Engineering data at the heart of your business

It is one thing to ensure that everyone has access to data, but quite another to ensure that they make full use of what's available – and another again to make it easily usable and indeed useful. Now that collaborative working and making data available to all have become more or less established practices, the challenge is on to ensure that all of that actually happens. Take that long standing bugbear of the design office, engineering change management. It will surprise no-one to learn that there is no single agreed method of managing this process. Making data accessible to all is good, but with today's work overload users tend not to check for changes as often as they should. One widely used approach is to send emails to advise of changes or change requirements, with or without attached design information. In some cases, these are automatically generated. Fine, but the snag is that we're overwhelmed with emails – including all the unwanted stuff that people expect other people to read. Another approach is to stiffly regulate checking in and checking out of designs so that only one person is working on a design at a time. But this negates the main intent of collaborative working, which is to have different engineers from different disciplines contributing to a design at the same time, as opposed to working on it sequentially or in splendid isolation. A middle way is to make one person responsible for changes, but allow others to contribute, without having the authority to save their changes into the model. Alternatively, changes can be flagged on screen when the user is working on a design that has changed, or which depends on the incorporation of components that have changed. Oliver Abel, deputy general manager with steel rolling mills maker SMS Demag, told MCS that his company initially relied on email alerts of changes and change requirements in design, but abandoned it as impractical. SMS Demag is the result of the amalgamation of three companies (Schloemann Siemag, Mannesmann Demag and DMF) with three different IT systems in 1997. The company uses a mix of Pro/Engineer and AutoCAD for design, along with Agile PLM (product lifecycle management) software to manage the links. Changes, Abel explained, normally come from outside the organisation – component changes or customer changes. Agile PLM automatically manages the change imports and generates a log file, which in turn generates a pop-up window to tell relevant engineers working that there has been a change requirement. The software also manages what Abel described as "block working" so engineers cannot work on anything that has not been cleared for them. When accessing authorised files, the system will advise users if they have been changed since they last worked on it. "Purchasing made too many changes. Now only an authorised engineer, or the project manager, who is also always an engineer, can OK any changes to the design. When an outside agency sends the drawings, they are out of the business. Changes can only be made by us." The main savings in going to an integrated data-centric approach have arisen, according to Abel, from creating a product neutral structure so that the team can quickly build custom machines from standard components. He cited a reduction in the time required to design a side trimmer from 800 to 300 hours using Pro/Engineer with a neutral bill of material in Agile PLM, and 250 hours to 120 hours for a bridle roll set. Of the 120 hours, he reckoned only 40 were involved with engineering design work, the rest to deal with questions from the workshop and site, as well as emailed requests for graphics. Just to put it in context, the company has engineering design offices in Hilden, Dusseldorf, Toronto, Geneva, New Delhi and Shanghai. In October 2002, when the Agile system was implemented, there were 126,000 standard parts and 14,500 old drawings. Since then, 40,000 new drawings have been made and handled, nine complete plants built and there are a further five in design. You can start small Autodesk, which still has more users than any other CAD vendor, is making no attempt to cover the whole process, but is aiming its data management offerings at what it considers to be core parts of the PLM process, as undertaken in SMEs rather than major companies. The firm is currently offering two products. Andrew Anagnost, senior director product management, explains that any customer who buys Inventor, Inventor Professional, AutoCAD Mechanical or AutoCAD Electrical automatically gets Autodesk Vault, and that the Vault client is also available to plain AutoCAD users on subscription. They have to have a seat of one package to get the server but that's all they need. "As customers move from 2D to 3D modelling, they realise they have a data management problem, and this creates a need for the Vault even if they did not use it before," he points out. Getting users live could take some time since there are still only about 150,000 Inventor users as opposed to around 2 million AutoCAD licenses. A greater incentive to change could be increased competitiveness in the increasingly global marketplace or, in Anagnost's words: "Customers realising that mistakes can cost them the business." He told MCS that 80% of Autodesk's customers agree that data management is important, but 89% claim not to have a data management system. 70% say they rely on either Excel or Windows folders, but around 50% say they are considering buying a dedicated data management system within 24 months. Excel is a powerful tool, and widely used to manage configurations, but apart from using its 'protect and share facilities', there is no way it can be used for engineering change management or managing the release of drawings. Autodesk Productstream is the company's BoM (bill of materials) and engineering change management tool, and that includes an automatic publishing capability producing Streamline .DWF files, which are view-only, so they can safely be sent to suppliers and customers and received back through firewalls. Prices range from a few hundred dollars per seat to $1,500, depending on license type. Latest versions coming on offer are Vault 4 and Productstream 4, both of which will apparently include notification facilities to let users know of changes. Says Anagnost: "Notification is a critical part of making this work. We have to make it simple to respond. Most users are on information overload." As to exactly what form the notification will take, we will just have to wait and see. Autodesk's competitors seem fairly contemptuous of its PLM and change management offerings, but Mark Jiskoot, managing director of oil sampling and blending systems manufacturing SME Jiskoot Autocontrol, is a firm believer in it. He's been working with AuoCAD since 1988 and is now an enthusiastic user of Autodesk Inventor Professional. He cites the bolted on Ansys feature as one of its great successes, pointing to one instance where a supplied component designed using AutoCAD Mechanical had skewed during a load test, but was successfully redesigned using Inventor with embedded Ansys to perform virtual load tests. He also claims that using Inventor saves his company money because it allows the design team to check fits, and thus achieve EU PED (Pressure Equipment Directive) certification. "My big drive now is to get all our suppliers to supply designs as Autodesk compatible 3D models," concludes Jiskoot. Which is interesting on two counts. First, it indicates that global companies do not have to be large – Jiskoot has but 65 employees, and is as subject to international directives as any large corporate. Second, managing design and other data is thus even more critical in even more companies, given the proliferation of regulations like WEEE (Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment), RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) and ELV (End of Life Vehicle) directives and the increasing host of recycling directives relating to specific products, such as batteries, around the world. Change management and workflow IT, along with good database management and knowledge management systems, are thus essential to keep abreast of all this if the engineering office is not to be submerged in paper. There is no panacea, particularly where the issue is not only about keeping an audit trail of all data, or about ensuring that all involved act upon it – but also about making best use of all the information available that might improve design and maintain a company's competitive edge. Siemens, according to Heinz-Simon Keil, speaking at the Agility 2005 PLM conference, has around 20,000 technical projects on the go at any one time, and a claimed 8,200 inventions per year. The company encourages its employees to come up with ideas, but with 170,000 in Germany alone and more than 400,000 around the world, the task of exploiting them is massive. 2020 or today? Siemens commissioned a 304-page report entitled 'Horizons 2020', published in October 2004, which, in the section on knowledge management, states: "The ability to utilise an organisation's knowledge has become a key economic asset. In the information age, only companies that can capitalise on and continuously expand their knowledge are successful. Electronic systems like workflow management processes, intranets, teamwork portals, communities and creativity techniques based on software tools and visualisation are the springboards for this trend. "Individuals can no longer master the vast volumes of information and knowledge available. Supported by knowledge databases and intelligent electronic data processing systems, teamwork now forms the basis for R&D. The resulting knowledge is extremely valuable in economic terms." The only point with which we might disagree is to suggest that this would be the situation in 2020. We would argue that we are already there, although there's a way to go in terms of the software portfolio. However, as the report points out, we have made a start and the 'springboards' are already in place.