Digital Manufacturing: An Emerging Management Priority (cont.)
The collaborative power of PLM has enabled manufacturing engineers, industrial engineers, NC programmers, tool designers and others with practical shop floor knowledge to participate in the early stages of product development, where their knowledge of materials, machining and production processes can help design engineers make smarter decisions that will lower the eventual cost of a product, assure quality and accelerate its time to market. Still, participants from these disciplines have not always had the same level of digital decision making tools to work with as their colleagues in the design department. This has hampered their ability to develop more agile processes or to fully optimize production and maximize value when planning and implementing the manufacturing phase of a product.
Many existing solutions for digital manufacturing are actually an assortment of separate applications, often a complex combination of older in-house systems and standalone products addressing specific activities of the planning process. These systems may hold significant amounts of business-critical data but be difficult to maintain or extend. This lack of a common data structure and integrated environment makes it difficult to provide managed, accurate and consistent information across the complete task of planning for manufacture, creating considerable potential for errors and delays in the overall manufacturing phase.
Because the cost of correcting errors in the manufacturing process plan rises exponentially as the date for entry into production approaches, this is a real barrier to reducing cost-to-market and achieving lean goals.
The answer to this challenge lies in a core infrastructure that can provide central management, collaboration and interoperability functions based on a data model that manages and associates product, process, plant and resource information. The infrastructure must provide an effective platform into which best-in-class authoring applications such as NC programming, manufacturing process planning, facilities design, ergonomic layouts, stamping, assembly planning, plant layout and resource management can be integrated. It must also allow fast and secure access to manufacturing information as well as the graphical visualization, analysis and optimization of dedicated manufacturing processes. The ability to create, validate and communicate the entire manufacturing process can catch errors and defects long before going to production, and ideally, before any physical commitments are made in terms of resources and plant.
UGS has long been recognized for the strength of its manufacturing applications and its commitment to adding value at this stage of a product's lifecycle. At this year's International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS), which starts next week in Chicago, we will be showing how we can enable "Maximum Manufacturing" through our Part Manufacturing solution.
UGS developed its Part Manufacturing Solution to bring together capabilities that span product and tool design through manufacturing process planning, NC programming and shop floor communication.
The key differentiator for UGS Part Manufacturing is the managed environment provided by Teamcenter technology. Based on an out-of-the-box information platform designed especially for manufacturing data, Teamcenter provides applications for part process planning, resource libraries, flexible reporting and collaboration.
The solution reduces the time wasted and errors caused by searching for manufacturing data. It brings together the pieces otherwise provided by separate point solutions and enables companies to maximize their overall performance in part manufacturing. It also provides the flexibility to respond quickly to changing market demands.
For key applications such as NC programming and tool design, the solution includes NX software. At IMTS we will be showing many of the new NX 3 capabilities for high-speed machining, multi-function machine support, five-axis machining and programming automation, all supported by enhanced machine tool simulation. For manufacturing process planning and resource management, the solution includes UGS' E-factory digital manufacturing applications, which digitally represent the plant, resource, process and quality aspects of a company's manufacturing operations
An extremely important aspect of this solution is that it is scalable, so enterprises of any size can implement the tools they need now to synchronize design and manufacturing operations and gain the ability to:
- Design leaner
- Plan faster
- Program smarter
- Communicate better
And thus... achieve more.
Digital manufacturing technologies are on the move
Mirroring Daratech's findings, we are seeing tremendous market response to the need for bringing product and process together through digital manufacturing. In fact, at the E-factory Global Symposium we held in Detroit this summer, attendance doubled from the previous year. During this event, manufacturers from around the world gathered to hear presentations on the importance of digital manufacturing from market-leading companies like American Axle & Manufacturing, Fiat Automotive, GE Aircraft Engines, Goodrich, Mack Volvo Truck and Visteon, and a special track for executives focused on implementing Digital Manufacturing as an enterprise strategy.
Attendance was also strong at our Wide Open series of regional symposiums in the U.S. We are now kicking off additional events in the Asia Pacific region with a major digital manufacturing symposium to be held in Beijing and a special digital manufacturing track at the annual UGS user conference in Tokyo in late October. As well, many of our European offices have held, or are planning to hold, digital manufacturing symposiums featuring E-factory.
Any company that keeps its digital manufacturing solution on the outskirts of its strategic product lifecycle mission is limiting its agility, productivity and, ultimately, its ability to compete effectively. UGS-enabled digital manufacturing solutions offer a unique opportunity to overcome this barrier and an expanded means to achieve mission-critical goals. I hope you have a chance to explore our vision of "Maximum Manufacturing" at IMTS (Booth D-3027) or a local event in your area.
