Weakness in numbers

Anyone who thinks managing large assemblies is merely about keeping track of all the drawings is in for troubled times. For Nick Ballard of UK IT consultancy turned analyst Cambashi, the list of key issues includes tolerance analysis, the difficulty of mating and manipulating sub-parts, the size of the complete model, and the complexity of the mechanical performance analysis for the whole system. And these exist even if there’s only one version of a product. As Ballard ploints out, there are usually hundreds. And on top of all this there’s the need to manage the skein of relationships in a project of any size. Most people think of complex assemblies as aircraft or automobiles. But Ballard says the complexity of, say, Nokia’s products bear comparison with these. Nokia’s biggest problem now is not the mixture of mechanics and electronics but the version control of the software that runs on the phones. Airbus or PCB? Assemblies don’t come much more complex than a top-end Philips printed circuit board, though the newly-announced 600-passenger Airbus 380 must run it pretty close! What both have in common is that they are developed with support from manufacturing simulation software Tecnomatix and its version of collaborative e-manufacturing, eMPower. A key eMPower component is manufacturing process management (MPM), a more powerful form of computer aided production engineering (CAPE). What’s interesting is not just that it manages complexity, but that it uses the web to extend the range of Tecnomatix’s electronic bill of process (EBoP) (MCS, September 2000, page 38). MPM is a process authoring, simulation and managing tool which delivers the eBoP. The point is product knowledge is no longer enough. Tools like these have to manage not just the knowledge of the materials used but the way they’re put together. Ballard speaks of a car engine manufacturer which supplies Formula 1 teams. The engines are despatched with a pack of instructions, but the manufacturer complains that customers don’t read about where to put the wiring harnesses. The result is that the looms are installed in the wrong place, so the wires become worn or too hot – and melt. According to Tecnomatix’s sales and marketing vice president Gary Kuba, process information is important for several reasons. New product introduction may be an important step in the life cycle of any product, but what happens when you have to increase production on one site, or open new plants somewhere else? You can’t be sure you’ll have the skills to do either, which is why wrapping up process knowledge in an eBoP and posting it elsewhere for reuse is valuable. It’s too early to say how well this will work, but as Kuba points out, you just can’t manage today’s processes by keeping process information – or its performance measures – on CDs, floppies, or paper or in people’s heads. And Tecnomatix, whose roots are in simulation, is far from alone in thinking this. From the CAD side, Smarteam – Dassault’s CAD-independent supplier of web-enabled PDM and collaboration tools – has something called SmartBriefcase – an electronic briefcase. According to Smarteam founder and vice president of marketing, Avichay Nissenbaum, very little of the products that we see around us are made by the people whose names those products carry. This implies a lot of collaboration, which is complex whatever the product – but the difficulty of doing it is particularly acute for high-tech companies like Nokia and IBM. For Nissenbaum, the key is the ability to collaborate with anyone inside or outside – a supplier – by allowing them to get the information they need, to view and annotate it, to make commments and, crucially, add more detail, fill in gaps and send it back. SmartBriefcase makes this easy, Nissenbaum says, and it bundles the information with enough intelligence for the receiver to do it without the software used to create it. “You need to collaborate a lot around the bill of materials of the product you are working on and the associated documentation – drawings, visualisations, analysis and so on.” This is the basis of Smarteam’s Smart BoM. If recipients do have ERP, PDM or Smarteam applications, the data is in an XML-based form, which translates to formats their own databases can read and act on. SmartBriefcases can be sent serially or in parallel to several recipients. When they come back the assembler can use consolidation tools to reconcile the different changes, like ‘track changes’ in Word. Ran Shribman, European sales director for SmarTeam UK, says the information SmartBriefcase exchanges could include process information, and a SmartBriefcase can include process rules about the way the information is processed. Other SmarTeam tools can include a company’s suppliers, customers and partners in common processes. Although in the UK these approaches are relatively untested, you can’t say that of iMan, UGS’ more conventional PDM. Oxford based Lucy Switchgear, which makes built-to-order protection and control equipment for 10kV to 25kV electricity substations all over the world, is one long standing iMan PDM customer. Lucy’s main manufacturing sites are in Summertown, Oxford, (where all the design and contract management is carried out), Saudi Arabia, Dubai and India. So a great deal of information has to be shared internally as well as with suppliers. The Saudi site makes 60 systems a month; Dubai and India over 200 a month between them. Some parts are sourced in eastern Europe and India. Lucy is unusual in increasing the number of its suppliers rather than decreasing them. It now has 2,600. Five years ago it even made its own screws: “We used to be highly vertically integrated,” says Lucy group technical manager Christopher Venning. “Now we don’t do any turning or milling here at all, and much of the product is sourced overseas. The number of suppliers has exploded, and managing that has been difficult, to put it mildly.” Painful version control Most of this management task has been cultural, not technological, says Venning. Lucy has to be sure that suppliers follow the right process steps using the right drawings and don’t take short cuts just to get the job through. They haven’t always done so. “And then we had some other problems with issues and issue control. You might have something production released to Issue 5 but discover there was an Issue 6 or 7 in prototype. What did you go on to production release? If you don’t keep tight control, it gives you headaches.” Each Lucy system contains 2,000 to 2,500 mechanical, electrical and electronic parts, not counting the programming and control software the electronics relies on. Options include remote operation, so the equipment has to carry sensing, transponding and actuator electronics, and a variety of remote tripping units. Protection options include self-powered protection, time limit fuses and auxiliary powered relays. Customers can also choose among panel, indicator, interlock and alarm types. Lucy also has to coordinate production and delivery with site personnel and project managers wherever the system is to be installed. Adopting PDM, says Venning, has allowed Lucy to manage these automation and other customer variants: “The core of the product is the main part of the switch. That is the part that is certified, so it will go out to be tested... Those can be plugged together Lego-like in various combinations. Those combinations and the engineering control on those modules is very, very tightly controlled, and that’s where iMan comes in. “Then the customer comes along and says he wants this or that added or whatever, so the cladding that goes round the outside can vary considerably. So that we don’t keep in the models and options set… To try to do that in all the variants that we do over the life of these things – they go on for years – that would be impossible. We’d just collapse in a sea of information. That’s why we restrict it and say, ‘There’s a bit we will do very tight engineering control over, and then there’s the remainder’.” And he continues: “Without a PDM system, there would be absolutely no way of managing all the 3D data and bringing in the assemblies and so on. It would be impossible. You couldn’t share information down on to the shop floor in any reasonable way. Now we have these web browsers all over the place that can go back and call the drawing up.” They can only see the production release drawing but they can get it instantaneously, he says: “see the bill of materials and then get the current one.” And ‘see’ means nearly everyone. Venning lists people in sales, contract administration, purchasing, manufacturing engineers, production and operations people: “They’re all referring back to it”. Using traditional paper-based CAD systems that just couldn’t happen. And that’s the biggest PDM benefit: “To allow Lucy to produce the variants – that’s what we’re known for.” Lucy has managed to grow its PDM system gradually, so there was no massive data-entry project. But when, last year, Lucy’s engineering department company took over responsibility for all engineering data from the IT department, this involved a £180,000 data cleaning project – which took over six months. “That was jolly hard work,” says Venning, with “a lot of extrenal consultancy, a lot of testing, and then a lot of training.” And the total investment in PDM?: “For us, a huge amount – I dread to think.”