Teamcenter Repeatable Digital Validation (RDV) Enables Rapid Validation and Analysis of Design Alternatives
Improves design reuse, part commonality, design cycle time reduction and enables lean design
Take an example for the automotive industry; a typical car has over 10,000 parts. On average there are 2500 parts changes in any given week. Trying to pull all these changes can take 2-3 weeks. Once a change is initiated, it must be validated and its impact on overall weight, cost and suppliers' schedules must be analyzed. This is a time consuming, resource intensive task. While engineers are pulling the changes together, there are inevitably more design changes being initiated. Repeat this cycle every 2-3 weeks during the product development process lasting 12-18 months. The second problem faced by a designer is that even when they bring up the whole product, containing 10,000 parts, it can take hours to zero in on the part and surrounding area - the design context - that needs to be analyzed. Finding the right design context can be time consuming.
Manufacturing companies want to shorten the design review and validation cycle time. They would like their engineers to spend less time trying to find information for the right design context. They would like to be able to evaluate many design alternatives throughout the design process to improve parts and subsystem reusability. They would like to make design decisions based on the latest information. They would like to be able to see their changes in the context of all other relevant changes continuously.
Mainstream product development processes have inherent inefficiencies built into them due to inaccuracies and difficulty communicating changes between the design teams, suppliers and manufacturing stakeholders of complex products. Critical product decisions are made continuously, necessitating continuous availability of the latest product and process information digitally. Manufacturing companies have initiatives to increase reusability, modularity and commonality between multiple products and programs. The business drivers are:
- Cost reduction - cost reduction in product development, cost reduction in inventory, cost reduction in servicing
- Improving quality by using what works
- Reducing cycle time by using existing proven parts and sub-systems
Complexity of Information is a significant issue. The design, development, manufacturing and maintenance of highly engineered products like automobiles, heavy machines, or jet engines contain tens-of-thousands of components, which in turn require thousands-to-millions of CAD files occupying terabytes of distributed data.
Even for less complex products (e.g., household appliances, machinery,) with a high number of variants, the design process can be very time consuming. Since each variant would require validation, the slightest change in one component can have a huge multiplier effect.
The tremendous amount of data contributing to the definition of a product and its variances must be navigated efficiently and reduced to the minimum set of data that will accurately represent the full decision context. A solution that enables a continuous and accurate decision context based on the latest product and process information must be able to:
- Integrate information from a variety of tools, including multiple CAD authoring tools, validation and analysis tools and business systems
- Configure and apply business rules to product and process configurations for rapid "what-if " analysis and knowledge reuse
- Quickly navigate large amounts of product and process information and work with only relevant data while retaining the context of total product
- Interrogate and validate multiple configurations for form, fit and function, and comply with requirements such as cost, weight and investment
- Integrate into your product development process with minimal training and support while sustaining your organization's ability to develop innovative new products
Today, there are software tools available that attempt to solve each problem separately. For example, digital mockup (DMU) software addresses digital prototyping but is time consuming, static and invariably prone to errors. Similarly, PDM solutions address problems related to configuration and business rules but lack tight integration with CAD tools or DMU solutions.
Teamcenter's Repeatable Digital Validation (RDV) solution facilitates a true paradigm shift for companies that perform complex product development and want to integrate a suite of core systems, such as design tools, visualization, product configuration, and change management into a single integrated web environment. Never before has such a ground breaking technology been able to dramatically reduce time to market in product development while delivering decision making knowledge directly to stakeholders responsible for getting the right product to the right market.
RDV provides an "always on" digital mockup of the complete product and all its variations, enabling companies to make optimal product decisions more quickly, resulting in faster and better products to market. Product changes and alternative ideas can be done "real time" in a controlled process while assessing the impact of change across the finished product and the impact on its performance characteristics
Benefits to the organization are huge:
1. Substantial enterprise productivity gains are realized by enabling continuous product validation.
Digital validation in the traditional form (DMU) is unable to address all the challenges and offers disappointing payback. This is due to the lack of a repeatable and continuous process available to anyone in the organization at any time.
2. RDV enables designers and suppliers to spend more time on innovation and creativity by removing non-value added tasks of searching for components and creating the right context or environment for validation. RDV also eliminates human error and ensures the right version and right configurations are always selected. RDV presents only the relevant information for decision-making and validation instead of a user having to navigate through a plethora of data to find what is needed to complete the job.
3. Fewer errors in the production or assembly phase due to early detection of problems. RDV allows designers, suppliers and manufacturing planners to evaluate product changes continuously against the specifications and business constraints, enabling them to reduce errors and make optimal total product decisions.
4. Companies are able to quickly evaluate more alternatives, and thus improve reusability and commonality early in the design phase, enabling them to deliver right product faster to market.
Summary:
Since approximately 70% of a product's costs are committed during the product development phase, the biggest cost savings opportunity is during the product design phase. These large savings opportunities -- in design iteration, change review and validation, process, and part and sub-system reusability, modularity and commonality - are not going to come from ERP, SCM, and CRM. Look to UGS' PLM solutions to handle the complexity of product information and support a rapid design iteration process.
For more information about RDV, contact your UGS sales representative or visit UGS' Teamcenter Web site and select Teamcenter Engineering. You can also download an informative RDV whitepaper here.
