Anyone who has dealt with Bill of Materials (BOM) knows about the challenges and complexities involved with it. Sometimes we get asked, managing a single BOM itself is cumbersome, then why do we even need another one in the form of a Manufacturing Bill of Material (mBOM)..?

What we have seen with our customers  is that, when there is only one BOM then it is usually owned by the engineering department (CAD BOM/ eBOM) and will be available for  the Manufacturing Department as  a “read only”. This is not good enough for the manufacturing teams as they need to author and add data specific to manufacturing , for example  manufacturing specific consumable parts like glue, oil or Tool Fixtures and such. Another key factor is how the BOM is structured; typically eBOM is structured around organization systems and functions and represent the product architecture, but for manufacturing team a mBOM needs to be  organized according to the manufacturing assembly order.

When customers need to work towards the industry 4.0 goal, they need to have  smarter manufacturing  solutions and systems that provide more ways to capture the manufacturing business intelligence and then suggest solutions based on the previous patterns. With this in mind they need to invest in  manufacturing BOM authoring and management area. During a mBOM adoption, the key is not to recreate the data that’s already in eBOM, but to reuse the eBOM and add additional information specific to manufacturing. That way there is both reuse and traceability of the data.

At a high level mBOM creation automation solutions exist in multiple flavors

1.  Recipe based mBOM:  In a recipe based mBOM, customers can initiate the mBOM creation via pre-configured  templates pointing to eBOM. Based on the recipe stored with the template it will automatically fetch the engineering parts into mBOM. This kind of solution helps customers who have heavy standardization in their product offerings.
2. Reusable Manufacturing Assembly: In such a solution, customers can leverage the same manufacturing assembly across multiple product lines to reduce the design, development and procurement costs
3. New Offline Processing Solutions: This approach is to tailor the mBOM creation process and application to the customer need using customization. This standardizes and automates the process to capture the business intelligence and its reuse via customization.
4. Smarter Validations: Such solutions suggests what’s next to the business users, that way users spends less time discovering the problem and more time solving it.

Over all value of such solutions is not just the flexibility it offers the manufacturing team, it also reduces manufacturing process planning and execution lead time with improved structure accuracy and significant reduction in change reconciliation processing time.

More often PLM starts as a CAD/Design data vault for many companies, later evolving to a design data exchange platform .  Most successful companies are taking PLM beyond just a design data exchange and access control platform; to a knowledge driven decision support system.  This means PLM not only needs to manage the multitude of information generated at various stages of the product lifecycle , but also capture the product development knowledge and feed it back to the product lifecyccle. For example, the requirements and design for a newer version of a product  needs to be also driven by the knowledge elements captured from the previous version’s lefecycle, from inception to design to manufacturing and service.

When PLM stays just in the Design Engineering world, it’s constrained to exchange information and capture knowledge from downstream stages managed by disconnected, silo based systems. This results in engineers spending huge amount of time in data acquisition tasks. Industry studies shows that information workers spend 30-40% of their time only for information gathering and analysis, thus wasting time in searching for nonexistent information, failing to find existing information, validating the information or recreating information that can’t be found.

Quality escapes is another challenge with such disconnected systems when product doesn’t confirm with the engineering definition. Non-conformances found on the shop floor  are costly to review and dispose and even more severe when the product is already on service. Reconciling change is also extremely challenging, especially its downstream propagation, resulting in significant productivity losses. Slow change processing along with quality escapes cause delays in new product introduction affecting the overall ability of the companies to compete.

The first step towards transforming PLM to a true knowledge driven decision support system is to extend it to the CAD/CAM/CNC process chain, thus taking it to the shopfloors. Such a solution helps to establish a  continuous loop from Engineering into the shop floor for operations management and manufacturing execution systems (MES). Such a continuous loop system provide more ways to capture the business intelligence and then suggest solutions based on the previous patterns. Then it’s much easier to capture information and use analytics to synthesize valuable knowledge elements compared to the fragmented solutions many companies have today.  It’s also a foundational element for establishing a Digital Twin per Industry 4.0 vision

 

Other key benefits of extending PLM to manufacturing include

Reducing the time to market

• Enhanced collaboration between Product and Manufacturing Engineering
• Enhanced Traceability and Faster Change Management

Enhancing Flexibility

• Manufacturing plans comprehend product variability/complexity
• “What if” scenarios for optimized decision making

Increasing Quality

• Manufacturing Simulation and validation integrated in PLM
• Up-to-date 3D work instructions delivered to the shop floor

Increasing Efficiency

• Ongoing process optimization based on Closed loop feedback of utilization data
• Reuse of common methods/tooling

You have probably heard about 3D EXPERIENCE. Or you may have heard about “The Platform”. But what does it actually do? How is it made? This article will explain, from the very beginning, what the 3D EXPERIENCE Platform is all about.

The Platform is created by Dassault Systemes and is their central product for the future. Here is a quote from the 3DS website:

“Dassault Systemes, the 3DEXPERIENCE Company, provides business and people with virtual universes to imagine sustainable innovations”

3D EXPERIENCE Platform is primarily a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system and is aimed at supporting the digital design and development of products that subsequently get manufactured. This explains the references to “virtual” and “innovations” in the quote. As a platform, it houses multiple capabilities (apps) in a single seamless piece of software. A user logs into one interface and is able to access all the installed and licensed capabilities of their 3D EXPERIENCE from there. The platform is based on a database, allowing for storage and indexing of data.

Dassault Systemes explain their platform in terms of a 3D compass illustrated below:

 

Let us look at the four quadrants, starting at the top and work around the quadrant in a clockwise direction:

1. Collaboration apps include functionality that foster informal collaboration across extended teams (SWYM) and structured collaboration such as formal change management (ENOVIA)
2. Information intelligence apps are designed to handle Big Data and drawing from multiple sources, present the user with concise summaries of the information they need (NETVIBES)
3. Simulation apps are aimed at virtual digital validation and testing of designs. Traditionally this is known as CAE or FEA (SIMULIA). It can also be extended to virtual simulation of factories or retail store layouts.
4. 3D Modeling apps are perhaps what Dassault Systemes is best known for and include CATIA and Solidworks

Finally, because all this functionality is in a single platform, this allows the user a realistic and immediate experience in a virtual world (Real time Experience).

A few more pertinent point regarding the 3D EXPERIENCE Platform:

1. The platform is scalable to suit the requirements of each organization using the technology. Adopters can chose to start with basic functionality and then move to more advanced capabilities.
2. The concept of a design platform grew out of the necessity to store and maintain all the digital data generated during product development after widespread adoption of CAD applications. It now has extensive capabilities beyond that.
3. Dassault Systemes are constantly added new apps and functions to the platform, so the range of capability is expanding.
4. More and more of the platform is moving to the cloud. Dassauly Systemes now offer a complete SAAS model for a lot of apps within the platform. This dramatically reduces implementation complexity.

Obviously, each application included in the platform is comprehensive enough to warrant a complete subject in and of itself, but I hope this breakdown has given you a useful high-level overview of what 3D EXPERIENCE can do for an organization, not just at initial implementation but in terms of adapting to its changing needs over time

 

 

Are you looking at investing in a MES (Manufacturing Execution System)? Do you need to improve the efficiency of your manufacturing operations with the latest technology? If you answered yes, then a MES benchmark may be exactly what is needed.

In order for you to realize the value from your current or future MES investments, you must first understand the maturity of your business and your current state. In addition, you must identify a pragmatic future state and plan a roadmap to achieve it. This may involve not only introducing new technologies and processes, but changes to your organization to support them.

Tata Technologies has developed a structured MES Analytics process with supporting tools and processes to help our customers understand the maturity of their MES, compare it to their peers and plan for the future.

The MES Benchmark assessment captures the opinions of senior and knowledgeable personnel in your organization on the current state and future MES requirements for your business, together with a priority for improvement and an assessment of current effectiveness. It centers on 17 key MES “Pillars” ranging from Scheduling Management, through to Shipping. These pillars are listed below:

1. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Integration
2. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Integration
3. SCADA, Control and Interfaces
4. Inventory Management
5. Planning, Scheduling and Execution
6. Resource Management
7. Progress Tracking
8. Track / Traceability / Genealogy
9. Error Proofing
10. Quality Management
11. Recipe Management
12. Work Instructions
13. Shipping Management
14. Shop floor Information
15. Data Collection and Performance Analysis
16. Maintenance Planning and execution
17. Predictive Analytics

After the 17 pillars have been covered, senior and knowledgeable personnel are also invited to “spend” an assumed benefit in value areas within your business. The areas identified are improving time to market, increasing the portfolio of the company and improving product quality.

Finally, the tool produces a comprehensive report showing the customers current state of maturity and a benchmark comparison with the industry.

Participants have found this process to be very useful as it allows them to prioritize their initiatives, gives a high-level view of their roadmap to success and provides them with industry benchmark information

My previous post described the “Digital Twins” in general and the importance of PLM to support it. To begin with a Digital Twin need to provide the means to design, validate and optimize a part, product, manufacturing process or production facility in the virtual world using a set of computer models. It should enable companies to do these things quickly, accurately and as close as possible to the real thing – the physical counterpart. They also need to consume the data from sensors that are installed on physical objects to represent their near real-time status, working condition or position.

Digital Twins was in the making for many years , especially around advanced robotics. Siemens has recognized the value of the digital twin for a long time and enabled the development of full 3D models for automotive body assembly cells. These models were used to simulate, validate and optimize robotic operations before they were executed on the shop floor. With an extremely high degree of fidelity, these applications could not only simulate a cell, but also enable its near perfect virtual commissioning. Advances in computer science have made it possible to broaden the scope of the primitive digital twin to include many more capabilities, information, inputs and outputs. Today Siemens support digital twins for product design, manufacturing  process planning and production using the Smart  Factory loop and via smart products.

One of the most important value of a digital twin is that it enables flexibility in manufacturing and reduces the time needed for product design, manufacturing process and system planning, and production facility design; thus helping companies to develop and introduce new products to the market much faster than ever.  Connecting Engineering , manufacturing process design and actual production is the foundation and starting point for Digital Twins.

A digital twin also improves quality and even supports new business models that offer opportunities for small-to-midsize companies to expand and bring more high-tech capabilities into their shops. Digital twins will help companies become more flexible,  reduce time-to-market and costs, improve quality and increase productivity at all levels of the organization.  When implementing a true “Digital Twin” on the first day becomes a  big ask for companies,  they might want to adopt it in a phased manner, may be in a similar way it evolved – starting with automated manufacturing process design and production.  My next blog will outline the three pillars involved in deploying a digital twin .

Digital twins are the next new thing for product development in this digitalization era. They bring the physical and the digital worlds closer than ever and represent everything in the environment of a physical product, and not just the product itself and its production system.  Enabled by Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and supported by advanced communications processes and workflows; often described as digital thread, Digital Twins represent the complete physical product throughout the entire lifecycle, end-to-end.

As products become ever more complex due to ever-increasing design complexity, regulatory requirements, higher software content, and the like, conventional simulations can constrain problem solving and decision-making. Digital Twins are much more than the typical CAE simulations with just design specifications,  materials properties, geometric models, components, and analyses such as anticipated behavior under load . It moves past the primary reliance of conventional simulations on geometry. Even the best of today’s simulations are largely limited to geometric data in CAD, CAE, and PDM solutions plus other elements contained in engineering repositories. Conventional simulations are limited to problems that are tightly circumscribed.   Digital twins have no such limitation: geometry and other engineering constraints are just starting points.  Digital Twins are virtual frameworks for managing product data that is orders of magnitude more varied than what conventional simulations handle and more importantly to turn it into actionable information -information that can be used for making decisions and for supporting those decisions as elements of business models.  This new framework uses latest digital technologies to simulate and accurately predict physical product behavior, which can change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities; it is the process of moving to a digital business.

The growing importance of digital twins adds to PLM’s key role as the innovation platform. End-to-end digitalization of both products and processes is essential for any enterprise that intends to implement and take advantage of this new models . This means PLM itself must also continually adapt to support the design and delivery of innovative products and services and further enhance its abilities on collaboration, connectivity, and interoperability; which forms the foundations of any innovative platform .

“What you buy makes a difference but from whom you buy makes a bigger difference”

Most often, I talk about greatness of our product offerings in my blog articles. Such kind of blogs assist prospective customers in choosing the right product. But the same product can be procured in multiple ways, either directly from the developer or through a value-added reseller also called as VAR. In this blog article, I would emphasize on how prospective customer should select the right VAR while purchasing a Dassault Systemes or Siemens simulation product.

The first thing a customer needs to verify is whether VAR is supplying just the product or the complete solution. The difference between the two is the “value added services” associated with product usage.

“Without value added services, it’s not possible for a reseller to become a value-added reseller.” Please identify if you are doing business with just a reseller or a value-added reseller. Remember, simulation tools are not easy to use. There is a learning curve associated with these tools that can greatly impact the ROI and break-even timeline. The productivity of the user can be substantially enhanced if he is associated with a reseller who can provide whole bunch of services to shorten the learning curve and achieve break-even faster. Now let’s look at what type of services makes a difference in simulation space.

We are talking about software sales as well as consulting, training and support. Our software partners, Dassault Systemes, Siemens and Autodesk offer a bunch of certifications around these four components to distinguish between just “resellers” and “value added resellers.” Being certified means reseller has enough resources and knowledge to execute a given task of sales or service. Let’s talk about each component with respect to Simulation:

Software: To sell any DS SIMULIA product, the associated VAR should have “SIMULIA V6 design sight” certification as a minimum. There are further brand certifications available such as Mid-Market Articulate for product highlight and Mid-Market Demonstrate for product technical demonstration. To sell FEMAP product from Siemens, the VAR must have “FEMAP technical certification” as a minimum. All these certifications are associated with timed examinations.

Training: Training should be an integral part of simulation software sales. It gives users enough knowledge to use the software product in production environment. To offer technical training on any SIMULIA product, the VAR should have “finite element analysis with Abaqus specialist” certification as a minimum.

Support: Once users are in production environment, technical support is required on continuous basis. While many answers related to product usage are in documentation, it’s not a full source of information. Many queries are model specific that require attention of a dedicated support engineer. To offer technical support on any SIMULIA product, the VAR should have at-least one engineer who has “SIMULIA technical support specialist” certification.  This certification should be renewed every two years. It is associated with a lengthy and “hard to pass” support certification examination across all products of SIMULIA brand.

Consulting: Consulting service plays a big role when customer either does not have enough time or resources to execute projects in house in-spite of having software product. It happens during certain burst phases of demand. While there are no certification criteria for VAR’s related to consulting in simulation space, a dedicated consulting and delivery team is needed to offer the service when demand arises.

The above information should help you in ranking your VAR. Do you need to know our rank? Please contact us.

 

Robots, automation, and what some would even call “artificial intelligence” are everywhere around us today.  From factories to automobiles; our smart phones to our refrigerators; digital life today has had a profound impact over recent decades.  This doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon either.

Automation and robots in factories have replaced many of the assembly line jobs, and this has also lead to a great improvement in quality and efficiency.  Instead of assembly line workers, we now have robot technicians and programmers.

The big question is “Why?”.  And the answer is generally along the lines of improved efficiency due the need to stay competitive.

It could be argued that we are seeing the same thing in the engineering environment with design automation and the associated engineering intelligence built into repeatable design types… or automated workflows that are electronically managed to ensure process repeatability, quality and efficiency.

This begs the question:  Can companies survive in today’s market without investing in their business and engineering processes like they also have or must do in manufacturing?

Multi-select for Project Security

Active Workspace 3.3 provides the capability to apply project security to multiple objects simultaneously in Teamcenter version 10.1.7 and 11.2.3, and higher .

This video showcases the new capability in detail.  Click here

Highlights include

• Assign multiple objects to one or more projects
• Remove multiple objects from one or more projects
• Remove objects from projects that are common to all selections
• Honor project membership and access while making assignments

Structure support 

The second new feature is the ability to assign content of a structure to a project.  While viewing structure content, users can assign the elements in the structure to projects.  Users  can multiply select elements, to assign them, or use the option to assign all of the content in a structure, or just to some level.  Users can also assign the specifically referenced revisions, or to all revisions, so that as the structure content revises, it is also assigned to the project by default.

This video showcases the new capability in detail.  Click here

Highlights include

• Assign projects to content while working within the context of a structure
• Assign projects to entire structure or up to a specific level of the structure
• Optionally apply project security to the revision or all revisions
• Multi-select to assign projects

Effectivity Authoring

With Active Workspace 3.3, users can assign existing effectivity criteria to elements of the structure to indicate when those elements are applicable.  Users can also define new effectivity criteria using dates or units.  For example, this element is effective for this date range or for this range of production units.

Users can also name the effective ranges, to enable sharing, or reuse, of that same range when applying effectivity to other elements in the structure.

This video showcases the new capability in detail.  Click here

Highlights include

Assign existing effectivity criteria to qualify what structured content will be configured  (Teamcenter 10.1.7 and 11.2.3 and upwards)

• Search and filter for existing effectivities to apply
• Apply effectivity to revision status
• Apply effectivity to occurrences in structure

Define new effectivity configuration criteria (Planned for future release, Teamcenter 11.2.3 and upwards)

• Set units or dates to specify or edit effectivity
• Apply specified effectivity to occurrences
• Optionally share named effectivity to apply to other content in structure or other structures

Baseline

Another complete the thought capability in the area of structures is creating a baseline.  Baselines are used to capture a view of that structure at a point in time.  Siemens chose to make this work in the background, asynchronously so that  users can continue to work in the client as the server generates the baseline.  When it completes, the Active Workspace notification center is used to alert users that the baseline has been created.  By default, the process applies a release status of baseline, but that is configurable.

This video showcases the new capability in detail.  Click here

While the example shows a requirement structure, baselining works with any type of structure. Highlights include

• Executes asynchronously to allow the user to continue other work
• Notification sent on completion – click notification to open the baseline
• Applies a release status of “Baseline” by default, but is configurable
• Creates a precise baseline
• Works with any structure content, e.g. parts, designs, and requirements

Show all Results from Find in Context

Lastly in the area of completing a thought is a visualization related topic.  In previous releases of Active Workspace, the show only results in the viewer would only work for the results that had been loaded to the client.  Users no longer have to scroll through all of the results to load them in the client before selecting the show only results in the viewer.

This video showcases the new capability in detail.  Click here

 

Universal Viewer

One of the most exciting user productivity improvements in Active Workspace 3.3, is the new universal viewer.  It enables viewing and paging through multiple file attachments.  In prior releases, only one file could be viewed.  You could not easily view other file attachments. Siemens also enabled support to view additional types of files including image files, text files, and html files.  This viewer supports markup for many of those types as well.

This video showcases the new Universal Viewer capabilities in detail : Click here

Tab Overflow Direct Access

Previous versions of Active Workspace used a carousel approach and required multiple clicks to navigate to tabs that were hidden.  The new approach allows for direct access to any of the hidden tabs. Highlights include

• Eliminates multiple clicks to access some tabs compared with prior carousel interaction
• Dropdown allows direct access to any of multiple tabs that not shown
• Preserves the order of tabs
• Replaces last tab with newly selected tab

This video shows how the new tab overflow access works: Click here

Command Stack for Visual Analysis

Siemens introduced command stacks in Active Workspace 3.2.  This is an example of their usage in 3.3 to improve access to the 3D viewer’s analytics capabilities.  Instead of having to navigate tabs, users can now directly access any of the features using the command stack.  Highlights include

• Directly access measure, query, section, and volume and proximity search commands
• Administrators can configure alternative arrangements and visibility of commands for specific roles, e.g., commands can be unstacked or hidden for specific roles

This video shows how the command stack works for the viewer’s analytics capabilities: Click here

Drag and Drop in Structured Content

Active Workspace 3.2 supported cut/copy/paste to edit structures, including working across multiple browsers and across multiple structures. Active Workspace 3.3 builds on that capability to improve user productivity by enabling drag and drop for many cases as described below

Edit structures efficiently using drag and drop

• Drag and drop between unstructured lists such as folders, search results, & favorites and structures
• Drag within one window or across multiple windows
• Drop action active only when dragged object is valid to be dropped on the target object

Predictable results based on context

• Drag and drop between structures to copy content
• Drag and drop content within a structure to move
• Drag and drop different types of objects/elements to create relations – e.g. dropping a requirement on a part creates a tracelink

This video shows how drag and drop in structures works: Click here

Some of the other improvements include

• Icons in the object header make it easy for users to clearly understand what object is open. For objects with thumbnails the thumbnail is displayed with the type icon overlaid
• Newly created items show up in at the top of the list to ensure that they are immediately visible and easily accessed.Object is automatically selected in single create mode
• Easily paste on a folder or in its contents .Select a target folder and user paste command from the command bar, Use paste command on table header to directly paste content into the table