Project Log

Tata Power shortens design cycle

The Strategic Electronics Division of the Tata Power Company has been successful in improving co-ordination between its design and manufacturing teams by using Wrench PLM. Vinod Yadav, Deputy Manager of the division, recalls the implementation of the project.

The Strategic Electronics Division (SED) of the Tata Power Company focusses on the aerospace and defence market in India. The design and development centre of the company is located at Mumbai, and the manufacturing division is at Bangalore. There has to be proper co-ordination between the two teams to excel in whatever defence project we take up.

Problems without PLM

The division’s product designs are an equal mix of Electronic Computer Aided Design (ECAD) and Mechanical CAD (MCAD). Prior to going in for a PLM solution, the designs that were generated at the Design Centre in Mumbai were transferred to manufacturing as hardcopies. The manufacturing unit had a legacy system which was used for storing component-related information of the equipment being manufactured and the details of the Bill Of Material (BOM). The manufacturing process could only be triggered once the parts and BOMs were re-entered into the system from hardcopies, and drawings checked and controlled in the records room. This used to take about two to three weeks for a small project. Also, the time taken from initiating a change to closing on it used to be more than a week. If any design issue was raised for a particular design drawing, it used to take a lot of time as the real-time sharing of design information between the design and manufacturing teams wasn’t there.

Another challenge was the visibility of controlled documents at the design centre. Since the design team had no visibility of product data, part re-usability was very low. There was also no common data repository as there was no common pool where design- and the manufacturing-related information could be entered.

Making a decision

The initiative to deploy a PLM solution was taken by our division’s Chief Executive Officer Rahul Chaudhry in 2004. He spearheaded the initiative to IT-enable the processes at SED in order to gain tighter collaboration between design and manufacturing, and to shorten the design cycle. This triggered the implementation of PLM and ERP solutions at SED.

After a detailed evaluation process, SED decided to go in for Wrench from CADD Solutions as the PLM solution. Oracle Applications was picked as the ERP system. Besides Wrench, we had also evaluated Team Centre from EDS. We decided to zero in on Wrench because it had the capability to manage ECAD as well as MCAD data in a seamless environment. Wrench offered good visualisation capabilities for ECAD and MCAD data, and supported electrical and mechanical BOMs. Through the visualisation capabilities it is possible for us to open any of our ECAD or MCAD designs without hassle. We also felt that, as compared to other PLM packages, Wrench was flexible enough to be customised as per our needs. In addition, we found that WRENCH had the capability to integrate well with Oracle Applications. Wrench was also being used by Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL), which has a design and the manufacturing line similar to ours; we knew that the product had been very successful at BEL.

Slow data migration, but smooth thereafter

We successfully implemented Wrench in about eight months. The implementation exercise began in January 2005, and the product went live by mid-September. The implementation team consisted of five members. One of the major challenges we faced during the implementation was in importing data to the Wrench database. We had to manually enter details, which consisted of a design repository of around 60,000 parts that was 15 years old. Cleaning up this data took almost three months. However, once this was done and the requirements finalised from our side, the delivery of customised software took hardly a month. After testing this baseline software, suggestions were given to add value to the users.

A PLM in time

We have seen some significant benefits after the Wrench implementation.

A data repository that aids in collaboration: A central repository of data has been created which is visible across the design and manufacturing teams spread across Mumbai and Delhi. This has led to improved collaboration between the two. After the Wrench implementation, we have seen that there has been an increase in the re-use of design components as the older product designs can be accessed instantly and used for some other project having similar requirements.

A shorter design cycle: There has also been a substantial reduction in the design cycle as all datasheets and specifications of parts used in the earlier designs are available online and can be accessed by both the teams. Earlier, there was no co-ordination between the teams as design and manufacturing-related data was not available in real-time.

Faster BOM and order execution: We have also observed in the one month after implementation that the time taken to create a BOM (consisting of both electrical and mechanical parts) has come down from 3-4 hours to just 20 minutes. Wrench has also facilitated a system-driven workflow for streamlining the release of manufacturing documents. This has eliminated the time taken to manually enter parts, BOM and control document releases into the legacy manufacturing system.

All this has helped in easier change initiation as the teams can share designs at the same time. This has resulted in the faster execution of engineering change orders—the time has been cut down from six to two days. Once the designs are released in PLM, the data flows directly into ERP where the manufacturing cycle can be initiated to start the manufacturing cycle.

— As told to Abhinav Singh

abhinav@expresscomputeronline.com