Custom Equipment Design

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.