Electric Design and PLM Roadmap

June 29, 2011

In the early beginning, solutions for manufacturing were focusing primarily on machinery and mechanical design. The historical reason here is simple – mechanical design was a key element of manufacturing for many years. However, the era of ‘mechanical design only’ ends. We can hear more and more about various aspects of combined solutions – Siemens PLM was coming with mechatronics already a couple of years ago. Earlier this month, on PlanetPTC, I’ve heard many stories about software related aspects of product design.

I’ve been reading Design New article yesterday – Mentor Takes a Lifecycle Approach to Electrical Design. It talks about latest Mentor announcement related to the expansion of their Capital electric design platform. This is my favorite passage (actually quote by Martin O’Brien):

The new Capital suite delivers on all of its traditional capabilities in addition to new functionality for designing the architecture and aiding service technicians supporting the finished product in the field. It also encompasses enterprise data management and compliance functionality, serving as a single repository to help manage and support the highly specialized materials and workflows associated with seeing a complex electrical system through each phase of its lifecycle.

Does it mean Electric Design is going to PLM route now? This is an interesting question. In my view, PLM approach is very successful when we deal with complex product development issues. Remember aircraft design, product configuration, etc. These are examples where product lifecycle management presented significant improvement and good results. Electrical design was standing separate long time. The same was for electronic and software. Is it going to change now?

The picture is courtesy of Design News blog.

The complexity of products is the real issue we need to discuss and mention in this context. Everything becomes more complex now. Ford T was a simple car. Nowadays, products become really complex. The integration of various elements is key problem manufacturing are facing these days.

What is my conclusion? I can see Mentor is going down to the road and implementing many features and functions we’ve seen in traditional PLM products. Lifecycle, Technical documentation, multiple functional representations. The word “single repository” mentioned by Mr. O’Brien made me worry a bit. In my view, traditional PLMs found themselves in the “single repository” mouse trap by trying to integrate everything in a single database. The cost and complexity of implementations are growing. Is it something vendors like Mentor can avoid? Learn from other mistakes? Is it possible in software word?

Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg

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Design To Manufacturing Process: Bumpy Road?

June 12, 2011

Integration between design and manufacturing is one of the topics that normally hits a lot of discussion in the product development and PLM space. To support this process becomes more and more important in a modern enterprise manufacturing organization. You can ask me why? Let me put is simple – this is one of the most important processes that can drive cost optimization in the companies. Everything a company is making need to be first designed and later manufacturing. If it breaks – nothing can help.

Design to Manufacturing Connection

One of the numbers that always amazed me is what percentage of product cost is defined actually early in the design process. Do you want to guess this number? Well, it is around 70%. I think, this is an amazing number. At the same time, the initial cost planning is something that poorly can be done without getting information about manufacturing, supply and other related elements. Efficient transferring of the information between a design system (CAD, PLM) and manufacturing system (MRP/ERP) is an important element of streamlining of manufacturing processes.

Integration Challenges

Despite the high importance of the integration between design and manufacturing, the reality of many companies shows that few of them can show successfully implemented integrations. There are several reasons for that. The top three, in my view, are as following: 1/ high diversity of engineering and manufacturing processes; 2/dependencies on CAD, PLM, ERP and other home grown systems; and 3/ significant cost of implementation and changes. Each vendor develops his own strategies and relies on multiple technologies and partners to deliver that.

Design to Manufacturing Integration Examples

To illustrate the need and the level of complexity, I decided to pull together few videos that present some elements of integration solutions. The first one is the integration solution between Autodesk Inventor and SAP. The solution developed by Autodesk partner – CIDEON Software.

The next one is the solution developed by CORDYS, Holland based company, which focuses on the development of business process management middleware and tools. What is interesting in this solution is complete Independence of CORDYS from both software vendors manufacturing solution CORDYS integrates.

The following video presents TeamCenter 8 integration with Microsoft Dynamics AX developed by Microsoft’s partner To-Increase. This is another example of "a process like" integration between two packages – engineering and manufacturing.

The last examples show a different approach of integration. Dassault 3DLive solution is providing an interesting approach to access manufacturing information from ERP and other systems via the native 3DLive user interface.

What is my conclusion? The space of design to the manufacturing solution is complex and not covered well, in my view. The demand from customers is significant and the same time the requirements are complicated and solution in a most situation needs to be tailored for every customer. Most of the software vendors are talking about design to manufacturing processes and, at the same time, moving integration to partners, service providers and 3rd parties. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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CAD, PLM and Product Cost

February 7, 2011

Cost is important. Period. About 70% of product cost is defined during the design phase. So, to have PLM helping you to predict a product cost and drive it down can be a very important feature and benefit of spending the time to implement your PLM software and set up right processes. However, to get an enterprise view of cost is not a simple task in manufacturing companies. Last year, I wrote – PLM and Enterprise View of Product Cost. Since then, I had few very interesting conversations about a product cost related issues.

Who is working on this?

I wanted to find recent examples of tools (CAD, PDM, PLM) dealing with cost calculations. I found few examples and references of PLM vendors doing “costing work”. Agile, Dassault, Siemens did some work. However, I didn’t find visible public references related to the cost integrations into their product suites. I know two vendors – aPriori and Akoya, focusing on cost issues. I thought, PTC InSight is planning to provide a solution for cost visibility. However, for the moment, more focuses on environmental problems. The following two videos present slightly different aspects of cost calculation.

SolidWorks World 2011 Demo Preview (thanks deelip.com for capturing this video during SolidWorks World 2011) presents future SolidWorks cost calculation capabilities. The important element of this implementation is the level of integration of costing functions into the design environment.

Obviously, SolidWorks’ focus is on part manufacturing-design aspects. SolidWorks solution is not up to solving enterprise cost scenarios.

Then another example comes from aPriory video. aPriory is a company developing Product Cost Management software. Watch the following video to get a glimpse of understanding how stuff works.

This video made me think again about integration with various tools and information related to the cost. This example is more focusing on multiple aspects of product cost and not limited to “design environment” only.

Cost: Important, but NOT transparent

I can hear two voices related to the cost. One – cost is (obviously) important. The ability to control cost is absolute. The enterprise software (in general) and PLM specifically needs to solve the problem of cost analysis and visibility. Second voice says, cost is not transparent in an organization. The transparency of cost is not obvious and there are multiple interests a company to make cost transparent. Part of them is coming from work with suppliers, part of them is coming from manufacturing.

PLM Software Fails, Excel Wins

I can hear “Design for Cost” more and more often. At the same time, I don’t see products in this space demonstrating strong functionality and capabilities to solve costing problems. When talking with customers, I’ve heard about the complexity of the costing problem and inflexibility of solution. Most of the solutions, I’ve seen relies on our “PLM buddy” – Microsoft Excel to solve any problems.

What is my conclusion? I think, costing is another place where MS Excel has huge market dominance. Software vendors slowly, but started to understand the importance of vertical cost integration. The solution in this space is not obvious and requires significant effort in data integration. So far, I’ve seen little activity in this space. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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CAD Data and PLM

October 5, 2010

The following blog article drove my attention yesterday: CAD File Management ≠ PLM. The short blog post published by Peter Schroer of Aras. The summary of this post, in my interpretation, is simple. CAD Files and design represent a small portion of business problems in a manufacturing company. So, when you are going to make your PLM decision, think about a full scope of business problems – not only about CAD data. I specially liked the following passage from Peter’s post:

I’m not saying don’t let the CAD guys use what they want. Let them use their system of choice for CAD file management. That’s no problem – today’s enterprise PLM systems can move data in and out of it easily. But you’ve got bigger business issues than CAD file management, like LEAN, configuration management, workflow processes, quality, compliance, supply chain integration, FMEA, etc.

Peter is referencing deelip stating the following – "CAD geometry is 1/20 of what it takes to produce and maintain a part" and making straight conclusion "If CAD only accounts for 1/20 of your product, don’t let it drive 100% of your decisions."

In my view, the discussion raised by Peter raises a very interesting question. How much attention PLM should allocate to CAD-related problems? How it is important for PLM to be deeply connected to CAD systems and CAD data?

CAD Roots and PLM

PLM, as a software, was born as a natural extension of CAD businesses. It initially started as data management for design and engineering, it grew as an important function to manage product development processes. Connection to CAD (design) data provided an important information to drive product lifecycle in an organization. However, this deep connection, also made a bad service for PLM. On a system level, it created an additional level of complexity and increase product dependencies. On a business level it, some of vendors started to use CAD-PDM/PLM dependencies in order to realize their competitive advantage strategies.

CAD-Rootless PLM?

Is it possible to create a PDM/PLM software disconnected from CAD and design roots? Companies were looking for answers on this question for the last two decade. Many of these companies went out of business or were acquired by CAD or ERP vendors. The idea of focus on product development processes without having deep roots in CAD, seems attractive to people these days too. I can see a kind of renaissance of these ideas influenced by modern technologies (the Internet, SOA, etc.).

Importance of CAD / PLM integrations

However, I can see a problem in a significant disconnection between design and rest of product development processes. The last release of Oracle Agile PLM 9.3.1 announced on Oracle Open World last week, stated the importance of multi-CAD integrations. It represents a clear path for PLM product to stay connected with CAD. In addition, the last paper from CIMData – Ten Questions to Ask PLM solution supplier presented the importance of PLM system ability to stay integrated with multi-CAD and ECAD data.

What is my conclusion? PLM is focusing on solving manufacturing business problems. The key manufacturing problems are related to how to control a product cost and optimize business. When 70% of a product cost defined during the design stage, the reliance on the design data becomes more than important. This is a strong point behind CAD driven PLM decisions. However, if your system becomes locked in the engineering department, you are barely able to drive a complete view on how to control a product cost and optimize business. The connection between design/engineering and rest of the business is the most challenging piece of a successful PLM implementation.

Best, Oleg

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PLM And Sustainability: Where Is The Problem?

April 22, 2010

Last week during COFES 2010 I had chance to attend DaS Symposium. This half-day Sustainability Think Tank was fully loaded with presentations and discussions about various issues related to sustainability. You can take a brief look on additional information about DaS Symposium on this link. I have to say that this topic seems to be HOT and vendors are trying to approach it with multiple solutions these days. I just want to mention few – SolidWorks Sustainability Xpress, PTC InSight, Autodesk also made the impressive presentation with a significant emphasize of the digital prototyping role. More about Autodesk Sustainability is here. This is, of course, not a full list of sustainability projects and resources. Another interesting discussion was about US Lifecycle Inventory Database – project that focuses on environmental information.

The meeting at DaS Symposium was moderated by Ken Hall, Director, Sustainable Design Systems, Gensler and Brad Holtz of Cyon Research. I’m sure COFES is going to publish all materials from DaS and we’ll be able to see it more in details. I want to put some initial thoughts related to the sustainability in the context of product lifecycle management. There are two main aspects of sustainable product lifecycle management I’d like to figure out: product information and environmental information.

Product Information is obviously data about all product characteristics, design materials, supplied components, etc. This information is actually what we design with sustainability in mind. The second one is all environmental information related to materials and products. This is the information that needs to be in hands of designer or any other person and/or organization that thinks how to design with sustainability in their minds.

So, how to make our design sustainable? I see it as the main question to ask. My take on this is relatively simple. If want to manage something, we to know how to measure it. So, sustainability need to be measures. Another aspect is how you can estimate your desired product performance and characteristics in the context of sustainability. In order to do so, we need to cross paths some information about a product with environmental characteristics. Knowing today product design environment it seems to me as a not trivial task. In most cases design data is in CAD or other design oriented environment. The real manufacturing or supply data and environmental data are separate.

What is my conclusion today? The whole issue of sustainability seems to me as one big data problem. There are too many pieces of data and lots of intersections. Current products almost cannot do it easily and especially with high changing rate. So, thinking about sustainability, my conclusion is to invest in new data management technologies that can handle data about product and corresponding disciplines (i.e. Lifecycle Inventory Database and other regulatory and environmental data). The problem there is hard. Data belongs to separate organizations and managed in different environments.

Just my thoughts… It will be interesting to hear what is your take on this.
Best, Oleg

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Design and Manufacturing: Top Down PLM approach with Treehouse?

October 29, 2009

The new release of SolidWorks Labs Threehouse V2 hit me to think again about Top Down approach and efficient communication between Design/Engineering and Manufacturing.


Background.
SolidWorks Labs released V2 of Treehouse. You can get more information on their website as well as take a look on multiple blog articles about that. My favorite was SolidSmack’s “Full Speed TreeBleed. SolidWorks Treehouse, Not Just a Treehouse“.

Design, Engineering and Manufacturing
Problem of disconnecting between Design/Engineering organization is not new, in my view and exists in many manufacturing organizations. It’s obvious Engineers sees a product they develop very much in the light, of how they build parts/sub-assemblies/assemblies/configurations models. For them this is what make sense. However, from manufacturing side, it always looks different because their structure is driven by assembly process, packaging, supply chain and other factors from a shop floor. Most of the systems today are not providing a good solution for this problem. Those customers that made decent solution in this space built it based on huge customization and service base.

Treehouse, Modular design and Top Down

In my view, Treehouse concept is interesting since it can provide a communication bridge between two worlds: design and engineering/manufacturing. The way to initiate design top-down in SolidWorks is not trivial and Treehouse can be an interesting approach to do so. It can facilitate modular design and ability to create new products and configuration top down initiated from Engineering/Manufacturing space.

What is your opinion on that? Have you had chance to think or implement the top-down approach in your organization? What systems you had in your mind to support it?

Best, Oleg

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PLM Prompt: Dynamic Business Application and Design Collaboration

September 9, 2009

During last week, I had chance to discuss PLM, Design and Business Process trends. The core idea behind was about how we can apply business processes in the context of design application and collaboration. I had chance to take a look on Forrester’s Dynamic Business Applications imperative. The idea of processes built for change as well as “context” is very co-sound, in my view, with designer work. Even most of Forrester analyzes were done in the context of MS Office application, I think it can be applied to Design Application as well. The core idea, if I got it right, is to be able to have flexible contextual information to make a business process decisions and this contextual information comes from interactive and visual communication.

forrester-dynamic-business-apps

What do you think about it? Does it make sense to define adaptable contextual design application that has an ability to inject business data?

Best, Oleg

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CAD – The Future of Collaborative Modeling

June 8, 2009

We have been talking about collaboration a lot these days. I was thinking about how collaboration can happen with designers. I thought about this from two perspectives: (1) CAD and PLM collaboration development and (2) Collaborative Document and Drawing capabilities. 

CAD and PLM collaboration development

 We have seen product offerings from companies such as Dassault Systemes 3DLive and Siemens PLM. Besides these giants, smaller ISVs also provide multiple 3D collaboration technologies. Dassault Systemes 3D Live and CATIA V6 provides, in my view, an interesting approach where Designers can work together on the same model and assembly. This is probably a good example of CAD/Design collaboration from PLM vendors. I’m sure you can come up with similar examples and will be interested in discussing these as well.

Dassault Systemes 3DLive product

 Collaborative Document and Drawing capabilities

 I found interesting blog article caught my attention:  5 Ways to Create Collaborative Drawings with Friends  - presenting ways to collaborate on creating pictures and other graphic objects. This is very interesting way to collaborate on graphic models online. 

 

scriblink

Online Design Tools

Nice addition to this collection is SolidWorks Labs product, Drawings Now. This is still not as sophisticated as the 3DLive/CATIA option, but is not simply a drawing game such as ScribLink. What is cool is that <SolidWorks Drawings Now> allows you to save 2D drawings on a cloud space. (think about Amazon Web Services or similar)

 

Conclusion:

I think we are moving towards a CAD system that will be able to store information on a cloud almost in the same manner as today’s CAD saves CAD models and Assemblies on your C:\ drive or corporate server. I don’t know how fast it will take for us to get there, but I see it happens more in the near future.

 What is your opinion on this?

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What PLM technology can connect virtual and physical worlds?

March 11, 2009

We live in a physical world. Everything in this world seems to be created in a parallel, virtual space. This space is in our heads, in the computer systems we use to design this physical world, and in the global enterprise systems that manufacture, support, and dispose things in this physical world. Certainly, there is a connection between these worlds that we can discover and use. But how? I’m sure this is a long journey. In this post, I will think out loud about some possible technologies that are available or emerging today to help us to establish this connection.

Practically, to create links we need to establish two elements of connection – (1) stable identification system; (2) technology for keeping the identification of this information.

Identification system

Probably the best resource identification system today is the URI based system from which the Internet was founded. There is some interesting research that I found in the area of creation of persistent unified resource locators (PURL). Such a system can be potentially adopted to indentify virtual objects. This system eventually can be used to enhance identification of today’s virtual models created with CAD/PDM/PLM and other manufacturing systems. On the physical side, technologies like RFID cards, QR (Quick Response) codes and smartcards can be the most common.

 Proxy objects

These identification technologies can be connected together by proxy objects. Information on the virtual side can be organized in the various cloud services and locations as an organized network of virtual objects describing everything that has been designed, manufactured and has existed. Now, on the physical side, various technologies (cameras, RFID readers etc) can be used to scan information from physical devices. What is missing is a sufficient amount of cloud services that will allow us to store and keep track of this information online.

 This idea is a little futuristic, but considering some of the products already available, I can see that some already show ideas and prototypes for this futuristic future.  For example, an idea is the ability of created physical objects to react to their environment, –  is something I may be expand upon in  future posts.

 Below are some examples of existing development and applications that inspired me in writing this post.

 When Blobjects Rule the Earth

http://boingboing.net/images/blobjects.htm

(Bruce Sterling, SIGGRAPH 2004, August 2004.) Bruce Sterling’s speech at SIGGRAPH 2004 describes a vision of objects that are con­nected to information related to their design, creation, and use; end-user reviews, ideas, and improvements; and where they are at all times.

 UWTeam Researches a Future Filled with RFIDChips

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2004316708_rfid31.html

(Kristi Heim, The Seattle Times, 31 March 2008.) Researchers at the University of Washington are exploring the positive and negative aspects of using RFID tags to track the movements of people in a social setting — by tracking them­selves.

 Home-Based Health Platform

http://www.harris.cise.ufl.edu/projects_nih.htm

Researchers at the University of Florida are developing an ambient system to measure a person’s vital signs as he or she enters the house, transmitting the information to family or doctors, as a way of monitoring at-risk individuals or the elderly.

 And one more… The book (Shaping Things) by Bruce Sterling influenced me to  think differently about the  world in which we design, manufacture and live today. While Bruce is indeed a futuristic writer, a lot of good ideas in this world originated in futuristic writing. I hope you will enjoy the following interview with Bruce about his concept of SPIMES- virtual and physical objects:  


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3D Limits, or How to Avoid Killing 3D with 3D applications?

February 20, 2009

I’d like to discuss 3D. The following 3D Perspectives blog post “Do Designers Really Want to Communicate in 3D?” got me thinking about when and how 3D is efficient and how to apply these practices in our implementations. There is no debate – 3D inspires! We can see what we are going to design, visualize engineering analyses, present and explain problems in a way that we cannot do in plain English words. But are limits for 3D? How can we collaborate efficiently on 3D and non-3D information?

There are a few basic types of communication in the design world. You can communicate to:

1/ present the design of product;

2/ describe a problem;

3/ discuss a particular solution.

What are the key decision points designers need in order to communicate in 3D? I think that the main point is around productivity. If 3D helps them improve their productivity, they will definitely take the “3D story” seriously and use it as an instrument for their daily work. But even if sounds like 3D is appropriate for a regular designer’s life, is 3D-orientation really that obvious?

I will try to delve into a typical designer’s activities and will figure out where 3D could help as well as harm. In other words, where are the limits of 3D?. 

Designer Activity

:) :) :)

:( :( :(

1.     Search specific design assembly/part/…  

 

3D is good because you can see what you’re searching for

3D is bad because it might show you 150 visually similar parts? I’m not sure that’s so helpful…

2.     Collaborate – i.e. discover a specific problem together?

 

3D is good because you can see the problem in 3D visually… I really like being able to see this…

 

3D isn’t always good in this case because the problem can’t always be represented visually. Sometimes you need the right balance of 3D together with textual information

3.     Co-design

 

3D is great!  Collaborative design is only possible in 3D…

But 3D is not always ideal, as design requires a good combination of visual and non- visual capabilities in order to keep records of discussions (i.e. IM with SolidWorks; 3DLive with buddy-list)

 

4.     Demo product, communicate with customer

 

3D is good as a picture is worth a thousand words, however….

3D isn’t always ideal in this case, because if  customers are interested in particular non-visual aspects, they will need to get access to these characteristics as simply as possible.

 So, my conclusion is that 3D is very important in the way we can provide a context for discussion and communication, – the ability to visualize and actually co-design our work. In certain cases, using non-3D user experience is the only way to work for designer to make right decision. Also, presenting non-visual information can be easily understood – sometimes too much 3D information creates an information overload. And ultimately, Excel-like communication, in many cases, can be the only efficient way to present a problem or issue.

So, to measure user productivity and work on the user experience is the only real way to find 3D limits. I’d like to hear your feedback about your personal experience with 3D.

 

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