Optimizing Product Designs for the Environment at Cummins
00:11 I'm David Genter, Director of Design Engineering for Cummins. We're the largest independent engine manufacturer in the world. For Cummins to maintain competitiveness of our products, we need to have the key performance indices of our products optimized in every way. The pursuit of optimization is what yields world class products.
00:42 So Cummins is taking every realm of how we manufacture and design products and looking to become carbon neutral as much as possible by the year 2050. The realization that 70% of what we do is locked in very early in the whole new product introduction process put the focus on design engineering specifically. When I realized that we had such a role to play in protecting our planet
01:12 it became for me, one of the most noble things that I felt I could do, as not just an employee of Cummins, but as a steward of the planet. Designing for sustainability, it has many, many flavors to it. The place where I'm placing a lot of my emphasis is to make sure that when we design a product, we don't design it with any more material than is required to attain its
01:43 strength or stiffness goals. So it's really looking at the full lifecycle of the product and making sure you're not using any more material from cradle to grave. And to do that, you need special tools like Creo generative or tools that help you to understand where you are potentially putting wasteful material into the product. What some of the analysis tools within Creo enable us to do is to do the iterative work upfront
02:14 within design, where it's the most efficient place to do that type of work. Design engineering really does have a very, very important role to play when we're trying to meet our sustainability goals. We now know that when you apply these techniques, you can expect to save between 10 and 15% on material use and you can pretty easily understand or calculate what those
02:45 benefits will be from a total cost perspective. But one thing really nobody knew until we did that work is how much that would translate to in terms of overall cost savings over the course of the year. There was not only a big impact on the environment, when you take that 10 to 15% savings and multiply that by the number of components that you make annually
03:15 there's also a cost savings that comes with that too. And a weight savings obviously, and the weight savings has compounding effects when that engine goes to work in a truck. So the less an engine weighs the better fuel economy it gets. It really has a compounding effect from a design engineering perspective. It really allowed our designers to go home at the end of the day saying that I saved half a million dollars today, or I saved $200,000 today.
03:46 And it really provided some value to the role that they had difficulty making tangible before we started this work. PTC has been very receptive to embracing our goals around sustainability. A big part of that is really trying to shift a lot of the work that has been traditionally done by the analyst and moving that back to the designer. If you don't move this work to the left, or you don't move the work so that
04:21 more of it is happening within design, you're not getting the most out of design engineering you're not getting the most out of the analyst, and it takes a lot of time that is pretty unnecessary from a product release perspective. The Creo suite of tools has increased in its capabilities that we would need for sustainability like generative design or tools that would allow us to design things more organically. It opens up potential that I never really envisioned
04:57 maybe 10 years ago. When people retire and you have new design engineers start it's unrealistic to think that they're going to come up with a mature concept without the same level of experience that some of the more experienced designers have had. With Creo generative, it helps to cut that corner. It helps to show the realm of the possible. The biggest change is that it really focused
05:31 our design group more on on the need to optimize. So I think it's really driven a completely different mindset which started with the aim of designing better products for the environment, but it really helped us to change the culture to move toward optimization. I'm excited that PTC has taken such an active role in protecting our planet and they realize the influence that they can have on it.