Management and 3D provide a lean model

Lean is about reducing wasted time and wasted effort. In engineering design, using the right CAD/CAM software helps, but it's even more important to use it intelligently. As well as designing in 3D there is a need, for example, to ensure re-use wherever possible, but also to minimise re-creation of data for manufacturing and for preparing documents, whether paper-based or electronic. These typically absorb 1-2% of an engineering company's turnover. They have to be correct - if they are wrong, leading to litigation, we're talking major cost. But there are the old ways and much smarter, less wasteful ways. A number of presentations at this year's PTC user event in Dallas were about applying lean concepts to producing technical documentation, a major nightmare in the aerospace business, especially when supplying defence customers. Others, from end-users, were about reducing time and effort by designing in 3D and adopting PDM (product data management) and PLM (product lifecycle management) procedures. PTC has recently acquired Arbortext, which stores document components as XML objects in assembly trees in a manner directly analogous to CAD models. It allows re-use because updating one of the object components updates all the reports associated with it. It also helps with collaboration: several people can work on the same document simultaneously. The XML tags allow users to find, use and share particular parts of documents. Then management of the process can be undertaken using PDM/Link, Windchill or other PDM or PLM software in the same way as managing collaborative CAD modelling. Jim Heppelmann, chief technology officer for PTC, described Arbortext as "Pro/E for documents." He then explained how users' author documents as components and assemblies, and that because the components are stored in native XML, there is a separation between content and style, explaining: "Word would be nicer if the style sheet was not embedded in the document." He revealed that Boeing publishes 310 million pages of documentation per year to describe 13,000 aircraft, each of which is custom configured - and that this has to be updated frequently. But Caterpillar is the largest non government publisher of documents, while Toyota, PTC's largest customer for its power train design work, is also Arbortext's largest customer for power train service manuals. Not an Abortext user but heavily into lean concepts is Ping, the privately-owned manufacturer of upmarket golf clubs and bags based in Phoenix, Arizona. John Solheim, vice president of engineering, and Daniel Shoenhair, engineering business director, revealed that 85% of this company's sales are from products brought to market in the last two years. Ping clubs are not normally supplied as unfitted stock clubs but as fitted sets with a choice of shafts and grips. Purchasers undergo a fitting process after which grips are taped to shafts that are glued to heads with epoxy. Irons alone can be assembled in over 900,000 variants. Club head designs still often begin with prototypes, perhaps modifications of existing heads, but once a design has been finalised, all further development takes place only in software with no pre-pilot prototypes. The process begins with modelling in Pro/Engineer, after which the clubs are meshed and finite element modelled on a 12-processor Cray. Pro/Mechanica is used for static modelling and LS Dyna for dynamic modelling. Golf clubs work close to the limit of what is mechanically feasible but, paradoxically, cannot be too efficient lest they run the risk of being banned by the US Golf Association or the Royal and Ancient as conferring unfair advantage on their users. The coefficient of restitution of a club cannot be better than 0.83 and there are other limits on performance, but there is no ban on innovations that improve control of ball spin and launch angle. So customers in the golf-obsessed US drive development of products that will enable them to make best possible shots while also looking stylish. To achieve that, club heads are modelled on the assumption that they are free to move in space, although Ping is also now modelling what happens when less expert users hit the ground. Lean knowledge base Apart from improving software to reduce time to market and eliminating first time failures, formal design and development management has been streamlined by removing some of the approvals stages. Instead, decision makers are now more involved in the design process itself. Since experience and expertise is everything in the golf business, the company is also building a knowledge base that designers can call-up online. The company has 20 seats of Pro/Engineer and 100 of PDMLink and ProjectLink. Since adopting PTC solutions, products that previously took months to model are handled in a few days. Time to market has been reduced from two years to nine months, and new product introductions per year have increased nearly seven fold. In future, Ping intends to improve 'leanness', involve suppliers at an earlier stage in design, and maintain control of intellectual property. Incidentally, the company adopts all software upgrades as soon as they are available to maximise its competitive advantage. Another Pro/Engineer user that takes all software updates as they come is Automotive Engineering Design based in Lahore, Pakistan. AE Design is one of the growing band of South Asian engineering houses that undertake contract automotive design for anybody local or foreign willing to pay hard cash. CEO and chairman Zaafir Waheed told us that his 25-strong company uses Pro/E, Catia, Ansys and Nastran. As well as cars, the company also designs machines. In order to operate lean, he says: "We try to make everything modular. Subassemblies are re-used in similar applications. We don't want to redesign everything all over again. Right now our knowledge base allows us to achieve a 25-30% reduction in design time that we expect to increase to 40-45% as our database expands. The biggest factor in our time reduction, however, is our policy of always acquiring the latest 3D design software upgrades." Rather larger, Toyota also uses a combination of Pro/Engineer and PTC tools and Catia and Dassault tools in its business. Managing director and CIO Yoshikazo Amano says that his company intended to use the two sets of tools, PTC for engines and Dassault for vehicles, side by side, at least for a while. "There is no problem bridging between the two," he says. He concedes that, from a lean IT perspective, it would be best to have one system but claims he needs separate PDM systems for the different electronic and power train sectors. In power train, the company has been using Pro/Intralink but plans to switch to Windchill about now. There are similar arguments over using different 3D CAD packages in the same company. Ron Werner, from the US side of agricultural machines builder Case New Holland, says that using SolidWorks alongside Pro/Engineer has been "a disaster" because of compatibility problems. The company started in 3D way back with Computervision, also using Catia and Solid Edge along the way, but has now standardised on Pro/E. It also undertakes analysis using Nastran, LSDyna and Radioss for FEA analysis. On the other hand, a missile designer from a Texas-based division of Lockheed Martin argued that Pro/E could not produce sufficiently smooth animations, so it models in SolidWorks and then translates into Pro/E. I suggested that working in two modelling systems to design the same product sounded like hard work but he responded: "Some folks actually enjoy doing things like that." What can you say?