PLM Soup

Final Day Recap:

We completed the Tecnomatix Track this morning with three sessions.  We typically boil these sessions down to the technical details but this time, marketing took a spot.  A good change-up if you ask me, but I’m from marketing so take it for what it’s worth.

Once again, we heard from Vodela Venkata, Product Manager for Manufacturing Process Planner.  He went into the details of leveraging enterprise bill of process (BOP), how standard practices are propagated to local processes through product BOPs and plant BOPs, allowing maximum reuse of your corporate practices.  This drives efficiencies and is especially valuable when new best practices are defined yet it allows for each individual plant to leverage its local diversity.  Global production means one facility can have very different machinery or automation to labor ratios from another yet still make the same or similar mix of products.  By utilizing your best strategies, you reduce unique solutions and improve quality and efficiency even with complex model mix production.

The next session was mine; How Tecnomatix software supports operational excellence.  I won’t bore you with the details but I did want to mention one thing.  It takes the entire organization to become operationally excellent.  It’s not just about waste on the shop floor.  If 80% of a product program’s cost is defined when you’re 20% through design engineering, what’s the actual cost to manufacture when design problems are discovered when you try to manufacture the product?  Today, operationally excellent organizations don’t simply call that the cost of doing business… they attack it.  (Want to learn more?  See my blog series here).

The final session of Day 4 was delivered by Kekin Sheth from Tata Consultancy Services.  Kekin showed the audience the details of how collaboration contexts leverage the Teamcenter data model.  This functionality allows collaboration between the data model and the analytical tools we use to simulate, validate and optimize process.  The context structure is extremely flexible and is built by deep references to the data model through structure and configuration contexts.  It’s a valuable tool as it provides the ability to leverage only what you need from the process data model yet still maintains the relationships necessary to assure alignment when you’ve completed your analysis.

That’s it from PLM Connection Americas 2012.  I do these blogs for those who couldn’t attend so I hope you found my updates of the Tecnomatix track useful and informative.

Recap of Day 2:

Uli Rossgoderer, Director, Product Management kicked off Day 2’s Tecnomatix session with a comprehensive overview of the Assembly Planning solutions.  He made it clear that the manufacturing engineering solutions are tightly integrated to product engineering through four key functions: Plan, Validate, Document and Execute.

Keying off some of Chuck Grindstaff’s core messages from Day 1: intelligently integrated information, value added applications, the user experience and system performance, Uli described some of the latest features in the latest release of Tecnomatix, as well as some of the upcoming features destined for future releases.

While attendees at PLM Connection come to hear from the executive team, product managers and technical resources of Siemens PLM Software, the overwhelming value of this conference comes from the customers who take time away from their responsibilities to speak about their use of our digital manufacturing technology.   So to all customers who are here supporting the event, hat’s-off and thank you for making every PLM Connection a huge success.

Speaking of customers, we were lucky to have Alan Baumgartner, Technical Leader, Virtual Manufacturing for Ford Motor Company, speak about one of the key new features just released, enterprise bill of process.  Alan described the pressure and complexity of planning and implementing global production strategies in the way that only Alan can.  Describing Ford’s business model for manufacturing as product and process convergence, how standard components and processes across vehicle lines improves commonality which in turn boosts quality, flexibility and efficiency across their production footprint.

Next we had Soumyadeep Basak from Honeywell Aerospace describe the implementation of EWI or Engineering Work Instructions as an integrated value-add to their Teamcenter manufacturing environment.   Honeywell went through several cycles of testing other solutions to help manage documentation for shop floor processes but each one came with some aspect that required too much manual intervention which increased the risk of non-compliance to regulatory standards.  With EWI, Honeywell has virtually eliminated manual intervention, the inefficiencies in having to check if it’s the latest revision and driven an easily deployable solution to their production environment.

After lunch, we kicked-off an afternoon focused on our quality solutions.

Al Hufstetler, VP, Product Management described our strategies in this space and the explicit value that PLM based quality delivers.  Al described some research done by the Boston Consulting Group about a gap that many companies face between the expected value and the actual value of a new product launch.  By far, the largest contributor to this gap is design and manufacturing quality.  Al made the point that quality and PLM brings the design and manufacturing domains together in the most effective way possible in order to address this gap.

 Next we heard from Matt Taylor from Raytheon Missile Systems.  Raytheon has very complex issues to overcome when designing and manufacturing these systems.  Model check in CAD solutions isn’t enough.  Tolerance check on the design isn’t enough.  They’re utilizing every millimeter inside these weapons and they know that variation introduced in manufacturing can cause major issues.  So Matt described how Variation Analysis (VSA) is helping Raytheon to design more robust components and eliminate issues on the shop floor.  He went on to describe how Raytheon is also using Process Simulate to ensure manufacturability by simulating the assembly process in these very confined spaces.

Our final customer of the day was Lori Russell from GM.  Lori’s presentation described the implementation of a global system for managing build quality, a first in the industry.  This is significant and the importance was not lost on the audience as she described how over 60 production facilities, GM and JV plants, are now flowing as-built dimensional quality information through our DPV solution.  Replacing about 15 unique solutions which made it very difficult to see and compare production quality between vehicle platforms and plants, GM now has the ability to see quality from any plant, on any program, from anywhere in the world.  DPV gives GM design and assembly engineers the critical insight they need to fix quality issues faster and identify their best quality processes which can then be implemented across the globe.  They currently have three thousand users and expect to double that amount very quickly.  According to Lori, this is GM’s one-stop shopping, problem solving solution which is helping GM to continually improve their world class quality across the world.

Thanks you all of you who helped may Day 2 a success.