Project Log

Shrinking the product design cycle

The LTM business unit of Larsen & Toubro has shrunk its product design cycles by adopting PLM. T M Mohamed Ibrahim, Executive, R&D and Engineering at the unit, explains the need for a product lifecycle management solution.

The importance of engineering drawings in heavy manufacturing cannot be ignored. It was necessary for L&T’s LTM business unit to have effective control over its engineering with the aim of speeding up production and reducing wastage. We were facing a lot of problems with regard to the management of engineering drawings. During the initial phase, when we had not gone in for computerisation, we had to physically manage our engineering drawings, which was a nightmare for all concerned. We went in for computerisation around eight years back, but our problems did not end there. We had to make a number of copies of the original drawings and feed them into different PCs. There was a lot of confusion with regard to the drawings—revised versions of drawings went unnoticed, and wrong drawings were supplied to the manufacturing plant leading to wrong production and loss of time and money.

Lack of security

T M Mohamed Ibrahim Executive R&D and Engineering L & T's LTM Business Unit

With so many drawings on different PCs, there was the problem of sharing drawings, and anybody could access these drawings, resulting in a lack of security. Thus, there was a chance of sensitive engineering drawings being accessed by unauthorised people and landing up in the hands of our competitors. Because the engineering drawings could not be shared across departments, a lot of specifications linked to a particular drawing could not be shared, resulting in the generation of inaccurate engineering designs. In case anybody wanted to see a drawing he had to physically verify and take printouts of the drawings. Due to the inability to share drawings, final approval took a lot of time—it used to take 3-4 days as the drawing had to be printed from various departments.

The chosen one

We decided to go in for a PLM solution to reduce these problems. We had a rigorous evaluation process to select the PLM solution. We were looking for a solution which could be customised as per our requirements. We have a unique bill of material (BOM) where we store standard design information for our different customers. The BOM is linked to our material resource planning (MRP) system which we developed in-house. We wanted a solution that could be integrated with these two core applications seamlessly without us having to change our systems to accommodate the product. We also had the problem of finding a product which catered to single product development as we are not a mass product manufacturing firm, and because most PLM products are tuned to cater to mass product development. One product of ours takes a few months to be completed owing to the enormous size of our projects. We found that Wrench PLM from CADD Solutions met our requirements; we were also able to alter the specification of Wrench to suit our requirements very precisely.

Long implementation

The implementation had to be carefully planned. It took us six months, from end-2002 onwards. We went live in May 2003. During the implementation, each and every system had to be checked, and the data-flow pertaining to the drawings had to be accurate. We also needed to search for relevant archived drawings and put them into the system as there were critical reference drawings that were needed from time to time. Tracing sheets also had to be manually scanned and entered into the system. We did all this successfully and went ahead with the system.

Prototyping 50 percent faster

After the implementation of Wrench, the time taken to manufacture a prototype has halved. Due to the effective co-ordination of the design team, it now takes 4-6 months to develop a prototype, something which earlier used to take 8-12 months. All the old drawings are now systematically stored and their retrieval is faster, unlike the pre-implementation scenario where it took one or two days to retrieve a drawing from different departments. This has made referring to drawings very easy. The usage of irrelevant drawings has also been done away with completely, and now accurate drawings are churned across departments. Wrench has also brought in a highly secured environment as people cannot copy and print a particular engineering design without the prior permission of the design department. Approval of engineering designs has also been streamlined since everything is done seamlessly, the designs are available across the departments on their respective PCs, and the approval takes only a few minutes which earlier used to take a couple of days. We have taken 25 user licences of Wrench for carrying out different tasks.

Integrated with ERP

Ever since we moved to a new ERP package from our earlier in-house-built package in 2004, Wrench has integrated with the new system without any problem though we had to re-customise the whole thing. Since Wrench is looking after the engineering design management as per our expectations, we have been able to save on at least 20 licences from J D Edwards for our design engineers. We are also planning to have a search engine on top of the Wrench, which will help us to locate engineering design drawings within the system, and also help in faster design development.

—As told to Abhinav Singh