MANUFACTURING: Automating Design Is Not Enough

Traditional CAD tools are great, and have been in trusted use for automating

product design processes for decades now. They slash the cycle time, help design

faster, and, with more accuracy. But is that enough in a rapidly changing

scenario where companies can’t afford to overlook global competition?

Enterprises are often faced with a situation when a huge amount of product

information is either left unattended or is not communicated properly. And it’s

increasingly hard to handle or make good use of that information independently.

Moreover, meeting diverse needs of customers, who are spread across geographies,

is an even more complex task. Collaborative product development is no more a

manufacturing hype, it’s an essential part of the development strategy.

As Vivek Marwaha, marketing manager, SDRC, points out, "CAD systems

generate volumes of product data that need to be processed and accessed by

various people involved in the development cycle."

The manufacturer today not only needs to coordinate well internally, but also

communicate well outside–with customers, suppliers and dealers. And with

increasing globalization of the product development process, pressures to

innovate and reduce time-to-market will only rise further. This is where

collaborative product commerce (CPC) steps in. Explains Bhupesh Lall, country

manager, PTC, "Earlier product development was controlled by the R&D

department, but now inputs of vendors, sales guys and customers have also become

extremely important. CPC links all of them through the Web and enables

collaboration among them." PTC is actively marketing its CPC product

Windchill in India.

Getting consumer driven

For manufacturers, the rules of the game have changed. Mass production has

given way to a build-to-the-demand model. Customers are no longer satisfied with

make-to-stock kind of products. Increasing complexity of product designs demands

greater innovation.

"It is all about innovating faster than your competitor. You have to

constantly add value to the product design, or someone else will beat you at

it," says Bill Dresselhaus, a design guru, who has also written a book

titled Return to Innovation. "Many great ideas get lost because of lack of

communication. Incorrect perception could also lead to poor planning, bad

decisions and subsequently substandard products. This could be avoided if all

people involved in the development process could see and share actual designs

rather than discuss it verbally or through text," he adds.

To translate product design concepts into reality, multiple viewpoints need

to be reconciled. The marketing or sales team that is in direct contact with

customers can give feedback from their understanding of the market. The costing

and purchase divisions can tell how to minimize product costs by suggesting the

materials to be used. Moreover, the ability to look at the product from those

different perspectives can add more value to the product through these inputs.

"CPC allows you to integrate these ideas together and share design data,

which was earlier restricted only to the engineering department," says Lall

of PTC. And ideas may not be restricted within your organization. To get a good

quality design done, you must take inputs from your customers, suppliers and

dealers as well. You also need to be able to capture the inputs in an effective

way. This is where Web-based interchange of information through CPC technology

can be extremely useful. "E-enabled access to product data means you can

minimize physical interaction and visualize product designs more easily, which

obviously saves a lot of time and effort," says Marwaha.

Collaborative development

When product information is inaccessible because the software in which it

resides is too technically arcane for most to master, development and production

time is lost and costs go up.

Manufacturers need to streamline and coordinate the multiple interrelated

processes involved in product development. Mahindra & Mahindra, for

instance, has deployed Metaphase to derive the benefits of concurrent

engineering. "To realize such an environment, information has to be

available by whoever wants it whenever. We function in a mode which can be

called as dynamic management of change," explains HN Subbarao, vice

president, R&D, Mahindra & Mahindra.

Apart from engineers and designers, product development must embrace

manufacturing, where designs are transformed into production processes;

procurement, which must acquire the right parts at the right time; and customer

support, which must maintain products in the field. What’s more, throughout

the product life cycle, engineering changes must be processed and shared.

CPC tools enable manufacturers to define and manage work processes,

coordinate activities and improve communication between workers, groups,

departments and enterprises.

"Earlier for any information related to the product, the marketing team

had to seek the help of R&D. Any changes in the product design meant a long

procedure and delay because it meant coordination with various

departments," says Anil Patel, general manager, Jyoti Ltd. The company,

which has recently implemented Windchill, a CPC solution, says it has been able

to make the product development cycle much faster and more organized with this

technology. "Our company is heavily into customized products and we can’t

afford to lose time in coordination," he says. The concept of collaborative

product development is not new. What’s new is that you can take advantage of

collaboration more extensively and more efficiently now.

Increasing efficiency with CPC

When enterprise resource planning (ERP) and data mining software came in,

manufacturing enterprises implemented them to improve internal efficiencies and

business processes. Further consolidation was facilitated by supply chain

management (SCM) and customer relationship management (CRM). Although they

enhanced overall administrative processes, the impact on the product development

process was not very significant. Aberdeen research indicates that nearly 80% of

a product’s costs are built-in before actual manufacturing takes place. This

means that no matter how efficient the enterprise is with ERP and SCM

initiatives, it only lowers the product cost by 20%.

CPC solutions are basically built around the product life cycle to cater to

this unattended 80% space. They provide a framework for capturing, managing and

sharing knowledge and business intelligence within the company, throughout the

extended enterprise and across the supply chain. The CPC infrastructure is built

on current platforms used for product data management (PDM), sourcing,

visualization, CAD/CAM/CAE, product modeling, document management, data

repositories and any other tools and services that add value to the product

lifecycle. It integrates PDM and ERP functions, so information can be

transferred quickly and accurately between engineering and manufacturing to

eliminate redundant efforts, reduce costs, speed workflow, improve communication

throughout the organization and reduce errors and delays in recreating data.

When engineers change designs faster than manufacturing can update its bill

of materials (BOM), errors and inconsistencies can plague the production

process. CPC solutions deal with this by using design data to generate and

update a bill of material. This enables companies to measure and understand the

impact of proposed changes and speed up time-to-market because work is routed

from one stage to the next automatically. Using Web-based communications and

workflow management, these tools reach beyond their original use in engineering

and design to embrace the entire product life cycle and the extended-enterprise

processes on which it depends.

So, not just designers and manufacturing managers but also purchasing and

salespeople, field personnel, partners and suppliers-can quickly and easily

share well-secured, up-to-date information and work in virtual teams.

CPC and enabling e-commerce

The survival of any manufacturing organization depends on the product cycle

time, production costs and overall productivity. And in today’s highly

competitive environment, it has become equally important to leverage on emerging

technologies such as the Internet to enhance business. Virtually all product

development related enterprises recognize this need. The Net revolution has

created a new wave of consumerism, which demands personalization of products.

Customers will soon expect to buy products from Web storefronts that provide

products customized according to their personal needs.

Most of the existing e-commerce sites offer only minimal capabilities for

such a demand. This is obviously due to the inability of manufacturers to

effectively adjust their business processes and applications. The CPC model

could provide a useful roadmap to meet these demands. By connecting the product

cycle with inbound and outbound commerce, it would allow you to tap emerging

opportunities such as collaborative sourcing, customer-driven design and other

product services. It would bring the advantages of e-commerce to the product

development life cycle and the supply chain that feeds it.

SHWETA VERMA in New Delhi

Case Study: M&M

 Embracing the new system cut down response time by a massive 60%

Business

Mahindra & Mahindra produces utility vehicles, light commercial vehicles

and tractors and recorded sales worth Rs 4,476 crore last year. It has six

factories and 33 sales offices supported by a network of more than 500 dealers

throughout the country.

Challenge

The company had to deal with delays in communication of engineering

information. In the absence of a centralized knowledge base, retrieving data

took lot of time and they had to hold frequent meetings. With increasing

complexity in designs, the chaos was only increasing. They needed a system that

could track and manage product design changes. There was a need to standardize

work processes so that they could handle product upgrades and deficiency

corrections in the desired time frame.

Strategy

The company has a SAP ERP, connecting all plants/offices, including

automotive and farm equipment divisions, with over 2,500 nodes. It has about 250

I-DEAS seats across 12 locations. The ERP and CAD tools were integrated with

Metaphase, a PDM/CPC solution using the Web for collaborative product

development. An amount of over Rs 11 crore has been invested for 1,000 seats of

Metaphase, which is being deployed over the next three years. Eventually, the

company plans to integrate the supplier network with the existing framework and

would be investing in Accelis, the enabling software from SDRC.

Results

Besides increase in productive capacity, the company has been able to

significantly cut down on response time for changes in product development. For

instance, a process, which would earlier take about 150 days, now takes 30-90

days. The central database helped in reducing the time of information flow and

ensured that the actions taken against product concerns were transparent and

traceable at any point of time. The company hopes to derive full benefits as the

entire supply chain is integrated into the process.