Today’s manufacturers have never been under more pressure. Competition is global, customers are fickle and demanding, and financial markets are unforgiving. Successfully balancing increasing product and process complexity with rising performance and quality requirements is a challenge.

These pressures are forcing fundamental changes in the way companies are structured and in the way they conduct business. The result is a new global business model based on cooperation and competition, and the transformation of manufacturing industries into collaborative communities working within, and beyond, company boundaries.

Over recent years, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) has been embraced by leading manufacturers as a means of leveraging leading business strategies. Digital Mock Up (DMU) is a key component of PLM

However, the benefits of DMU extend far beyond reducing the number of physical prototypes. By providing a mechanism for sharing product information and allowing design reviews to be quickly and easily conducted among multiple team members and across multiple companies and geographies, DMU provides the critical time and data needed to explore design alternatives and increase product innovation.

The concept of DMU originated in the late 1980’s shortly after the adoption of 3D CAD systems. It was typically provided as an ‘add-on’ application to CAD systems. Most DMU applications are still provided as standalone applications that are not integrated with CAD authoring tools or with the overall PLM solution, CAD, Product Data Management (PDM) or Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) applications.

Designers, project leaders and process engineers can find it challenging to use a DMU application that is decoupled from their working environment. The visualization format used by the DMU applications is different from the formats used by CAD applications, and the CAD applications have limited (or no) ability to integrate the output from the design review application for easy resolution by the designer. Now imagine the complexities of this approach for design reviews in the automotive industry: A typical automobile can have 3000-5000 parts, with many of these being used in different models and configurations of a given vehicle and with the parts themselves also having different release levels and variants.

Using a DMU application that is not tightly integrated with your other PLM applications leads to several other business issues as well:

• Increased cost, time and effort – IT infrastructure, business processes and support requirements all increase when maintaining separate design review and CAD authoring formats and repositories.
• Poor product quality – Design errors result from an inability to simulate the performance of all product variants and configurations, leading to quality and warranty issues.
• High warranty costs – Manufacturing and product service quality and performance suffer due to inadequate simulation during the product design stage

Maintaining the review repository separate from the design repository may seem like the most expedient way to initially implement DMU capabilities. However, it introduces several challenges.

Concurrent engineering – a vision originally conceived in the early 1990’s – relies on simultaneous efforts from multiple designers. However, when two separate repositories are used, engineering must stop until the design review is completed. Otherwise, reviewers cannot be certain that they are looking at the most up-to-date design.

Ideally, the design data and visualization data are integrally linked within the PLM environment and synchronization is inherent within the architecture. Engineers can then work rapidly, and if data used in the visualization is changed, all affected reviewers are notified, ensuring that everyone involved in both design and review is up to date. This tight coupling of design data and visualization data, as well as integrated data management, optimizes the overall DMU review process, leading to significant productivity improvements.

In addition to productivity improvements, significant business benefits can be gained by integrating CAD design applications and DMU review tools within a single application framework. In an integrated environment, a design engineer simply selects a menu pick within the CAD application to immediately change to a design review session. The designer then uses the power of the design review tools to simulate the product being designed. If a problem with a design (for example, a kinematic mechanism clashing with other components) is found, the user can immediately switch back to the design environment to rectify the problem – without any data translation or migration. The integration of these two environments into a single logical application leads to immense productivity improvements in the overall design process

Capabilities exist in today’s PLM solutions to manage multiple product configurations. These capabilities originated with PDM systems, which were used to model product structures and engineering bills of material. However, modern PLM systems leverage configuration management that is much more closely aligned to the design environment than can be provided by traditional PDM systems. This technology is called Virtual Product Development Management (VPDM).

As well as supporting DMU studies across all configurations, VPDM provides a very efficient process for managing the results of clash analysis. This process ensures that all interferences are captured and addressed, and limits risk by providing decision support capabilities specifically designed to support complex environments

One of the most important questions to ask during the design phase is how easy it will be to service the product once it is in the field, as problems can be incredibly expensive to address. Advanced DMU capabilities allow a user to simulate and analyze assembly and disassembly operations to validate the feasibility of maintenance operations.

Realistic product visualization is especially important in the automotive and consumer packaged goods industries, where styling can make the difference between market success and failure. Using advanced 3D rendering, marketing can view realistic images of early designs and participate in the conceptual design process, saving valuable cycle time and hundreds of thousands of dollars on physical prototypes.

While clash analysis is an important part of product design, many products have moving parts. For these products, it is important to understand how parts move relative to each other to ensure no interferences occur in actual usage. Advanced DMU capabilities allow a user to define mock-up kinematics using a wide variety of joint types, or to generate them automatically from mechanical assembly constraints. The user can also simulate and analyze mechanism motion by checking interferences and computing minimal distances, and generate the trace or swept volume of a moving part to drive further design.

With an increasing focus on customer safety and comfort, today’s manufacturers are placing even greater focus on ergonomics. DMU allows designers to simulate the usage of a product by a human by creating and manipulating standard and user-defined human mannequins. The range of human motion required operating the product, lifting, lowering, carrying, pushing and pulling activities as well as human vision considerations can then be assessed. This understanding early in the design process can help manufacturers avoid situations where a product cannot be used safely and effectively after market introduction.

In an increasingly competitive business environment, DMU, integrated within a PLM environment and utilized throughout product development, delivers significant business and competitive advantages. DMU provides more than advanced visualization, analysis and simulation capabilities. Enabling the real-time sharing of 3D product information, DMU puts the 3D model at the heart of exchanges and tightens the links of virtual workgroups and communities – from internal departments to the global enterprise ecosystem. Additionally, DMU promotes 3D model usage beyond the product development stage by supporting downstream processes in the manufacturing and technical publication areas. Significant benefits include: a reduction in time to market and product development costs by minimizing the need for physical prototypes, higher product quality due to tighter integration between design and manufacturing, and increased product innovation through the ability to simulate multiple product alternatives and understand real-world behavior early in the design process.

For companies looking to not only survive but succeed, an integrated DMU environment provides a means of successfully beating the competition, creating customer loyalty and delivering strong business results well into the future