CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

4 May 2009

CIMdata News

What You Need To Know About Digital Manufacturing by CIMdata's President Ed Miller

Companies in a wide range of manufacturing industries recognize the importance of Digital Manufacturing for significantly improving their competitiveness in today’s volatile economy. The underlying concepts of these solutions have evolved over the years, and have included initiatives such as design-for-assembly, design-for-manufacturability, concurrent engineering, and approaches that promote more collaborative product and process design. From these initiatives, the breadth and depth of Digital Manufacturing has continued to evolve and mature.

Today, complete manufacturing facility definition—including tooling, assembly lines, work centers, ergonomics, and resources—is an integral part of the manufacturing process planning environment. Full understanding of the production of products, including machine operations and human interaction in assembly, are the result. Simulations of all facets of the production process can be developed and utilized to optimize the processes. Feedback from actual production operations are incorporated and utilized to effectively modify the process definitions to take maximum advantage of real experiences and better utilize capabilities and resources.

Digital Manufacturing embraces, and even requires, the use of various technologies, but those technologies do not automatically provide Digital Manufacturing just by their implementation. Rather, the approach is implemented as a suite of processes and best practices that the company uses to achieve optimal manufacturing process definition.

In most cases, companies that have invested in Digital Manufacturing over the past several years have done so with a view that it is a “point solution.” However, more forward-thinking companies understand that the role of Digital Manufacturing is a critical part of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and these companies are receiving the highest level of benefits from their investments. Indeed, Digital Manufacturing is a key point of integration between PLM and factory automation equipment such as PLCs and transfer lines, and many of the long-term benefits from PLM are simply not achievable without incorporating a comprehensive Digital Manufacturing strategy. This migration of PLM onto the shop floor provides an opportunity to better exchange product-related information between the design and manufacturing groups so that processes in both areas can be developed collaboratively instead of in isolation.

One of the important characteristics of Digital Manufacturing is that it fully incorporates the product and process definition into a comprehensive and consistent approach. It facilitates a holistic view of product and process design as integral components of the overall product lifecycle, and enables product design to be sensitive to process constraints and capabilities. The result is a tremendous clarification of the relative roles and boundaries between PLM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) environments, two of the primary areas of investment for industrial companies. The clarification of this boundary should clarify and facilitate future development of integrations between these two major areas of investment.

Digital Manufacturing impacts the overall product lifecycle, but is primarily focused on supporting the portion of the lifecycle that is centered on manufacturing engineering activities. Of course, these impact the lifecycle from the early stages of product design all the way through final production of the product. Digital Manufacturing provides the bridge between the full product definition including both configuration of components and definition of the manufacturing processes necessary to produce the product, and the actual manufacturing production activities within the enterprise. See page 14 for Digital Manufacturing’s overall role in the product lifecycle.

A full Digital Manufacturing program implemented as part of corporate-wide PLM strategy holds tremendous potential in achieving major benefits including: shortened product development cycles and earlier visibility of manufacturing issues, faster time-to-volume production and subsequently shorter time-to-market, reduced manufacturing costs and fewer production ramp-up problems, and improved product quality.

Digital Manufacturing has demonstrated its value at many companies and provided significant payback. One large aerospace firm employs Digital Manufacturing as part of a broad PLM environment within their aircraft engine operations to manage approval, notification, and tracking of documents, establish routings and work instructions, and manage process templates. A head of manufacturing engineering noted that through commonization, reduction in design changes, quality improvements, and productivity gains, the company obtained payback on its investment in less than one year. This example is not unusual. Research conducted by CIMdata on Digital Manufacturing implementations indicates that companies around the world have achieved very positive results and have validated the potential value for organizations to make Digital Manufacturing a fundamental part of their overall product program. A survey of companies with Digital Manufacturing implementations of various sizes indicates exceptionally impressive return on investments (ROIs). Relatively small $200,000-investments yielded annual savings of $1-million for a 5:1 ROI, for example, while larger investments in the range of $5-million to $10-million lead to annual savings of $50-million to $100-million for a 10:1 ROI.

Clearly, substantial benefits are available for companies making the investment in Digital Manufacturing, and having an understanding of the changes that must be made in business operations to best leverage these technology-based solutions. Organizations taking the initiative to implement Digital Manufacturing as a component of PLM broadly across the enterprise are better able to successfully compete in the global market and will undoubtedly be among their industry’s winners in the coming decades.

Column from: Time Compression, Contributed by: Ed Miller, President, CIMdata Inc

Posted on: 5/4/2009

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