The devil is in the detail

It should come as no surprise to learn that designs ranging from major chunks of the Mars rovers to baby products owe some of their success to 'product lifecycle management' (PLM) concepts, even though probably none of the software had 'PLM' or 'PDM' (product data management) on its label. Vendors of CAD/CAM systems mostly now offer aspects of PLM and PDM – with the objective of sharing and maintaining product data throughout the life of a product – but take-up of the full monty has been very limited. Many companies' engineering people, at least, recognise the need for part of its promise, but where users are implementing PLM, they're mostly doing so without considering the meaning of the acronym – instead meeting their requirements from a variety of solutions, some of them quite ingenious. That's fine, but couldn't there be both engineering and business benefits in manufacturers adopting more standard overarching software solutions – for example, in terms of reduced license fees, support and customisation. We asked senior executives at SolidWorks World in Boston, what they considered the key issues that engineering and manufacturing companies needed to focus on for their IT strategies in design. Think of tools SolidWorks' CEO John McEleney reckons we'll see development of inter-departmental, inter-site systems requiring PLM-like software, and thus follow-on uptake as business itself dictates the requirement. His reasoning: "Because things are now more global, US and European companies need to very much fasten onto timely delivery of their value-added products and services to meet particular customer needs... Job shops are likely to continue to prosper in specific vertical niches. [But] to succeed, they are going to need tools that will allow them to design and deliver differentiated products in very short time scales." And 'tools' is the word. Chris Garcia, SolidWorks' R&D vice president explains: "It's all about doing more with less, and getting to market quicker. At one extreme, we're moving towards a world where one person can design for the whole world of consumers. As an example, there are companies with maybe three people designing in the US, having their products manufactured in China and delivered in Europe. In the future, a global design company may consist of only three, four or five engineers with ad hoc global manufacturing partnerships and distribution networks created as and when needed." How are they going to manage without something that approximates to PLM? Well they might, because what they'll perceive themselves as needing will be aspects of it – for instance, a system that helps them collaborate on the engineering design side, from concept to prototype, involving interested parties as required at whatever level of sophistication. So, tools. McEleney: "A lot of people talk about PLM, but not a lot of our customers ask for it. When asked, we drill down to establish what it is they're trying to achieve." Garcia agrees there is a place for complete PLM system providers – serving large global engineering and manufacturing companies, particularly those that are more project-orientated and cannot rely on software from 15 different vendors on their mission-critical projects. But SolidWorks' approach will be to open up its architecture to make design information re-usable by others. One vital area of PLM currently only tackled imperfectly by one or two specialist vendors – is tolerance analysis. Garcia comes from a metrology background, and says: "Every CAD system is presently set up to help designers model at high speed. The methods used do not consider how parts are to be made. We, therefore, are trying to make a bridge to manufacturing by incorporating a better definition of design intent." The point: this is about eliminating at least some of that work, and getting the processes more streamlined and concurrent. We can expect improvements here to slide down the cost scale over the next 18–24 months. Do it yourself Users unable or unwilling to wait for better design-to-manufacturing links, and other aspects of the total PLM concept, can already go much of the way with available tools. And McEleney and Garcia point to two references that are particularly worthy of study. The first concerns collaborative development on the robot arms for the two NASA Mars rovers, which had to get from concept to final review and the start of manufacturing in only six months. Whatever may be the failures of the controlling software, the hardware performed perfectly in a situation of extreme difficulty. There is no environment on the surface of earth as severe: temperatures range from +110 to -120C, dust storms can reach hundreds of miles an hour, and delivery involves being bounced around on a dusty, rocky surface over 1km, with shock loads starting at 42g. The design and manufacture of the arm was contracted out by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to Alliance Spacesystems (ASI), based in Pasadena. The specifications for the arm included: five degrees of freedom and support for a turret with three instruments and a rock abrasion tool to grind clean patches on rocks that the instruments could be used to examine. It had to fold into a small space, but be able to extend to more than 1m, while weighing only 4.2kg. Each joint was unique, and 220 electrical signals had to make their way across them. Using what director of engineering Brett Lindenfeld, describes as "the traditional JPL production cycle", development would have required four meetings and three sets of drawings for each of perhaps 300 design iterations. Clearly, it wasn't going to get the job done: it was necessary to collaborate electronically. As is the case with so many engineering projects, many of the collaborators weren't on the same design software, so the team adopted novel PDF files capable of being read by Adobe Reader 6.0 (now spun off under new company Bluebeam Software), displaying accurately scaled drawings with correct line widths. Digital text stamps help maintain draft revision control, and hyperlinks are incorporated into design notes. By using a file attachment facility, solid models and other data are directly embedded into the PDFs. Approved drawings are then signed off with digital signatures, and ASI also developed a workflow tool to control configuration and drawing release. Lindenfeld says: "Using electronic collaboration easily achieved a five- to 10-fold time saving over traditional working methods." PLM on the ground At the other end of the cost scale, but just as concerned to achieve total product integrity in litigation-aware North America, is the design and manufacture of baby bathing aids by the Dorel Juvenile Group. J Peter Giardina, design systems engineer, explains that his design office has 17 seats of SolidWorks on a licence floating among 28 users, as well as eight seats of Vellum. Designs start as hand sketches, and Vellum turns these into quick 2D parametric electronic sketches, which are exported as PostScript files, with CadMover used to turn them into DXF files that can be read by SolidWorks. Some of its industrial designers use ShapeWorks, which interfaces to SolidWorks directly. All CAM and tooling work is outsourced. Giardina: "We send them IGES, STEP, SolidWorks or eDrawings files as best suited to the task at hand." Management is assisted by PDMWorks combined with a "discipline for naming conventions." Engineering and quality assurance departments also exchange eDrawings and PDF files. Again, it all works. If you think of PLM as a mindset, an approach, rather than a singular software product, you won't go far wrong. Getting there, and getting the structure to cover more of the total product lifecycle throughout the collaborative design and development processes, as well as manufacturing, repair and the rest, is going to get easier and more formalised, but for now there are lots of horses, and the courses are still being outlined.