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Product Lifecycle Management technology can centralize, standardize, and streamline your manufacturing process, speeding time-to-market.
Market dynamics, such as continuous technology advances, increased customer demands, new compliance standards, and competitive pressures, are requiring today’s electronics manufacturers to develop more complex, higher quality products, in less time. Product information is constantly changing throughout the design-to-manufacturing process.
As design cycles shrink, it is critical that controlled product development processes be implemented to avoid inefficiencies and to ensure product delivery goals are met.
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) technology provides a system to centralize product data, standardize business processes, and streamline communication of information across distributed product development teams. It helps manufacturers meet market pressures and maintain a competitive advantage by helping to shorten development cycles, improve product quality, and speed time-to-market.
PLM provides a single environment to share information and ensure all appropriate parties have access to current and accurate data. Software is designed to manage product data throughout the product life cycle, from concept to design to manufacture and support.
A PLM system is crucial during the design phase, where engineers need instant access to product data, including specifications, engineering parameters and documentation. The software tracks and manages information, such as component data, Bill of Materials (BOMs), product documentation, engineering changes and revisions, quality issues, and compliance data. PLM also centralizes all of this information for easy access by all appropriate team members.
PLM technology is built on the concept of sharing data with the extended enterprise, helping manufacturers meet yet another challenge they face with outsourcing. With the increase in outsourcing, both locally and offshore, companies must implement processes to effectively communicate constantly changing product information with their outsource partners. PLM facilitates the secure sharing of product information among internal and external product development teams, streamlining communication of such information as new products, changes, revisions, and configurations.
In addition, PLM provides a mechanism to synchronize engineering and manufacturing data through an automated process. This eliminates issues related to the disconnect between engineering and manufacturing where manufacturing is often not aware of new product releases and revisions, and engineering is not aware of design issues impacting manufacturing and procurement processes.
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FIGURE 1. A Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system provides a mechanism to synchronize engineering and manufacturing data through an automated process. By creating an integrated environment between engineering tools (CAD/CAE) and business systems (ERP/MRP/CRM), engineers gain visibility into business-level information to which they typically would not have access, such as vendor status, lead times, and costs. Such integration improves the overall design decision-making process.
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By creating an integrated environment between engineering tools (CAD/CAE) and business systems (ERP/MRP/CRM), engineers gain visibility into business-level information to which they typically would not have access, such as vendor status, lead times, and costs, improving the overall design decision-making process. In addition, automatically sharing data with business systems, such as product changes, ensures manufacturing receives the most current design information for more efficient production processes.
According to a recent study from the Aberdeen Group (www. aberdeen.com; “Integrating the PLM Ecosystem”), “PLM is emerging as the system of record for a broad range of product-related data.” As Product Lifecycle Management technology evolves and encompasses more aspects of overall product development, additional product data is made accessible to engineers at design time, making PLM more of a proactive design tool.
For example, having such data as quality information (customer responses, issues, history, etc.) managed within the PLM system and tied to the product record, gives engineers access to direct customer feedback. This information is typically managed in a separate quality system, limiting access, or is never communicated to the engineer. Making it available, however, brings the design engineers closer to the customer, enabling them to design better products that meet customers’ actual needs.
New regulatory requirements, such as Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS), the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) 21 CFR Part-11 and 21 CFR Part-820 regulations, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards create additional pressures for manufacturers. To meet and maintain compliance, companies need collaborative software solutions to ensure that information sharing and data classification are completely accurate and accessible to all product development parties.
Product Lifecycle Management software solutions can support manufacturers’ initiatives in successfully meeting compliance. It can alleviate the costs and pain of the compliance process by automating data management, enabling manufacturers to more easily track, store, and report pertinent information, and providing a solution that can adjust to meet the requirements of new and evolving guidelines.
Like many electronics manufacturers, Astronics Advanced Electronic Systems (AES; www.astronicsaes.com), a manufacturer for commercial and military aerospace platforms that include lighting, power generation, distribution and control, was challenged with its manual product development processes. The company produces more than 100 products, each with their own processes and workflows, and more than 20,000 parts.
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FIGURE 2. Omnify Software’s Empower PLM solution provides a single, secure location to manage all product-related data, including component, bill-of-materials, engineering change, and document information, ensuring that all design team members have access to current data.
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“With a growing number of parts, products and changes, added to the tracking of drawings, schematics and part lists, there were definitely efficiencies to be had by tightening up the management of all internal processes so that no steps could be skipped and outdated processes could be eliminated,” says Marty Jeide, program manager for Astronics AES.
The company had been using a home-grown system consisting of Windows folders, various Excel files and worksheets, and Access databases with complicated security schemes to manage product data. The growing silos of information and manual processes burdened Astronics with data inconsistencies that resulted in costly rework late in the manufacturing process.
“If an engineer changed a part or component via an engineering change notice, for instance, the ‘system’ relied upon a manufacturing engi-neer or other operations person to incorporate the change into the Manufacturing BOM,” explains Jeide. “If that did not happen, wrong parts could be potentially built that would have to be reworked to the new, correct configuration when identified at later steps in the manufacturing process.”
To position themselves for continued growth, the AES executive team looked at new strategies that would maintain the company’s competitive edge and product reputation in bringing leading electrical power to passengers and airline personnel. The first step was investing in a Product Lifecycle Management system to tighten product lifecycle processes and ensure that accurate data was shared among design and manufacturing teams.
The company needed to improve antiquated processes, particularly with engineering change documentation and control. “We wanted a solution to help streamline our product development processes and improve efficiencies,” says Jeide.
AES required a PLM system that provided easy integration with their Intuitive Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) environment so that product data, such as BOMs, drawings, and changes, could be automatically ported to the Intuitive system and eliminate errors related to hand-entering data. The company also wanted the ability to integrate the PLM system with their engineering design environments, SolidWorks and OrCAD CIS.
Implementing a PLM solution chosen from Omnify Software enabled Astronics AES to gain control of processes, streamline data, and improve efficiencies. “We evaluated a number of PLM systems for the purpose of creating a best practices environment and found Omnify’s PLM software stood out …in terms of it being a robust system, having a seamless interface to our Intuitive ERP, and extremely good people standing behind the product,” says Jeide.
By delivering a single, secure location to manage all product-related data, including component, BOM, engineering change, and document information, Omnify helped Astronics eliminate the silos of information and ensure all team members had access to current data.
“With the implementation of our Omnify PLM software, we have been able to achieve a single Engineering BOM that is controlled in Omnify PLM and can only be changed via a formal change process in Omnify,” notes Jeide. “All changes, when authorized, are automatically forwarded by Omnify via a software link to our Intuitive ERP system. The process is automatic and foolproof, and there can no longer potentially be a difference between what is designed and what is built.”
Omnify also facilitates Astronics’ ability to meet ISO and FAA regulations by making compliance demonstration much easier to accomplish. The solution provides the necessary functionality to store, track, and report data required by these regulatory bodies.
“With 300 employees and data coming from multiple sources, systems, and departments, it is often difficult to adapt to change and instill good corporate disciplines—but a number of small efficiencies can really make a major impact,” observes Jeide.
Astronics has been able to maximize efficiencies by establishing a controlled environment to manage all product data and implement formal processes. The company has also realized cost savings by preventing late-stage rework through the automatic upload of design data to Intuitive ERP. In addition, employees have been able to move on to more productive tasks other than manually maintaining Configuration Management (CM) records and performing tedious searches to find information, resulting in improved resource allocation.
Today’s market requires manufac-turers to look at ways to improve their overall product development processes. Centralizing product data, automating design processes and instilling controlled processes with PLM technology can help manufacturers meet product development goals and maintain a competitive edge.
ALAINE PORTNOY is product marketing manager at Omnify Software (www.omnifysoftware.com). Her expertise is in the manufacturing and product lifecycle management markets.
Connector Specifier September, 2008
Author(s) :
Alaine Portnoy
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