Virtually Flawless?

Using real-time simulations, manufacturers are working out kinks in their processes and plant layouts—before bending metal and without building costly prototypes.

Warning lights flash as cars careen into walls and crumple, accordion-style. Crash-test robots twist and turn to avoid collision, while lifelike, three-dimensional characters do their part to reassemble the pieces. This is no extreme video game. Rather, it's the latest chapter in an information revolution that is transforming the manufacturing industry. Computer simulation and collaboration technologies, known collectively as digital manufacturing, are being used by car companies and aerospace giants to test-drive product concepts and experiment with manufacturing techniques in lieu of building costly and time-consuming physical prototypes.

The idea behind digital manufacturing is to leverage IT to collaboratively develop the manufacturing plan and manufacturing equipment simultaneously with the product. Why is this important? Because design flaws, manufacturing kinks and inefficient processes can be hammered out and corrected early on when changes create little disruption of critical time-to-market schedules. The potential cost savings are huge. While the concept isn't entirely new (early iterations were known as concurrent engineering or design for assembly), it's only now starting to take root. CIMdata, a consulting and research firm specializing in product lifecycle management issues, estimates that investments in digital manufacturing technologies will grow at a clip of more than 25 percent annually for the next three years.

Amal Girgis, CIO for Pratt & Whitney Canada, says virtual manufacturing saves the company $500,000 for each new engine it produces.

And CIOs, rather than engineers, have turned out to be the linchpins of the digital manufacturing push. "The CIO is responsible for all information technology, and [digital manufacturing] is part of information technology. The way to look at it is as a partnership between IT, engineering and manufacturing," says Amal Girgis, CIO of Pratt & Whitney Canada. DaimlerChrysler Senior Vice President and CIO Susan Unger, who has been a driving force behind the company's digital manufacturing initiative, known as Digital Factory, says, "If you don't have IT fairly active [with digital manufacturing], there ends up being standalone types of activity and you lose the power of this virtual team."

CIOs have several roles to play in digital manufacturing. They need to be futurists who identify the competitive possibilities. They must act as key sponsors and change agents to facilitate all the new business processes and organizational transformations. And plenty of traditional IT responsibilities are associated with digital manufacturing. Orchestrating a product information structure within the organization, creating a data integration strategy to sync up with other core business systems, and identifying the areas where digital manufacturing can deliver the most compelling results can only be accomplished through CIO direction, in partnership with executives in engineering and manufacturing. "You have to reengineer an organization to deal with digital information and create a culture of sharing across functional areas. The CIO is the enabler," says Michael Grieves, director of industry research for the MIS Department at the University of Arizona's Eller College of Management.

Not too long ago, it took Pratt & Whitney Canada (P&WC) five years to bring a new aircraft engine to market; today, thanks to its Digital Engine initiative launched in 2002 and other internal improvement initiatives, new engines take three years to develop. P&WC is looking to digital manufacturing and other technologies to reduce time to market even further, to two and half years. Using simulation to ferret out production flaws and assess maintenance costs has had huge ramifications—new engines designed in the new virtual world have saved the company $500,000 for each engine program by eliminating physical mock-ups, says CIO Girgis. Moreover, 70 percent of so-called interferences—conflicts between production parts—are now resolved at the early design stage.

The simulations also help verify whether the engine can be maintained cost-effectively. Instead of building expensive wood or plastic mock-ups of an engine to determine if maintenance workers could, say, easily access parts, P&WC engineers use simulated mannequins to test ergonomics and estimate maintenance time more accurately. "Cutting metal to produce a product is very slow and very expensive," says Girgis. "Seeing a simulation helps us understand what to expect."

"The CIO is responsible for all information technology, and digital manufacturing is part of IT. The way to look at it is as a partnership between IT, engineering and manufacturing." -Amal Girgis, CIO, Pratt & Whitney Canada.

Automotive companies Ford, General Motors and DaimlerChrysler, and aerospace company Boeing, among others, have recently begun applying digital manufacturing tools and processes in earnest. The early results are promising. According to a 2003 CIMdata survey of companies doing digital manufacturing, companies achieved one or more of these results: They reduced time to market by 30 percent, pared the number of design changes by 65 percent, cut the manufacturing planning process by 40 percent and saw increases of 15 percent in production throughput on average.

When GM started creating digital mock-ups for its car designs in 2000 instead of building physical prototypes, it saved $75 million in the first year. Another important stage on the company's road to digital manufacturing was simulating key factory floor operations and testing ergonomic issues. GM now has 25 Vehicle Assessment Rooms around the globe where design engineers and plant engineers convene to do regular 3-D assessments on vehicles, testing out things like parts assemblies and other aspects of the line before going live.

Since embracing digital manufacturing, GM has seen a lot of near-flawless product launches, says Terry Kline, process information officer for global product development for GM in Warren, Mich., and CIO of GM's Asia-Pacific region. "Before, you'd build a vehicle in a plant to find the process changes. Now you visualize and simulate to find those changes," he says.

Abdallah Shanti, CIO for American Axle & Manufacturing, says manufacturing in North America is "under global attack," and it needs new technologies to compete.

It's a similar story at DaimlerChrysler, says Unger. Using digital manufacturing tools, the company slashed construction time on a new plant built in Germany by 30 percent and reduced its plant floor costs by more than 10 percent compared with factory projects built and designed in the traditional fashion. Simulation has also improved manufacturing planning time by 30 percent when retooling lines in existing plants for new products.

BEYOND CARS AND SPACESHIPS

So far, automotive and aerospace companies are the leaders in digital manufacturing. "Automotive and aerospace have invested so heavily early on because their investment in tooling is so significant," says Ed Miller, president of CIMdata. "The ability to understand flow and how factories and assembly lines are built is so critical to them." But other sectors are taking note of their successes. High-tech electronics, medical devices, pharmaceuticals and biotech are prime candidates for digital manufacturing.

Some high-tech electronics manufacturers already use digital manufacturing processes, in fact. The pharmaceutical industry has concentrated its use of technology on the drug discovery process rather than production. But as drug discovery processes become more virtual, pharmaceutical makers are likely to shift their emphasis to digital manufacturing techniques to bring drugs online quicker and shorten cycle times, says Grieves.

Game-Changing Technology

Why the big rush on digital manufacturing now? Advances in simulation technology from vendors such as Dassault Systemes and UGS have sparked interest. The software has progressed to the point where virtual renderings are as accurate as real-life operations.

"Simulating how a factory will run before you cut any metal is cheaper by a mile," explains Kevin O'Marah, vice president of research for AMR Research. "You can design a product without reference to manufacturing processes, but you might design something that's impossible to make. If you do it with reference to manufacturing processes, you can better estimate what it's going to cost to design the product and what you need to put in place to get to high-volume production."

Making this virtual world real is no small feat, however. Digital manufacturing software is highly complex and expensive. It also opens the door to major business process change. There are enormous cultural challenges associated with getting manufacturing and engineering groups to work together earlier on in the development process.

How I.T. Improves Manufacturing

Rationalizing factory flow and reducing do-overs are just part of what IT can do.

Another reason for recalcitrance is that manufacturing is a traditional discipline that does not easily adopt new ways of working. Many midlevel executives remain skeptical of the claims made by digital manufacturing vendors and early adopters and are not prepared to risk their careers by pitching such a substantial investment to senior management. Finally, most companies would have to do a great deal of advance work to fully utilize digital manufacturing. Executives would need a perfect understanding of their processes so that they could accurately model the building of products, which is very different from traditional manufacturing approaches.

Historically, collaboration between engineering and manufacturing departments has been a sequential process. Engineers work their CAD tools to innovate product designs, then throw a prototype over the wall to manufacturing engineers, who use their own set of tools to figure out if it can be manufactured, and at what cost. Next comes a round-robin of tweaking the prototype, testing its manufacturability, reworking it again, retesting and so on. This iterative process leaves huge gaps of downtime in the time-to-market cycle as well as significant costs associated with the scrap and rework of building new prototypes. "If you try to build it without simulation, you'd miss three or four weld points or find something doesn't fit together because the tolerances weren't right," explains the University of Arizona's Grieves. "But you'd expect to have that shake out through experiments on the factory floor."

Not in the digital world. The volleying between the engineering and manufacturing groups happens concurrently in simulations and without any physical prototypes. After engineers create a design, manufacturing engineers view the same digital representation to pinpoint possible problem areas, which are adjusted before any digital prototypes are made. The same thing goes for the production line. The digital representation of a product can be simulated on a virtual manufacturing line to see if weld points work, for example, or if a robotic arm does what it's supposed to do without interferences.

Not only do companies save time and money this way, they also have a better chance of optimizing the manufacturing process. "In the old way, you're happy if you find a process method that works," Grieves says. "But you often left a lot of cost on the factory floor, and the first method that worked was used. With an automated or simulated approach, you can run different alternatives to find the optimal way to build it.

CASE STUDIES IN DIGITAL MANUFACTURING

Boeing is looking to digital manufacturing to improve the maintenance and serviceability of its aircraft. Digital manufacturing will feature prominently in the 787 Dreamliner program, a new midsize jet design due out this year, with production slated for 2008. Using software from DELMIA the leading digital manufacturing vendor, Boeing will do everything from simulating how the plane will be assembled in the factory to testing how specific structural components will wear over time. Having this level of insight into possible maintenance issues prior to finalizing a design will do much to help Boeing engineers produce aircraft that will operate more efficiently and with a higher degree of serviceability over the typical 30-plus-year lifecycle of a plane. "Lots of times we do things because it's better to be safe than sorry," explains Frank Statkus, vice president for 787 Advanced Technology, Tools and Processes. "In this way, we actually design the product so we really understand the lifecycle of a particular component."

DaimlerChrysler Senior VP and CIO Susan Unger replaced weeks of back-and-forth between engineering and manufacturing with a half-hour simulation session.

At DaimlerChrysler, digital manufacturing has done much to facilitate communication between design engineers and manufacturing engineers. CIO Unger recounts one particular simulation session in 2003 where the benefits seemed to crystallize: Engineering and manufacturing were at odds over whether a particular module could be easily assembled into a vehicle. In the past, there would be weeks, maybe months, of back-and-forth discussions in trying to reach an accord. In the new Digital Factory world, both sides participated in a half-hour simulation session where both the module and the virtual factory were put on screen. There was immediate understanding that a worker would have to step into the trunk and blindly place the component to meet the design engineer's specs. "It's the old adage of a picture's worth a thousand words," Unger says. "It creates a common framework for people to understand different points of view and eliminates some of the functional biases that have happened in the past."

That's not to say digital manufacturing instantly translates into better cross-functional communication. It takes a significant amount of cultural and business process change to get engineers comfortable with sharing work-in-progress designs earlier in the process, not to mention getting manufacturing folks accustomed to working with incomplete and still-evolving information.

That's where the CIO can step in. Unger acted as a sponsor for digital manufacturing, along with her counterparts in manufacturing and engineering. She also was active in identifying the areas that would showcase the best returns for Digital Factory—in this case, some of the Mercedes car programs and the "body and white" piece of manufacturing, which is the exterior steel portion of the car. "This isn't any different than any other process change you go through. You have to look for early adopters and the biggest business problems you can solve," Unger says.

THE IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGE

Because digital manufacturing software is such a big investment, both in financial terms and the business and process changes it requires, it should be tied to a company's core business strategy. At American Axle & Manufacturing (AAM), digital manufacturing is part of the mission to become a lean enterprise, says Abdallah Shanti, vice president of IT and electronic product integration and CIO. "The manufacturing industry in North America is under global attack, and the only way to compete is to be better than the rest of the globe—not only from a product perspective, but with processes and efficiencies through the whole business. That's why it's so critical to leverage the technology tools," he says.

With the help of digital manufacturing technology, the $3.6 billion maker of driveline and chassis systems has virtual access to all 17 of its factories so that top executives can monitor production, drill into quality issues and put out fires in real-time. Before any new facility or piece of capital equipment is approved, its business case needs to be demonstrated through simulation. Simulation tools are deployed to predetermine factory throughput, capacity and capabilities before they are built. As a result, Shanti says, AAM today enjoys a Six Sigma rating—for every 1 million parts made, there are now a mere 3.4 mistakes—and the company's new factory in Mexico was finished five months ahead of schedule. Shanti expects more benefits as digital manufacturing continues to gain traction at the company.

While the CIO needs to be a player in digital manufacturing, he can't be the only one. It's important to engage allies in functional areas such as manufacturing and engineering. At Ford, the digital manufacturing project is a partnership between product development, manufacturing and IT. Information is the responsibility of the CIO, while business process setup and priorities fall to the business areas, says Richard Riff, a Henry Ford Technical Fellow for Virtual Product Creation and PLM at the company. "This has to be a partnership between business and IT," he says. "Otherwise it's technology for technology's sake, not technology for purpose."

DELMIA and CATIA are from the same PLM family.With CATIA, the digital product is defined and simulated, with DELMIA, the lean digital manufacturing processes are defined.

The link between this article and the one below, is that virtual manufacturing and simulation using DELMIA can only be achieved by the OEM's if CAD design data is fed into it from the suppliers in CATIA format. For example in order to simulate a virtual assembly line, the CATIA design data from the suppliers, e.g. Jig/Fixtures needs to be fed into DELMIA to make the Virtual factory work.

As several major automakers worldwide accelerate their product development cycle internally by using CATIA V5 software, suppliers who don't adapt are at risk of losing business. This is according to Mark Ratliff, president and CEO of Virtual Services, Inc., who discussed this major technology shift at the COE 2004 Industry Workshop- Automotive at the Hyatt Regency here today.

Automakers, including DaimlerChrysler, Ford, Honda and Toyota, are weaving CATIA V5 -- an advanced process-simulation technology -- into their daily product development culture. As a result, a new business model is evolving that yields accelerated product development cycles with drastically reduced effort. Consumers stand to benefit by having new vehicles introduced faster, a larger variety to choose from and higher quality vehicles.

"A major technology shift is quietly underway within the global automotive market that requires a transition over the next several months from various computer aided design (CAD) software systems to CATIA V5," Ratliff said. "This shift is due to several technology breakthroughs achieved by the CATIA V5 software. Suppliers who are unaware of this global trend are critically at risk of missing significant opportunities and may be jeopardizing the long- term viability of their company."

Although technology changeovers occur every five to 10 years, none have ever been as widespread or as deeply entrenched as this one, Ratliff said.

According to Mike Fecek, Virtual Services vice president of services, "Automakers are implementing CATIA V5 technology because of its ability to drastically reduce product development costs, significantly reduce timing and improve overall product quality. Their approach is to implement CATIA V5 strategically rather than just tactically. Strategic implementation means assessing the entire product development process and integrating the CATIA V5 technology into key value-driven processes. This is where Virtual Services excels."

For example, Grand Rapids, Mich. tooling supplier Northwest Tool and Die - which partnered with Virtual Services for strategic technology support - has implemented a new business model and uses CATIA V5 technology from the shop floor to the president. Its die makers can now manage four programs simultaneously instead of just one, Fecek said. In addition, Northwest Tool and Die has not only reduced its overall program timing from 38 weeks to 28 weeks, but also reduced hourly workweeks from 55 hours to 45 hours.

At COE 2004, Virtual Services is showcasing its products and services at booth No. 12, and discussing the CATIA V5 technology, its successes and benefits to suppliers and consumers. In addition, the company is conducting a raffle in which one attendee will win a brand new 2004 car.

Headquartered in Madison Heights, Mich., Virtual Services, Inc. implements process improvements and new technologies, including CATIA V5, that improve product quality, accelerate the product development process, increase engineering efficiency and reduce cost. The company provides engineering solutions and support services to auto suppliers of BMW, DaimlerChrysler, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Nissan and Toyota.

Virtual Services offers a distinctive total service solution including on- site implementation services, system administration, technical training and continuous support. The company is an authorized business partner of IBM, Dassault Systemes, UGS, Sun Microsystems, Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Microsoft Corp.