Business Accent

Expediting product innovation with PLM

R Nagarajan

The trend of introducing competitive and innovative products in the manufacturing world makes deploying a PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) system inevitable.

A note from Gartner Research firm says that Fortune 1000 manufacturers who do not implement PLM strategy will become non-competitive by 2007. PLM expedites product innovation process by giving right data to the right people at the right time. It enriches the organisation to work towards a visible business goal.

Increasing visibility

A loosely stated requirement misleads the design team. It is important to capture requirements in a structured manner in a requirements database maintained by requirement managers before it subsequently gets passed on to product development teams. The role of requirement manager may not exist today or the function may have been subsumed by the marketing team. Companies can use best practice methodologies like Affinity Diagram, PUGH Matrix and QFD for analysing, prioritising and mapping the requirements to the existing or new features that an organisation can deliver.

A PLM system emphasises the fact that product requirements should be passed on clearly to all stakeholders of product development including design, testing, materials, suppliers, manufacturing, production engineering and service.

Improving productivity

Designing begins with the concept generation for a given market need. The design team must be given an efficient working environment. The challenge is to store generated CAD data in a centralised, secure and easily accessible place, and let the design engineers check the CAD files in and out during the design cycle. CAD data management is a sub-system of PLM. Companies can attain greater control over product design for the designer by maintaining day-to-day versions of the CAD data and put a strict approval mechanism that enables designers to do things right the first time. Precise CAD data is an important input for the CAE/CAPP teams to do the analysis. Making CAD data precise results in the precise Engineering Bill of materials being sent to the MRP/ERP system. Cleanliness and control over the CAD data is important not just for the design team, but also for the subsequent product development teams.

Healthy collaboration

Bringing people together is the primary objective of PLM.

Globalisation and the need to leverage competencies of resources that are geographically separated have made it mandatory to collaborate in a virtual environment. The healthiness of the collaboration can be parameterised by the security of the collaboration environment, its efficiency and resource consumption in terms of network, hardware and software.

Collaboration plays a vital role when your design teams are separated geographically. It also makes sense for organisations that outsource the entire product design to third parties. This enables host companies to provide design feedback to their design partners or suppliers in the early stages rather than after the design is frozen. Early detection of issues is less expensive to fix.

Reducing time-to-market

Manufacturing organisations are striving to reduce time-to-market to become more profitable. Product cycle time can be broken into design, engineering analysis, validation, buying, process planning and piloting. Product development involves cross-functional teamwork and generally encompasses Marketing, Design, Engineering, Purchase, Testing, Production Engineering, Manufacturing and Quality.

In a conventional product development cycle this cross-functional team works serially. This process is known as Serial Engineering. This fixes the product cycle time into a certain period, only one team works keeping others waiting for results. For example, the analysis, testing and purchase teams will wait for the design to be completed. This idle time can be utilised to shrink the overall product cycle time leading to the concept of Concurrent Engineering. Cross-functional teams can start their work concurrently after a predefined time of the previous step of the product life cycle has been completed. For example, the engineering and purchase departments can start their analysis and buying process when the design is 60 percent complete. The manufacturing planning can start once the analysis and testing is 50 percent complete. Concurrent Engineering can phenomenally shrink product cycle time by leveraging the maximum possible resource time from all stakeholders of the product.

However, the impact of rework in concurrent engineering is heavy compared to Serial Engineering. For example, when there is a design change after the design is 60 percent complete, it will impact the analysis and testing team’s work if they start their work concurrently. This impact can be easily managed in a digital workplace. If the analysis and testing is being done in a digital environment that is seamlessly integrated with the CAD system, the impact of design changes is minimal. It is advisable to digitise the product development environment as much as possible to attain Concurrent Engineering. Nowadays, CAD tools are integrated with native CAE tools and then with the CAPP (Computer Aided Process Planning) tools. Concurrency can be easily achieved with these kind of digital environments for designing, analysing, simulation testing and product planning by using computers rather than doing things physically. This also reduces the cost of building physical prototypes.

Engineering Data Control

Engineering data is the output of the design team that releases the design to other teams to get their feedback and incorporates the collected feedback on engineering parts. There should be a revision control mechanism in this process. Even after the design is completed there can be a design change initiated due to failure in product development steps down the line. Sometimes difficulties show up in assembling process only during the piloting stage and the part has to be revised and the design change happens in the revision. It will undergo the same reviews, analysis, testing and validations before it comes back to piloting.

Control over the engineering data is cumbersome when design is outsourced to a third party or a supplier. Here the host company has to notify the design partner or supplier to make the change. Without a healthy collaborative environment this design change process increases cycle time drastically. So the collaboration and integration between the host company and its design partners or suppliers plays an important role in reducing time-to-market.

Design one, configure many

Modularising product structure and generating product variants help save time-to-market. Companies need to break down the product structure into a meaningful set of aggregates and make compatibility rules between the aggregates under each product line. Basically, they need to make a product portfolio rationalisation. If they make sure their aggregates work with each other across different models under a single product line, they can easily generate new product configurations on the fly, based on today’s product need and launch a new product in weeks. Few organisations have achieved this globally.

Managing the innovation process

PLM helps manage the product innovation process by making companies directly map the product requirements and features, and giving them control over the product data. It also helps them preserve the product knowledge asset and make the companies enter the new paradigm of modular product development.

The author is a PLM Consultant.
He can be reached at nagaraj@elgi.com