CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
24 March 2010
Events News
KRONTIME Launches Unique Digital Manufacturing Solutions at Industrie 2010
For its first presentation, during the French exhibition of production equipment "Industrie 2010", the start-up KRONTIME is launching a set of new software tools for Manufacturing Engineers. "The different offers on the Digital Manufacturing market, at the moment, are based on 3D numerical data and deal with only a part of the manufacturing engineering problems in the middle size European companies" explained Jordi Portella, co-founder of KRONTIME. "The major problem with all these solutions is their complexity and the cost of implementation".
Digital Manufacturing groups together a family of software and working methods for designing, simulating, optimising and putting the production process in order. It controls all the information needed for preparing jobs in the workshops and is included in the Product LifeCycle Management programme (managing all the information during the life span of the product). It facilitates the control and management of process data in conjunction with the product evolution and revision (design data in digital form).
Several software modules easy to use and built around a unique data base
KRONTIME software brings together all the information needed by production engineers, what we call Digital Engineering data. All the information needed by the Production Engineering department is collected including description of operations, work instructions, documentation files, assembly files, calculations of time based on standards, management of resources (machines-tools, tools and fixtures, , measuring instruments…), balance of lines, ergonomic checking, safety, analysis of critical points of quality, cost and performance repartition, up-date of operations… by way of presentation screens customised for each function in the company.
"This information, very often disseminated in the company, was essentially built on software such as Excel or “in-house” programmes. Up to now, these solutions have had the great disavantage of not being built around a unique data base. The result was that, in the past, history of companies was not stored and therefore was not re-usable".
A quick return on investment
With the graphic design of production lines, tools for time measurement, calculation and analysis software and a unique data base, KRONTIME Digital Manufacturing is very useful for day-to-day efficiency and is particularly suitable in continually improving organisations such as Lean Manufacturing, Total Productive Maintenance, Total Quality Management…now in progress in a growing number of enterprises.
By using the historical information of the company, manufacturing engineers are now able to reproduce an assembly station or a production line on a different production site, in order to review a continuous improvement action or to study the ergonomic design of a workplace in more detail. "All these data are now available to each manufacturing engineer in the company".
Another important advantage is the use of a very pragmatic process which gives a very fast implementation time of one or two weeks. This quality gives a very quick return of investment : "In most cases, return on investment is calculated over several months" concluded Jordi Portella. "Rarely are the ones which need more than a year".
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