Tecnomatix has Automotive Body-in-White solutions to enhance competitiveness by:

• Accelerating project time by as much as 25%
• Reducing project investment by 5% or more
• Shortening ramp-up time by up to10%
• Increasing throughput as much as 10%
• Cutting Engineering Change Orders (ECOs) by as much as 20%
• Reducing tooling and costs up to 10%

Planning a Body-In-White Process

The Tecnomatix Automotive Body-in-White environment facilitates multi-user and multi-site planning and engineering, and enables you to create hierarchical representations of body-in-white manufacturing processes which make up the Bill of Process (BOP). The BOP captures process logic and flow, and defines the relationships between operations, manufacturing resources and product parts.

With such tools as standard robots, fixtures and welding or painting guns from the system's libraries, you can quickly plan a spot-welding or painting layout in a 2D sketching environment. Process planners can define welding points and allocate them to welding operations. Automatic tools associate the most suitable combination of welding guns, controllers and transformers according to process parameters, such as sheet metal thickness and combination. This allows early evaluation of manufacturing times, costs and project investments, as well as assembly line performance, throughput and resource utilization.

Tecnomatix for Automotive Body-in-White also tracks and manages product design changes and verifies their effect on the manufacturing process.

Designing, Optimizing and Off-Line Programming

The Tecnomatix applications for Automotive Body-in-White engineering applications enable detailed design of robotic and manual operations in a spot-welding line and cell. Automatic robot placement ensures that the robots can reach their target without colliding with their environment.

Guns are automatically selected from the system's libraries, and verified using the sections feature, which lets you view the gun's fit and reach from all angles.

3D simulations of the generated robot paths let you detect collisions, check reachability and optimize cycle time. Discrete-event process simulation allows analysis of line performance, including throughput, resource utilization, bottleneck detection and buffer sizes.

Tecnomatix for Automotive Body-in-White automatically generates robot and programmable logic control (PLC) programs (off-line programming), as well as work instructions for shop-floor workers and suppliers that can be published and distributed in either hard copy format or as electronic work instructions over the Internet.