not linked with the actual revision of drawings,” says D L Oberoi, deputy general manager-Technical Services, BHEL.

Manual print request generation

In the earlier system print requests were generated through the CBOM system but sometimes the drawings were not submitted (or released) in Motiva as the two systems were not integrated, leading to delays in print distribution. The print requests of the drawings were further uploaded to the print requisition system. Depending on this data, prints were taken by the technical services department from Motiva and distributed. The updation in the print requisition system was done manually for monitoring and reporting.

Manual workflow, approval & mark-up

The check prints of the drawings after being made in AutoCAD were requested by the engineering department to be sent to main technology section for approval. The complete group (entire assembly product) was sent to all the concerned sub-technology units one at a time. After technology put its remarks down, the bundle was sent back to main technology, which forwarded it back to the engineering department. The complete process was manual and therefore it was very slow and there were many agencies involved (contract manufacturers). Gupta says, “A lot of follow-up was required. The activities, which could have been done in parallel, were done serially. Mark-up and signatures were done on paper, which could not be produced electronically. Designers had to keep the signed check prints to take care of any future discrepancies.”

Poor reporting system

No reporting system was available in Motiva and reports were generated manually.

Issues related to Motiva DesignGroup

Motiva was being used as a vault for drawings and limited approval workflow within engineering. No concept of PDM was present in it at that time and all the drawings were considered individual entities.

Evaluation

To solve its business problem, BHEL evaluated seven PLM solutions in 2002 from vendors such as Infotech Enterprise (eMatrix), TCS (iMan), Cadd Centre Scanning Technologies (DataViewer), EDS (EDS PLM, erstwhile Metaphase), HOPE Technologies (Motiva), PTC (Windchill) and Cadd Solutions (WRENCH).

BHEL set eight parameters for selecting a PLM solution and floated a limited tender to eight vendors. Gupta adds, “The main criteria for selection of the PLM software was the assessment of the capability of the vendor to customise the processes as followed in BHEL and good product support.” WRENCH from Cadd Solutions was selected on this basis.

Pilot to study system, customisation and training

A pilot to study the system kicked off in October 2002. Starting from the group initiation till the manufacturing of the actual assembly, there are many processes associated with drawings. To understand the complete system, an implementation team of 17 personnel from all the concerned engineering and technology departments was formed. This team finalised the software specification requirements (SRS), based on which the WRENCH was customised to suit BHEL’s requirements.

To facilitate the use of WRENCH in engineering, training has been given to all 300 users of the system. During training sessions many suggestions came from the users that were incorporated in the new system. Support and hands-on training is provided to users. Cadd Tech, a third-party training solution provider, conducted the training process.

Staged rollout

BHEL decided to divide the implementation in two phases. In phase one, BHEL implemented the engineering part i.e. automating and simplifying drawing management, checks and approval. In phase two, the complete system was implemented, including product data management (PDM), drawing and document management (collaboration with other departments), release management and change/configuration management.

Phase one

Phase one began in January 2003 and was completed by February 25, 2003. During this phase, PDM was integrated with CBOM for viewing the complete product structure. The process of submission and approval by engineering of drawings, an electronic CA system for electronic drawings, migration of Motive and the online database, computerisation of microfilming and CTA activities were automated. Automatic print request generation and updation of database for printed drawings, and revision of drawings was executed.

Phase two

Phase two implementation began in June 2003 after stabilising the implementation in the engineering department. The PLM project went live in all the modules, including PDM, drawing and document management, release management and change management in September 2003. Phase two began with the implementation of technology workflow & approval system. This was a significant activity as the technology departments used to work with paper prints. There are seven technology departments and the drawings of an assembly can go to any of them. Usage of attribute-based formats by engineering for linking WRENCH profile data with attributes on the drawings is needed for capturing signatures of persons granting approval.

Benefits

The objective of investing in a PLM solution has paid off for BHEL from day one. Dev Raj, additional general manager-Electrical Machines Engineering, BHEL says, “WRENCH PLM has helped our department in reducing the design document movement time by 35 percent and change advice processing time by 50 percent.” WRENCH PLM has also been able to reduce the time spent during workflow and online approval.

Some other quantifiable benefits are:

Integration with CBOM

• New system: The complete product structure (PDM) of the CBOM (group) is available to the user in WRENCH. Also, when the user adds the drawing file through product structure in Wrench, the system downloads data relevant to the drawing from the CBOM system.
• Benefits: Users are able to view the complete CBOM and the drawing in a single window. Double entry of data is completed eliminated. Users can view/preview the complete group and its attached drawings.

Change advice system

• New system: The CA and technology approval is conducted online.
• Benefits: The new change advice system is fast and at any point of time the CA can be traced through the system. Usage of paper has been reduced as CA form and drawings are available online. As the MF and CTA activities have been computerised, these activities are very fast and report generation is done through the system.

Print request generation

• New system: The print request generation is done through WRENCH after the whole group is submitted and released by the designer. WRENCH downloads the relevant route information from the CBOM system and generates a print request.
• Benefits: Print request generation is done for all the attached drawings that have completed the workflow after checking that the CBOM is locked. The print request for those drawings that are not submitted or are in the stage ‘work in progress’ are not generated. Also all print requests are available in the WRENCH print manager making the printing and updating print requisition system faster and easier to use.

Workflow/online approval and mark-up

• New system: In WRENCH, the group of drawings after checking is sent to the main technologist who assigns individual drawings to the concerned sub-technologies. The technologists’ view, mark-up (redline) and approve the drawing online. After technology approval, the complete group is forwarded to the design approver who releases the complete group.
• Benefits: Sub-technologists are able to work on the concerned drawings in parallel, drastically reducing design cycle time. At any point, the stage of the drawing is known and the complete routing history is documented, helping do away with bottlenecks in the approval process. Signing is done online and the user ID of the agency approving is put on the drawing electronically.

Comprehensive reporting system

• New system: WRENCH provides standard reports to be generated online as per the format given by technical services and engineering departments.
• Benefits: Reports are quickly generated by the system and are authentic as they are directly generated from an online database.

Printing of drawings

• New system: Printing is done through the WRENCH Print Manager. The print request along with its distribution information is generated and the check print request of the complete CBOM (group) drawings can be done all at once.
• Benefits: Printing is very fast and the updation of the print requisition system is through WRENCH. The Wrench viewer can be used for printing drawings, doing away with the need for extra licenses of AutoCAD.

IT infrastructure

Wrench PLM is loaded on to a HCL Infiniti Pro Intel Pentium 4 server running Windows NT. The server has 512 MB RAM, a 10,000 rpm Ultra SCSI 36 X 2 hard drive, 10/100 MBPS UTP network card, HP DDS4 with a 20/40 GB DAT drive for backup. The database is Oracle 9i. Clients are generally Pentium II, III or Pentium 4 machines from HCL, Siemens and Compaq running Windows9X/NT/2000/XP.

Cost of the project

The WRENCH PLM deployment was executed with an investment of Rs 25 lakh including the cost of hardware, software, implementation and training.

akhtar@expresscomputeronline.com