Product lifecycle management is power to Siemens’ elbow

“The software that we are now implementing will help to reduce our product development time-scales at the same time as improving quality – by enabling everyone involved in the product development process to communicate more effectively.” So says Alan Walker, information services business projects manager at Demag Delaval Industrial Turbomachinery (now owned by Siemens), formerly Alstom Power. “Importantly, it will also help us to reach our goal of a fully integrated PLM (product lifecycle management) environment that embraces everything from product concept through to, and including, after-market support. These are still early days but we are presently on track to achieving all our objectives, and fully expect the objectives we set out at the start of this project to be realised.” Some background: the company, with three sites in Lincoln, has been a leading developer and manufacturer of industrial gas turbines in the 5MW to 15MW power range for around 50 years. It has around 2,000 employees in Lincoln, and its products are used for stand-by and base load electric power generation, co-generation and mechanical drive of pumps and compressors for the oil and gas industry. For this project, in 2001, it took on the EDS TeamCenter suite of PLM – now moving up to v8 – and visual collaboration software to be the foundation of what would become a completely integrated engineering, business and manufacturing IT environment. And that’s the nub of what today’s development is about. But there’s considerably more to this, and we need to understand some of what went before, and its achievements. As Walker says: “We’re coming from 12 years of legacy use of Unigraphics PDM and CAD that has generated a huge amount of data.” In fact, the company is now moving onto Unigraphics v18 across all of engineering and looking at using some of developer EDS’ most recent technological introductions. Beyond that there’s the company’s work with DNC development at the other end of CAD to manufacturing, with most recent developments spanning 1999 to 2002. That also contributed to manufacturing productivity and quality improvements, in this case by allowing the firm to increase the number of CNC machine tools operating on the shop-floor over a period of years from 14 to 54 without additional NC programmers. It’s also worth noting that, again harnessing its CAD/CAM software, the firm’s engineers have been progressively starting NC program development well before design data is finalised. Indeed today, tool-path program generation is routinely complete here on the same day as design release to manufacturing. But to return to the design side, the responsibility is one of developing gas turbine packages that typically incorporate total parts counts far greater than those for a car. We’re talking about lubrication, starting, fuel, ventilation, fire and gas detection and protection systems, along with filters, pumps, gearboxes, pipe-work and electrical cabling, all mounted on a platform in an acoustic enclosure. They represent complex design tasks, and they’re all individual to customer requirements, so the last several years have been about developing and improving engineering design systems to manage all that, with an open-ended mass customisation environment. It’s fair to say that the company now doesn’t just design gas turbine engines; it also designs ‘solutions’ using pre-defined modules. And the Unigraphics CAD/CAM/CAE suite, bought initially in the late ‘90s and now developed and up to 125 seats, is at the sharp end of all that, right out to manufacturing. Indeed, with the latest project involving consolidation of all those onto Unigraphics v18 under TeamCenter PLM, coverage also includes from design to commissioning and on out to on-site maintenance and support. Before we come to that though, there’s still more, like the firm’s use of Unigraphics’ knowledge-based Knowledge Fusion engineering software technology, which enables users to develop specific applications and to control Unigraphics objects via rules beyond the geometric definition of its products. Large section steelwork was the target here, and although this hasn’t progressed as far as the company would like (it’s still using Grip routines), Walker expects more development when it move to the more sophisticated Unigraphics Next Generation (NX) release. When it’s been commissioned, Walker says its rules-based environment should enable the team to, for example, capture the specifics of a particular design engineering process, encode them within Unigraphics, and then make them available for re-use elsewhere during the design and development phases of any of its projects. Similarly, it can also be used to optimise designs, for example, for manufacturing costs or performance limits. On a separate note, another development in train at Siemens, this on the CAM (computer aided manufacturing) side, involves capturing manufacturing best practices with the help of templates and ‘Process Assistants’, also within Unigraphics. NC programmers will be able to capture the specifics of a machining process in order to define and plan the manufacturing sequence for a part before design is finalised. Information, such as tools, feeds and speeds and cutting strategies, will be stored as the manufacturing templates for subsequent access and re-use. Once the geometry of the part has been finalised and released, the NC programmer will simply have to apply the information in the template to generate the tool-path program automatically. ‘Process Assistants’ will take things a stage further by incorporating ‘best practice’ for the broad range of manufacturing disciplines, including planar cutting, turning, wire EDM and three- to five-axis milling. The objective is to provide the programmer with prompts that guide him through the steps involved in creating an NC tool-path program with very little input. Jim Rogers, group leader of the company’s engineering compressor group, says: “Because of the difficulty industry has today in recruiting and retaining highly qualified engineering staff, and in order for the company to remain competitive, we want to achieve two things through CAD/CAM technology. First, we wanted to automate the process of creating NC tool-path programs so that it would become less of a ‘black art’.” And for this the firm confirms that the whole process is far more clean and consistent now. “Second, we wanted to remove the dividing line between design engineers and manufacturing engineers, and give them each the opportunity to take a job from initial design right through to machining. That way everybody wins: the engineering office is more productive and the engineers themselves are more fulfilled. With the latest version of Unigraphics we are a long way to achieving these goals.” Productivity, in particular, is already improved, not least because of the more fluent flow of work though the department and the broader functionality open to its production engineers, particularly in terms of pre-design release working. Probably the biggest benefit so far is that, today, machining components the same day as the design is released is no longer unusual – and that compares to a delay of anything up to three months between initial design and eventual manufacture. Walker says: “In the past, the design of the turbine itself and the ancillary equipment required for its on-site installation, such as the structural steelwork, piping and ducting etc, were separate activities, carried out by different teams on different CAD systems. TeamCenter PLM is enabling us to integrate these activities under a ‘master model’ approach, so that all our engineers have one, comprehensive 3D master model to which they all contribute and refer during the different phases of a project.” This is currently the big one. Legacy data from other systems has all now been migrated to the Unigraphics environment, and the last few are coming under full TeamCenter management. It’s involved what Walker describes as a significant effort, but the benefits internally are already clear. Not only is the environment unified, with all the reduced support and training implications of that, but it prevents the issues around engineers using a mix of server and local drives for parts in development – resulting in time wasted for resolution of missing data. Similarly, it deals with issues like naming conventions, old data and the rest. Walker explains that now, data authored in TeamCenter is the established master, including the BoMs (bills of materials) built during engineering design. Beyond design, work flows into the firm’s SAP ERP system via a SAPConnect interface, and users on the manufacturing and business sides can add data, such as stock levels and pricing, but cannot modify the design BoM structure from that environment. It means resilience and structure that’s workable and makes sense. New product introduction, engineering change and after market product and replacement parts identification are all done from within the TeamCenter controlled world. Additional modules, including TeamCenter Visualisation, are now being installed to provide real time, web-based collaboration for up to 350 engineering, manufacturing, procurement and management staff, both on-site and at the company’s main suppliers and partners. EDS’ Vis Mock-Up CAD-neutral digital mock-up and prototyping software, and Vis Publish web-based publishing software have also been added. “[This] will help to reduce our product development and manufacturing time-scales still further,” says Walker. “At the same time it will improve quality by enabling everyone involved in the product development process – including suppliers and customers – to obtain project data that relates to them, according to what data we decide they can see. Sub-suppliers, for example, will be able to work better and quicker since they have access to the right information as early as possible.” Benefits there, he says, range from customer service improvements, because of the intimate involvement up front, to speeding up projects and getting them right first time – because of the single source of data. “It will also help us to reach our goal of a fully integrated product lifecycle management environment which embraces everything from product concept through to and including after-market support.” And he adds: “We’re also building up the means to create and publish all our technical documentation electronically using XML structures that can be dynamically linked to associated data and re-purposed into formats such as HTML, PDF and Microsoft Office.” So documents, drawings, technical specification and illustrations– all the data sets associated with parts models – are being made available from TeamCenter both internally for manufacturing, and externally for the after-market. “We’re moving away from the traditional three hundredweight of manuals to electronically available data for everything, available 24/7. On the shop floor it means dynamic build information available on screens. In the after-market around the world it means users will be able to identify parts, even where there’s a language issue.” Vis Publish will be used to generate interactive parts catalogues with navigable 3D images from which users can ‘drill down’ to the TeamCenter engineering product database to identify and then order parts required for service and maintenance. And that could be another big win for the company – turning what is already a good maintenance business to an even better one. Putting figures on this ongoing achievement isn’t trivial, but Walker reckons it’s fair to say the returns will be “six figure sums”, leading him to suggest payback from the TeamCenter project within one year.