Digital Manufacturing - A PLM Essential (cont.)
Continued from April 2006 Main Page
What is Digital Manufacturing?
CIMdata, Inc., a leading PLM strategy consultant, describes Digital Manufacturing as:
"Solutions that support manufacturing process planning collaboration among engineering disciplines, such as design and manufacturing. The solutions use best practice processes and allow access to the full digital product definition, including tooling and manufacturing process designs. Digital manufacturing is, in practice, an integrated suite of tools that work with product definition data to support tool design, manufacturing process design, visualization, simulation and other analyses necessary to optimize the manufacturing process." 1
Industry analysts and users agree that digital manufacturing is a significant part of the discrete manufacturing community's ability to develop, capture, execute and reuse manufacturing processes for greater efficiency, quality and business growth. According to Dick Slansky of ARC Advisory Group, "(Digital Manufacturing) applications provide powerful simulation, visualization, and other applications that create a virtual 'living' manufacturing environment with production lines, work cells, machines, tooling, and other equipment. The digital product design is inserted into this virtual environment to create an integrated product design/build process. This allows manufacturers to simulate and validate the entire production process before assembly lines are built, machines and equipment purchased and resources allocated." 2
These powerful digital capabilities are especially critical in today's manufacturing environment where production must be immediately responsive to rapidly changing market requirements and buyer demands. In addition, the ability to create common manufacturing processes using digital manufacturing technology that integrates with concept and design models is essential to outsourcing production and building global manufacturing supply chains and innovation networks.
Building Global Innovation Networks
UGS' Teamcenter™ software extends knowledge capture, management and distribution into process planning and production, providing a virtual "manufacturing backbone." This backbone enables a comprehensive PLM solution that shares data models between product and process design and manufacturing execution with feedback loops that facilitate continuous process improvement and support for global innovation networks. As I mentioned earlier, version 7.6 of the Tecnomatix product suite further strengthens its integration with this backbone. In fact, we are now expanding this integration down to the production floor allowing MES systems to use process information for the execution of the manufacturing plan - further proof UGS is committed to helping customers realize maximum value from their digital manufacturing initiatives.
Of course, UGS' Open for Business philosophy means we also continue to enhance the application value and interoperability of Tecnomatix solutions to support multi-CAD and multi-PDM environments, independent of Teamcenter, giving customers great flexibility in implementing digital manufacturing to best suit their individual situations and goals.
All Industries Benefit - Learn How Today
No matter what industry you are in, digital manufacturing can provide significant short- term as well as long-term results. In conjunction with the release of Tecnomatix 7.6, we will conduct a series of worldwide introductory events and symposiums exploring the value of this technology. If you are interested in learning more about digital manufacturing as a way to reduce risk, improve quality, lower costs or improve your product development and introduction performance, I encourage you to contact your local UGS representative to find out more today.
1 The Value of Digital Manufacturing in a PLM Environment - Case Study: Fiat Auto S.p.A.
2 Gaining Competitive Advantage through Digital Manufacturing, ARC Insights, March 9, 2006
