Data is the key to knowledge

Know-how – or intellectual property (IP) – is everything when it comes to designing, manufacturing and running businesses. But capturing it, preserving it and making efficient use of it, particularly for the processes around concept to engineered design, is hardly ever assigned anything like the importance it merits. That may be due to other initiatives taking priority, or it may be ignorance – both of what is possible today and the implications for improvement. And hence, of course, the movement for 'IP', aimed squarely at CEOs' consciousnesses. Either way, given the ongoing pressures on costs and timescales throughout engineering and manufacturing, forced by increasingly determined international competition, we need to get a grip on this, and certainly take notice of anything that can make a difference. As Dr Diane Mynors, of the Department of Design and Systems Engineering at Brunel University, says: "We need to create time… Manufacturing companies do not hesitate to apply lean thinking to the shop floor, but what about pre-production?" The good news is that knowledge management tools are available and they don't cost a fortune. And you don't have to look to the big-ticket software league, nor to the massive, all-encompassing solutions. The bad news is that they're mostly fragmented systems doing aspects of the job, and that take up is not great enough for standards or best practice to be taking hold. Fact is, attempts to capture and make better, more wide-ranging use of engineering know-how go back more than 20 years. IT-based options range from supposedly 'zero cost' approaches, based on packages such as Word and Excel, all the way up to enterprise systems that help capture data associated with good design and build decisions and use it to automate future decisions. But the starting point here isn't, or shouldn't be, software; it's management understanding and prioritising. A study, completed with funding from the DTI, throws some light on what matters: it came up with an approach to gathering and re-use of knowledge aimed at reducing repetitious and time-wasting (in view of what could be automated) tasks, primarily through procedures rather than any particular software. The Tooling and Experiential Design Initiative (TEDI), was led by Mynors and Dr Brian Griffiths, also of Brunel, with partners Corus Automotive, Dzus Fasteners, the Gauge and Toolmakers Association (GTMA) and the Technology Application Network (TANet). Main focus of the project was to look at issues and solutions using knowledge engineering in toolmaking. The point? As Mynors puts it: "Somebody from outside, instructed to make coffee, first needs to know where the kitchen is and the coffee and utensils. If they have to discover the locations unaided, they waste time doing so. Extend this to discovering the machining times and techniques used on previously manufactured items of tooling similar to one about to made, and it's not hard to see the problem." Much of the approach depends on managers answering questions such as: 'Can anyone search for a similar product made previously by your company?' 'How much time could be saved if you could?' 'How dependent is your company on a single person for certain knowledge and experience?' 'What will happen if they leave?' 'What does your chief designer do all day?' 'What fraction of a designer's time is working on the new and creative?' And, 'How do you train designers?' Interestingly, typical answers show, for example, designers spending only 20 to 30% of their time being creative. The rest is putting standard requirements on drawings and documentation, generating quotations for jobs and sorting out problems. And we get the point. Simple or sophisticated One company that reckons it's captured the knowledge it needs, and is re-using it successfully, is Corus. The firm's Mike Twelves told MCS: "Our hydroforming application enables us to do fast analysis and fast design iterations, but the design is still manual. The difference our knowledge management system makes is that we can make quantitatively justified design decisions rather than just qualitative." And he adds: "We can also produce 80% of our reports in 30 seconds, which includes all the structure, only requiring some manual updates. We wrote the software ourselves based on the ICAD [KTI, now part of Dassault Systemes] toolkit." However, Mynors reckons solutions such as ICAD are probably too large and cumbersome for some SMEs. Her initial suggestions are essentially simple common sense. Chief designers and others should develop the habit of time watching, with a view to eliminating poor usage. There should also be in-company quick reference systems for frequently asked questions. Only then, she says, should you get into buying software designed to capture and manage knowledge and ideally disseminate and re-purpose it automatically. Mynors: "If a company buys software in the expectation that it will solve its problems, but can't get it working quickly, it will not look at it again. There is no point in buying software that has the word 'knowledge' on the label. You need to identify the problems you are trying to solve and then look for something that will do the job. You also need to involve all the key players in your company, and you need to think about your technology succession planning – what comes next – just as you would your management succession planning." Dan Etheridge of Dzus Fasteners, which makes fasteners for the automotive, aerospace, IT and commercial markets, is walking the walk, and describes TEDI as invaluable. "Fundamentally, there are three issues: globalisation, mass customisation and cost and time compression. UK manufacturing appears unwilling or unable to respond to these, [but] the ability to source low cost tooling and parts from Eastern Europe or SE Asia is impacting heavily on local industry." He believes we should adopt new technology and processes to capitalise on our engineering heritage and knowledge base. The goal: undertaking business involving more complex engineering with higher margin returns. Outside TEDI, global engineering services provider Amec, which operates in the oil and gas industries, has bought Verity and RedDot knowledge engineering software to improve its access to what is a vast engineering database. Chief knowledge officer Satvinder Flore says he has no idea how big it is, although it's Terabytes, and "probably doubling every four months." Amec stores technical data, reports and case studies, and RedDot will be used for content management, while Verity assists with searches. Flore says: "Verity allows us to taxonomise the information." At a more modest level, UK users of knowledge capture and re-use software DriveWorks, include Rossendale Group, which makes spreader beams, and Whale Tankers, which builds tankers. The system is also gaining favour in the US, and Steve Fye, design engineer with SpanTech comments that it's reduced conveyor design times from 16 hours to less than 30 minutes. DriveWorks is used to automatically generate drawings and NC machining instructions. It allows the firm to take an assembly or part and apply rules to it, with data captured by clicking on a dimension in a SolidWorks model. Fye says: "The software uses the power of Excel to perform calculations… If you can use Excel, you can use DriveWorks."