Avoid duplication: use classification

It’s an all too familiar scenario in engineering companies these days. Design teams waste time creating duplicate in-house designed components rather than capturing and re-using existing design effort. These same people often waste more time designing similar parts when a close substitute will do the job just as well. And what about the issue of different engineers around the company giving the same engineering parts different names? These are very real issues faced by many manufacturers. But they are often only uncovered during long, tedious PDM (product data management) implementations when firms (and IT vendors) haven’t thought things through properly. Peter Penhallow, engineering consultant for Worcester-based EDM Consultancy, explains how classification systems can help: “We need to go back to basics. Customers usually don’t know what they want in the way of IT; they are often led by the software vendor. They need tools that can help them solve these basic engineering problems: new product development, engineering change control and bill of material generation. What they need is configuration management tools here, not customisation.” He explains that parts classification itself is the area of PDM that makes for effective management of parts and assemblies, from design through to assembly. Without this, it’s all too easy for chaos to reign. When design engineers cannot locate a part, often a new one is designed from scratch, triggering considerable downstream activity, representing in some industries as much as 90% of the cost of creating a new part! And, if there’s no effective method of locating parts, orders for bought-out parts would be made when the same (or similar) parts are already in stock. It’s not unusual to find warehouses stocking duplicate parts under different part numbers. And Penhallow should know. He’s been involved in a European multi-site PDM implementation for electronics contract manufacturing giant Celestica. The company uses a classification system from Aspect (now part of i2 Technologies) to help control the creation of new part numbers and source approved supplier parts globally. Greg Lake, the firm’s global IT manager, explains: “We implemented MatrixOne PDM to our global plants in 1998. Some of these are now fully integrated with Aspect so that we now have a global part number standard. It’s been pivotal to our global purchasing strategy.” All industries need it But it’s not just discrete or electronics-based manufacturers who are set to benefit from classification systems. Steven Brown, of systems integrator ActiveIntranet, has been working over the past 12 months with Croda Chemicals, a process manufacturer of healthcare products. The firm has multiple sites worldwide and wants to create a central, online portal workspace for all its staff. But two years ago, one important thing prevented them from doing this. They had classification issues to solve. Croda engineers around the world were giving the same parts different names. With 40 Croda sites and an even higher number of disparate databases, centralising and integrating all this was not easy. ActiveIntranet won the business and over six months last year developed a system for Croda called ‘Data Manager’. This software manages and classifies all Croda’s parts data into one central hub. The firm’s legacy data from the 100 or so databases had to be ‘cleaned’, then transferred to Data Manager with its underlying classification. But before this could happen, Croda engineers and buyers had to spend three to five months classifying all the company’s parts. As Brown says: “We simply gave them the tools to work with.” The key to the success of the project was giving Croda engineers around the globe a localised, personalised view after the classification work was completed. Company politics were removed from the equation – each of the sites could continue to name parts in the way they always had. All the firm’s products are now classified in Data Manager enabling buyers and engineers around the globe to access a central portal for e-procurement activities, company-wide reports and analysis, etc. The business knows what everyone else is doing. So far the project has taken about 12 months to implement, but is still ongoing. Less re-design work Why is all this so important? Well, it all has a direct impact on bottom line profit. It means the firm has money tied up in inventory, when it could be used to better effect elsewhere. This is where PDM comes in. In theory, it allows engineers to locate standard and similar parts quickly, instead of designing them from scratch, resulting in less ‘re-inventing of the wheel’. And good parts management allows you to classify parts so that users can find similar or standard parts and design data that’s been grouped by common attributes. Managing this in a suitable database leads to greater product standardisation, reduced re-design, savings in purchasing and reduced stock levels. There are classification standards out there, such as the UNSPSC (Universal Products & Services Classification), but this particular system tends to be broad in its coverage rather than having real engineering depth. At present it has a shallow hierarchy of four levels which simply isn’t enough to describe the more complex manufactured parts. The strength of the standard though is its openness and wide acceptance. Roger Dean, European director of ECCMA (Electronic Commerce Code Management Association), a body set up to manage the UNSPSC, explains further: “Our codes are international, open and are created by a democratic process taking place over the Internet, ensuring that no dominant influence prevails.” But for many, waiting for standards formed by a democratic process like this could mean waiting a lifetime. Are there alternatives? Over the last three years, Findlay Publications has developed its own manufacturing parts classification system, called FCS (Findlay Classification System) with the help of engineers and classification experts. It has up to 12 hierarchical levels of engineering categories, plus a host of attributes. Engineering sectors covered include mechanical parts, electronic components, fluid power, automotive, etc, all classified into 15,000 categories and 2,000 attributes. But the power of the FCS comes from its attached database of suppliers – 12,000 UK companies in all. Peter Knutton, Findlay’s FCS director explains: “By normalising all data and content to a standard classification, all the supplier’s product data can be compared and stored like-for-like. Information retrieval is very fast using classification keywords, but most important is users can view data and information classified as they would expect to see in their own sector.” And the FCS’ ‘Definer’ tool allows users to assign multiple descriptions for parts in the hierarchy to suit different markets and user preferences, and multiple views of the same data can be created to suit everybody’s taste. The FCS can be reorganised and renamed one-to-many times for multiple applications. Most content management vendors such as CatalogA, SAQQARA and TSI Powerdata, currently use some form of classification to help suppliers create and manage their product catalogue content for release to web trading exchanges. But so far these vendors have largely been dealing with indirect, non-production items rather than complex engineered parts. To do that requires attributes to fully describe products, and a classification with greater depth. This is where the FCS really scores.