Consolidation in EDA and PLM Pitfalls

March 19, 2010

I was watching Mentor Graphics presentation yesterday about their Valor acquisition. If you haven’t had a chance to watch it, take a look on the following link – Consolidation in EDA and PLM State of Mind. The presentation impressed me by slides and explanations. The acquisition’s target is clear and presenting an interest to create integration between design and manufacturing in the Electronic Design industry domain.

The presentation made me think about some fundamental trend in engineering and product development. This trend is about integrated systems. It seems to me EDA industry is following PLM state of mind in the creation of integrated design to manufacturing systems. PLM leaders – Dassault and UGS (now Siemens), passed exactly the same trends by acquisition of manufacturing software companies (Delmia and Tecnomatix).

Quote from Aberdeen’s Michele Boucher, finally confirmed my thoughts:

“In the mechanical world there have been significant moves by PLM vendors to expand their solutions footprint into manufacturing. The acquisition of Valor by Mentor Graphics is the first such move by a major ECAD vendor and constitutes a substantial step forward in providing end-to-end development solutions for the electronics industry.”

However, there is one thing I wanted to raise and discuss. The following side presented the biggest industry problem and reason for acquisition-  fragmentation. The similar problem was presented by PLM industries during the analyzes of design, engineering, manufacturing and other systems. As a result, the complex integrated PLM systems were created.

My take on this:

1. Integration of the systems is a very complex task
2. PLM systems focused on MCAD mostly, already did it in the past
3. Integrated systems in PLM domain created a huge level of complexity
4. Cost of the system’s lifecycle and changes are growing exponentially with the increased level of integration.

I’m sure Mentor Graphics engineering wizards will create an integrated models and maybe even standards to combine data and process flow between various components of EDA systems. Will they be able to resolve the similar problem created by PLM systems? It seems to me, people less think about a cost of change when creating an integrated system. World “integration” is so positive, then people tend to forget about a possible impact in the future.

Just my thoughts… What is your opinion?
Best, Oleg

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Posted by olegshilovitsky

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

10 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, PLM and organization, PLM Implementation, SolidWorks | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

BOM: Manufacturing and Engineering

October 22, 2009

I’d like to continue discussion about Bill of Materials. I learned a lot from previous posts. Thank you all for excellent comments!

For those, who just joining us, these are links on previous posts:
BOM: Overstructured, Understructured or Lean
Seven Rules Towards Single Bill of Material

Picture 10
So, today, I want to focus on potential differences between Engineering and Manufacturing bills and put some ideas how, I think, these bills can be managed as a single, or more synchronized one bill. A very logical situation I had chance to see in many companies – both engineering and manufacturing have their own BOM. If you will request part list from both BOMs for the same part number, two different BOMs will appear. And these two bills supposed to be in sync…. However, they don’t. In my view, the fact, these bills are not synchronized can bring a very significant damage to the company nowadays. Increased regulation requirements, IT resource optimization – this is the only initial list of the reasons why we can prefer to make some optimization around both engineering and manufacturing BOMs.

I will try to figure out why engineers and manufacturers prefer to have their own bills. Engineers don’t understand the manufacturing’s need for more or less levels in BOM. Most of engineers prefer to have fewer levels in the bill, so it will simplify the process of changes. From their standpoint, it will make the process of changes straightforward. Another situation when engineers, indeed, create additional levels of sub-assemblies. However, in real life these sub-assemblies are consumed on the shop-floor almost immediately and manufacturing doesn’t see any need to assign Part Numbers to these sub-assemblies (lean practices). There is also a situation when manufacturing leads to a false conclusion about two BOMs need. One of the examples is when the assembly requires many parts,  but manufacturing is not using them all in once, or they are used in different assembly areas. Even more complicated situations may happen in case you are manufacturing configurable product with multiple options. Set of engineering documents and engineering parts can be significantly different from manufacturing bill you’ll have for a particular order. To manage synchronization between these bills can be a huge task, and it will result in high complexity of software (or procedures) used to make this synchronization happen.

The solution for this problem, I want to discuss is to maintain single bill of material with the sufficient level of granular (or I can call it modular) definitions of parts. The granularity needs to be on the level to satisfy both engineering and manufacturing. Engineers need to have the ability to manage parent/component information. At the same time, manufacturing can maintain the operation information and lead time offset data. In the case of manufacturing to order, a unique bill of material will be generated from a modular set of components.

Advantages of this approach will be eliminating costly synchronization between engineering and manufacturing BOMs. The visible disadvantages of such approach is how to implement it using today’s software. I’m not familiar with applications that can provide the level of flexibility to manage bill of material. I assume some service implementation or customization can be done, and maybe you can share your experience about that.

Just my thought.
Best, Oleg

6 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, PLM and organization, PLM+ERP | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

Engineering and Manufacturing Data Management back in 1992

October 12, 2009

Reading again some books from 1992. Engineering and Manufacturing Data structures and Engineering Information Management Systems.

eng-manuf-data eng-inf-systems

I’d like to share some mixed feeling. We moved forward in many topics for the last 17 years in CAD/PDM/PLM/…. But some fundamental things remain the same, and we continue to discuss it heavily during implementation with customers.

Multiple Bill of Materials
Relations between Design, Engineering BOM and Routing
Early visibility of design information for manufacturing planning
Maintenance and Repair Bill of Materials
Design to Manufacturing process

So, my conclusion is as following:

1/ We are far from excellence in such implementations.
2/ Reading old books is an interesting exercise allows you to zoom out on what you are doing.

Enjoy Columbus Day holiday!
Best, Oleg

2 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, Interoperability, Market and Technology, PLM+ERP | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

6 factors impacting PLM industry today

July 28, 2009

I think, PLM evolved for the last few years to become accepted by many companies. Started from bigger auto- and aero- companies and finally coming to smaller manufacturers, supply chain and various industry verticals. Today, I want to discuss top factors that influence PLM. These factors are combination of technologies, economical situation and people demands.

Complexity in Manufacturing

I’d like to start from this one. Our life becomes more complex and manufacturing becomes complex. Lots of constraints, economical situation, business model changes, globalization, energy constraints, industry re-structuring. Our life is much more dynamic in comparison to what we had 10 years ago. So, how to help manufacturing companies to manage their digital life around all these things? Product Lifecycle Management is one of the answers. To establish control and lifecycle of all product IP, to connect to other enterprise applications, to enable social networking, to allow to potential consumers to touch future products… This is the only partial list of what PLM can do. The most important, in my view, for the future is that PLM will provide simple solution for this complex problem.

Compliance and Regulation

Next big thing in manufacturing in my view. Multiple compliance and regulation acts came to the game and impacting manufacturing in very severe way. Multiple new compliance requirements and regulation needs is additional cost manufacturers need to pay. Their product development, supply chain and other systems are not ready to provide answer to all these regulations. This is definite opportunity for Product Lifecycle Management. PLM should come as solution to solve these problems and change business processes in organizations.

Collaboration Software

A lot of things PLM is doing are related to ability to multiple participants of product development, manufacturing, supply chain to collaborate. At the same time, I’m observing significant changes in ways collaborative software came to our regular consumer-oriented life. Internet, Google, iPhone, Laptops, Twitter, Facebook etc. This is only short list of players and influencers. All of them make our life more digital, but at the same time introduce different standards for “collaboration”. In my view, consumer market will impact significantly business software. And PLM, with needs to collaborate, probably will be one of the first in the list to be impacted. We cannot collaborate on digital representation of a product which will not be as cool as iPhone based and manage processes with software much more complex than Facebook/Twitter. In addition to consumer impact on Collaboration, new collaborative features came to the portfolios of big platform providers. Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and others have collaborative and social software in their bags. PLM needs to take it into account and jump over, to take advantages of them.

Content Management

Big IT providers and additional specialized companies put significant focus to improve capabilities of content management software. It started as software to manage documents, today, content management provides wide range of capacities to manage content and processes in the company. Enterprise Content Management created a significant overlap with Product Lifecycle Management on the level of digital content. Future development of ECM and their belonging to big IT portfolios will be additional impact on PLM roadmaps.

SaaS / On Demand

I don’t need to talk and explain SaaS and On Demand models. Many people today are asking how possible to introduce these technologies and business models to product development and more specifically to PLM. After few initial tries, we can see multiple big IT, ERP and PLM players are coming to this space. The biggest challenge for PLM companies in SaaS and On Demand that I see is potential disassembly of PLM portfolios to many small services that companies will use. When it is definitely good for customers, it will be business challenge for today’s providers selling big portfolio on premise. Additional challenge related to SaaS and On-Demand is to provide answer for IP protection and security.

Low cost solutions and Future Challengers

This is last, but definitely not least. MS Office, SharePoint, PDM Collaboration, Content Management on demand, Open source… These and many other solutions are a threat for PLM exclusivity and ability to support product development collaboration and product IP management. PLM better be aware about these solutions and build PLM strategy that will allow to provide right answer at the right time. Future coming free MS Office 2010 Online, and Google Wave will become next PLM challengers in the organizations.

So, to conclude, I think PLM has a lot of challenges to find a right way to their existing and future customers in the context of these trends. The right balance of solution/values will be key to succeed. I’m looking forward to your comments and discussions.

Best, Oleg

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