Effective collaboration between those in Engineering and Manufacturing is critical to any digital transformation strategy. Yet this is no small feat in today’s manufacturing environments.
Acknowledging Manufacturing Complexity
Consider the manufacturing process, which must satisfy many requirements:
- Customer demand for greater product variety and capabilities
- Expansion into new markets and locations
- Bottom line efficiency – reducing costs while driving faster throughput and sustainability
Complicating matters is that collaboration between design and the factory is often limited. Teams tend to use different systems to do their work, manage data differently and even rely on different data models. This “wall” between groups can lead to:
- Delays and cost implications due to ineffective communication of product updates and changes
- Greater errors and rework due to the manual sharing of data between groups
- Delayed production because factory workers cannot work in parallel to design
The Solution: A Part-Centric Product Development Approach
Success hinges on the effectiveness of manufacturing to streamline processes and stay aligned with engineering and other downstream teams. Simply put, manufacturing processes, quality plans and work instructions should be defined and delivered digitally.
The first step to taking this part-centric product development approach is integrating product data – including that related to CAD and PLM – in a single repository. Manufacturers can achieve this using a multi-dimensional BOM. Manufacturing teams can then create connected but separate plant-specific manufacturing bills of materials (MBOMs) and work instructions based on the engineering bill of materials (EBOM).
By using PLM to connect domain specific information from systems such as CAD, PLM and ERP, manufacturers create and automate a single source of truth to all product data between the respective BOMs. Some of the core benefits of adopting this part-centric approach include:
- Streamline data sharing. Realize better part reuse, enable better collaboration and communication, and streamline discussions with everyone referring to the most accurate, real-time data via a parts-centric BOM.
- Enable concurrent design and manufacturing planning. Eliminate the need to manually synchronize disconnected design and manufacturing elements while ensuring consistent information is presented at each stage of product development. Changes are automatically reflected across all functional domain systems.
- Comprehensively manage change. Easily identify, collect and execute changes across all disciplines in the digital product definition. Then automatically feed those changes to enterprise systems such as ERP and manufacturing execution (MES).
- Reduce costs. Provide greater visibility into product development, enabling timely decision making. This reduces the cost to produce, assemble and service products downstream – and the costs associated with planned changes.
The Value of Adopting a Collaborative Approach Between Engineering and Design
When the EBOM, MBOM, manufacturing processes, quality plans and work instructions are defined in a single PLM system and delivered digitally – organizations benefit from:
- Faster time-to-volume production because of the ability to digitally validate manufacturing processes, and execute concurrent design and manufacturing planning
- Better product quality by defining control characteristics and validation requirements from 3D models
- Higher operator efficiency due to 3D/augmented reality work instructions and in-process quality validation
- Faster change propagation due to associative engineering and manufacturing change management
To learn more about the value of adopting a parts-centric approach enabled by PLM, complete and submit the form.