Custom Equipment Design

equipment ready for delivery

Heavy equipment manufacturers get ever more requests for specialized custom equipment design. Across industries, companies are trying out innovative techniques, targeting new levels of productivity, sustainability, safety, and more. This often requires specialized machinery. Besides, as those companies are operating globally, they might need equipment that is suitable for specific local conditions or that is compliant with local regulations. Accommodating such individual requirements in a profitable way is challenging, especially as equipment is becoming increasingly complex.

Siemens helps heavy equipment manufacturers deliver all types of custom equipment design more efficiently by offering them an environment with modules for configure-to-order (CTO) design, engineer-to-order (ETO) design, or any combination in between. By using those solutions for CTO and ETO, heavy equipment manufacturers can build new configurations faster while maximizing commonality and reuse, speed up the development of new parts using automation, and improve collaboration and efficiency during verification and validation of numerous custom equipment design variants.

Heavy equipment manufacturers get ever more requests for specialized custom equipment design. Across industries, companies are trying out innovative techniques, targeting new levels of productivity, sustainability, safety, and more. This often requires specialized machinery. Besides, as those companies are operating globally, they might need equipment that is suitable for specific local conditions or that is compliant with local regulations. Accommodating such individual requirements in a profitable way is challenging, especially as equipment is becoming increasingly complex.

Siemens helps heavy equipment manufacturers deliver all types of custom equipment design more efficiently by offering them an environment with modules for configure-to-order (CTO) design, engineer-to-order (ETO) design, or any combination in between. By using those solutions for CTO and ETO, heavy equipment manufacturers can build new configurations faster while maximizing commonality and reuse, speed up the development of new parts using automation, and improve collaboration and efficiency during verification and validation of numerous custom equipment design variants.

custom equipment in operation

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Maximize commonality and reuse during custom equipment design

When offering custom equipment design, OEMs can achieve massive time and cost savings if they can maximize reuse of existing parts and components and if they optimize the commonality across the variants they have. To make this possible, their product planners must have access to data across all business lines and product segments as well as tools to leverage existing parts in building new configurations and validating those for compatibility. Those configuration-related choices should be made prior to and independent from the actual design process. And that single variability definition should then be maintained throughout the lifecycle. By doing so, decisions will be made for business reasons while everyone downstream in the process can focus on valid configurations using consistent data.

Enable any degree of custom equipment design

Offering customers more freedom of choice is commercially very interesting. But it adds pressure on the design team, as unique design requires dedicated engineering and because managing product data is more challenging if all serial numbers are different. A thorough digitalization of the design process is indispensable to achieve full custom equipment design or ETO. OEMs can save a massive amount of time if they can automate a part of the engineering process. For example, if based on legacy data, they can set up a rules engine where customer requirements and their organization’s capabilities are coupled and from which they can automatically generate technical content. In most cases however, requests are neither ETO not CTO, but somewhere in between. For those cases, design engineers need tools that have both CTO and ETO solutions, and where one solution is driving the other. Then any degree of custom equipment design can be accomplished efficiently.

Gain efficiency and flexibility by improving collaboration between custom equipment design stakeholders

Especially when working on various configurations simultaneously, OEMs cannot afford to lose time redoing work because teams for different disciplines were using inconsistent data or doing double work because they are not fully aware of each other’s activities. Therefore, it’s important that all stakeholders in the custom equipment design process, including peripheral divisions and suppliers, are connected through a common platform, where they have access to the same up-to-date data, so they can smoothly collaborate. By deploying such a digital infrastructure, many activities will happen way more efficiently, including generating the Bill of Materials, CAD, simulation and more. Such a platform should also facilitate proper change management. Change is necessary to continuously improve equipment, but it may impact many product areas. Understanding ‘how’ is crucial to make informed decisions or to anticipate. To implement change effectively and safely, it is necessary to deploy a systematic approach that provides increased visibility and control, across the various teams that may be impacted.

custom equipment in operation
Success story présentée

Pöttinger

Leading manufacturer of agricultural machinery uses Teamcenter to meet diverse needs of its customers

Pöttinger enhances decision- making, reduces errors and improves hit rate with Siemens Digital Industries Software solution

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Fonctionnalités de la solution

Bill of Materials Management

Teamcenter vous aide à connaître parfaitement votre produit, en fournissant à toute votre organisation une source commune d’informations de nomenclature. Que vous ayez besoin d’une gestion de nomenclatures basique, ou d’une gestion et d’une configuration de nomenclatures plus avancée, flexible et évolutive, vous pouvez répondre aux exigences du marché, voire les dépasser, en proposant des produits plus innovants et plus variés.

Engineering Automation

Les fonctionnalités de conception à la commande de Rulestream et de Teamcenter vous permettent d’automatiser les règles associées aux produits et aux processus. Vous pouvez donc répondre rapidement et avec précision aux exigences nouvelles tout en étant certain de respecter les contraintes définies par votre organisation. Vous pouvez créer des dossiers d’offre et de fabrication en quelques minutes au lieu de plusieurs semaines. Avec Rulestream, vous pouvez prendre en charge les demandes des clients pour des produits conçus à la commande, sans perdre en rentabilité.

Flexible Product Line Engineering

Offrez la variété voulue par vos clients tout en augmentant la rentabilité. Teamcenter permet de créer une définition unique de la variabilité dans tous les domaines et pendant la totalité du cycle de vie. Les options des produits ne sont pas liées aux données de conception mais sont gérées de manière indépendante pour pouvoir être exploitées dans toute l’organisation. Cela crée une source de données de configuration commune et simple d’emploi. Les planificateurs peuvent définir les produits, les lignes de produits et les fonctionnalités qu’ils veulent mettre sur le marché. Les ingénieurs peuvent se concentrer sur les configurations valides. La fabrication peut générer une nomenclature basée sur cette même définition.

Product Configuration Integrations

Pour pouvoir vraiment gérer et automatiser des produits configurés, il vous faut plus qu’un système autonome de conception à la commande et que des outils ou des systèmes autonomes de gestion des configurations de produit. Siemens PLM fournit une solution intégrée de gestion des configurations de produit qui permet de tirer parti de la puissance de Teamcenter® et de Rulestream ainsi que des fonctionnalités uniques d’autres logiciels. Cette solution Siemens de gestion des configurations de produit s’intègre avec certains des outils les plus puissants que vous utilisez pour gérer votre entreprise.