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IBM
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The need for today's corporations to innovate is becoming increasingly critical to their survival as competition increases globally. Delivering products with a consistent level of quality and in an efficient manner might ensure positive revenue, but it does not ensure the maintenance or growth of market share. With an increasing number of competitors -- which employ the latest technologies to ensure manufacturing efficiency -- revenue growth can occur most rapidly by increasing the size of existing markets. Increasing market size and market share can be ensured by consistently launching products that are dynamic, fresh, and desirable. Core objectives for a corporation include not only reducing the cost of developing new products, but also increasing the speed with which new products can be brought into existing markets. Launching new products quickly requires an environment that facilitates cost reduction, and encourages and supports innovation. Significant progress has been made in reducing product development costs. Use of modern computer-aided design (CAD) tools has allowed design engineers to more efficiently create a detailed product definition. With digital mock-up technologies, product designs can be validated before cutting any metal. Similarly, implementation of product data management technology has enabled increased access to product information. This progress, however, has focused on the production engine within a business rather than on the innovation engine. Even though CAD systems enable designers to create information faster, the number of new products a company can create is constrained by business processes and other systems. For example, designers often are not able to view manufacturing constraints and the impact of these constraints on their design efforts. Thus, though parts of the process may be automated and supported by digital data, the overall process, which involves other departments within the organization, does not function smoothly or efficiently. As a result, the time required for analysis and justification of new products constrains the number of new products that can be introduced in a given period of time.
Innovation Requires Change Today's serial development processes generate and utilize large amounts of product information, but prevent corporations from developing product knowledge. Serial development processes consist of several sequential stages, each of which uses information from the previous stage, and generates information to be used in subsequent stages. Between each stage, information must be transferred to other people and departments, re-interpreted, and converted into a format expected by that department. The data conversion and interpretation comprise a significant portion of the time consumed by the product development process. CAD and other tools support product definition and enable more rapid transformation from one format to another. Product data management (PDM) provides a single location from which to access information, thus minimizing time consumed by data transfer. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems integrate data and processes associated with manufacturing planning and assembly of the product. These technologies contribute more strongly during different portions of the product development process towards compressing the product lifecycle. Despite their benefits, they do not eliminate the re-interpretation required by various departments involved in a serial development process, and do not encourage parallel development activities.
To maximize compression of the product development lifecycle, companies must not only represent product data in digital format, but they must also ensure that multiple departments can interpret the information easily and unambiguously. Secondly, they must re-architect their product development process to allow multiple disciplines to not only access product knowledge at any point in the process, but to productively utilize that knowledge to progress their portion of the overall product development lifecycle. This activity can be undertaken with a consolidated focus on the drivers that have the greatest bearing on reducing cycle time and cost of creating new products, while more efficiently employing available resources. For example, allowing the design, analysis, manufacturing, and maintenance disciplines to define their respective deliverables in concert would have an enormous bearing on the overall cycle time by consolidating the influence each of these disciplines has on the product itself.
A New Era Today, the tools exist to define product information so that it can be utilized by all disciplines involved in the product development process at any time during that process. Successful utilization of these tools requires working in a new way. First, companies must define product information in a context within which multiple disciplines can access it and utilize it productively. In this form, it becomes corporate knowledge. Secondly, companies must design processes so that participants can perform their roles in the product development process without the need for completely mature information. This allows departments to work in parallel. As information matures, each department revises its work, if necessary, based upon any new information. The tools for collecting, storing, organizing, managing, and giving access to product and process knowledge make up a new environment referred to as Virtual Product Development Management (VPDM). This type of corporate transformation represents a significant paradigm shift. Product development processes have evolved over decades; changing them, even slowly, is difficult. By automating tasks and allowing enterprise information sharing, CAD and PDM systems deliver significant reductions in cycle time. But to move to the next level of competitiveness through product innovation, companies must think about product development in a new way. The core concept lies in focusing the product, resource, and process modeling environments to foster communication. Multiple disciplines must be able to work in parallel, accessing and utilizing information from a corporate knowledge base. This knowledge base will contain an entire product definition, including processes required to build the product, as well as plant designs for the factories in which manufacturing will take place. The traditional handoff of data no longer will be necessary, nor will the data conversion and re-interpretation that typically accompany them. Because downstream disciplines can define information before designs are complete, design engineers can utilize this information to perform intelligent product simulations. They can understand performance, manufacturing processes, and maintainability constraints, all of which are relevant to the initial product design. Changes to the design that occur early in the design cycle are orders of magnitude less expensive than those made after the product is released. Moreover, the design is able to mature more quickly, compressing traditional product development processes.
Providing the Answer To create collaborative, innovative design environments, companies must think about product development in a new way. They also require specific tools that enable creation and accumulation of product knowledge. ENOVIAVPM is a software solution that addresses the needs of companies wanting to increase the size of their markets by developing innovative products faster. The primary objective of ENOVIAVPM is to optimize end-to-end development of competitive and innovative products -- in effect, to create better products. To optimize products and processes, ENOVIAVPM provides a high degree of collaboration. This includes simultaneously defining, configuring, and optimizing product definition, manufacturing process, and product operations, and propagating changes consistently through the entire product and process definition. To capture and access knowledge during the product development process, ENOVIAVPM manages product information such as features and relationships generated by tools such as assembly and configuration modelers. ENOVIAVPM achieves these objectives by delivering the following capabilities:
Software alone is rarely sufficient to deliver substantial corporate-wide benefits, especially given the paradigm shift required to fully leverage the power of ENOVIAVPM. To prepare the organization for effective utilization of a tool such as ENOVIAVPM, a company must first examine business objectives to ensure that increasing market size is the proper goal. Secondly, a company must analyze existing processes to determine where process linkages between departments are weak. Next, these processes must be re-engineered to ensure that multiple disciplines can interact to simultaneously define and simulate a product. Finally, the proper tools must be implemented, along with other required complementary products, such as network management, load balancing, and backup and archive. All of these tools must be integrated carefully with legacy applications in a manner that does not disrupt normal day-to-day operations. These steps will enable a company to realize the tremendous benefits that can be derived from improving its ability to innovate. IBM and ENOVIA can help a company not only start its innovation engine, but bridge the gap between its innovation and production capabilities. The resulting environment encourages involvement from all disciplines in the entire product development process. This article was written by Steve Shoaf, IBM PDM II Solutions Manager, North America. For more information, contact ENOVIA Corporation, Charlotte, NC, at 877-ENOVIA2 or 704-944-8888.
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