In the typical company with large numbers of people involved in the engineering and associated functions, many problems arise from the lack of control over engineering data and the engineering process. People are sometimes unable to find the information they need. If they can find the information, it may not correspond to the actual state of the product. For example, a facility drawing may not correspond to the physical facility layout.

Developers are unable to rapidly access a particular design among the mass of existing designs. To find specific information, they may have to search through tens of pages of listings. They lose valuable time. Studies show that design engineers spend up to 80% of their time on administrative and information retrieval activities. They develop new designs that may be almost identical to existing designs with the result that unnecessary additional costs are generated as the new designs are taken through the various activities necessary for manufacture, and then supported during use.

As more and more data is generated on computer and other electronic systems, it becomes more and more difficult, with manual control and management procedures introduced when data volumes were twenty or even fifty times lower, to track the location of data, to prevent unauthorized access and to maintain up-to-date product configurations.

Large companies hold many hundred TB (Terabytes) of data (1TB=1,000 GB). Companies hold thousands, or even millions, of drawings. 3D CAD part models may run to many MB. One company calculated that it needed 250,000 pages to describe a new product, and that, on average, each of these was reproduced 30 times. This can be thought of as many tons of paper, or many Gigabytes of data.

Data entry is poorly controlled. Data is lost and cannot be retrieved. It is re-created and errors are introduced. The wrong product goes to a customer. Product configuration data is not up-to-date. When a defective part is found in the field, many more products than necessary have to be recalled. Design history is not maintained, so it is impossible to draw on previous experience.

Due to gaps between incompatible application programs, data is transferred manually, and errors occur. They have to be corrected, and their correction has to be managed. This costs time and money. An error slips through and is not discovered for several weeks. Correcting it leads to months of delay. Part descriptions and Bills of Materials developed on a CAD system may need to be manually transferred to an ERP system in a computer that is not linked to the CAD system. The Manufacturing Bill of Materials may be different from the Engineering Bill of Materials. The two systems may be the responsibility of different departments or organizations. The change processes in the two organizations may be different and out-of-step. At a particular time, a given change may have been made in one system, but not in the other. As a result, not all users will have immediate access to the most up-to-date information. Thousands of dollars can be wasted if the Manufacturing organization works on the wrong version of a design for several weeks.

Several copies of the information describing the same part are maintained. Nobody knows which the master copy is. When a change is needed, not all copies are changed, and not all the downstream functions are alerted. Old, unwanted revisions of parts are machined, while the new, required versions are ignored. When there is no agreed master version of a particular item of information, and no agreed owner, all users of the information will behave as if they were the owners. Each user will define the item to suit their particular requirements. All the definitions may be different. Such wasted effort leads to confusion when information is transferred between users.

Attempts to work closely with a supplier in the design phase are hindered because it takes several days (a month in the case of one aircraft manufacturer) to transfer a paper drawing from one company to another. Increasingly, companies expect suppliers to design and produce complete assemblies containing many parts. Unless the company's after-sales engineers have access to information on individual parts of the supplier's assembly, problems arise in the field.

Project and resource management tools are not linked to the design information. Unintended overlap in data and workflow occurs, wasting time and money. At the same time, any attempt to save time, by running the various phases of a project in parallel, leads to chaos. As a result, the phases are run in serial, lengthening project cycles. Rules and procedures are difficult to enforce. Design rules can be ignored. Project planning exercises can not draw on real data from the past, but are based on over-optimistic estimates. Project managers find it difficult to keep up-to-date with the exact progress of work. As a result, they are unable to address slippage and other problems as soon as these occur.

Engineering changes are poorly coordinated, with the result that unnecessary changes may be introduced. Design cycles are longer than necessary and unreleased versions of data are acquired by the Manufacturing organization causing confusion and waste. The time taken for raising, approving and implementing changes becomes much longer than necessary. The change process may take days, weeks or even months, whereas the actual processing time may be only minutes or hours. In large companies, it costs thousands of dollars to process an engineering change.

Engineering change control systems are often bureaucratic, paper-intensive, complex and slow. A central engineering services group may have the responsibility, but not the tools, to push the changes through as quickly as possible. Many departments may be involved (one manufacturer found that, depending on the change, up to 16 departments were involved). As a result, it may take several months, and fifty or more different documents, to get a proposed change approved and incorporated into the product design. During this time, the product will continue to be produced with an unwanted design. Even when a change has been agreed and announced, many months may go by before the corresponding documentation gets to the field.
As the management and change process appears as an inefficient and time-consuming overhead, some people will avoid it. For some information, there may even be no formal change control process. Minor modifications to products and drawings will not be signaled. Components will be substituted in end products without corresponding changes being made to test routines. People will fail to maintain the trace of the exact ingredients in ever-smaller batches of products. Nobody will notice until something goes wrong or another change has to be made. Then, unnecessary effort will be needed to find out where the problem comes from. Additional support staff will be employed to try to prevent further problems.
Informal communications are developed between departments to cope with the lack of suitable formal communications. Few records will be kept of this type of transfer and, in the absence of a particular individual, it may be impossible to find any trace of important information.

People wait hours, even days, for a given piece of information. The person who should sign off a design is called away for a few hours, and work is held up because nobody knows who else has the authority to sign off. When people do receive information they are not sure if they have received the correct version. Sometimes they just want to make a simple request for information from a system that ®belongs¯ to someone else, and find they have to wait several days to get it.

Configuration control breaks down. Configuration documentation no longer corresponds to the actual product. Unexplained differences appear between as-designed, as-planned and as-built Bills of Materials. Increased scrap, rework and stock result. Incomplete products are assembled and delivered. Field problems are difficult to resolve, and inefficiencies occur in spare parts management. New versions of computer programs are introduced without sufficient care being taken to ensure that, for example, data created with earlier versions is still usable. Programs are insufficiently documented. Program modifications are made without appropriate change control.

Technical manuals become outdated, yet are not updated. Logistics support data gets out of control. Inadequately documented configurations become difficult to maintain. Spares replenishment becomes inaccurate, and customers have to immobilize products while efforts are made to identify correct replacement parts. When the right part arrives, the right handling equipment and maintenance tools are not in place.

There is a conflict between the central Information Systems (IS) organization and the computer system support staff in the engineering function. The IS staff are deeply involved in F and A work, and they do not invest enough time in supporting the engineering function. They are often more interested in the theoretical aspects of IS and new IS technologies, than in its practical use for engineering activities.

New product introductions in a whole range of manufacturing industries are delayed for a myriad of apparently random and minor, but cumulatively significant reasons. Product quality is erratic despite vast investments in engineering and manufacturing technology, and in Quality programs. Lead times seem to remain the same in spite of all the new investment. Overall, the costs associated with engineering and development rise rather than fall.

EDS Technologies being the largest PLM solution provider in India and with close to a decade of experience in implementing and supporting Dassault Systemes PLM solution. EDS Technologies is well placed to answer all your quires related to the latest trends in Product Data Management (PDM).

For more information please write to marketing@edstechnologies.com or
call us on +91 99001 07425.