Visualizing Manufacturing With PLM

Manufacturing Engineering, Mar 2005

DEALS, OPENINGS, ACQUISITIONS, PARTNERSHIPS, ORDERS, EXPANSIONS, AWARDS

SOFTWARE

Bernard Charles is president and CEO of Dassault Systèmes (Paris), developer of the VS PLM set of software solutions including CATIA, ENOVIA, SmarTeam, and DEEMIA.

Manufacturing Engineering: How do you define PLM, and what can it do for manufacturers today?

Bernard Charles: If I have to define PLM in one word, I would use a Japanese word, monozukuri, which is a powerful word describing the Japanese approach. It's about thinking about the craftsmanship of PLM, because that's the way I look at PLM. PLM is about using the power of the digital world to make innovative products. Make them affordable, which means you can produce them at your target cost, and do it', right the first time, for everything, not only about shape but about the functions, the behavior of the product, and about the way you produce the part. It's also even about the way you put the product in the box to sell to your customer. It's really about creating a movie of this product you're about to deliver, and verify everything before you commit to physical things. That's the real power of PLM.

ME: By that, are you referring tovisualizing with PLM and simulation tools?

Charles: Yes. By visualizing, instead of taking your video recorder and looking at the physical life of the part you are building, one should think about the fact that you have done this before. Everything is done before you commit to starting something, so PLM is pretty profound-it's not CAD. It's everything that enables you to do that. My view is that I would describe PLM the opposite way. I wouldn't start with the CAD aspect, I would start with the way you produce that part.

ME: The Japanese manufacturers look at it that way, starting with how you want to manufacture, and working their way backward?

Charles: Yes. Because it's the digital world, you can rewind the movie. So if you can really do simultaneously manufacturing functions, spec-driven design, and you can put all these in a center for modeling technology that allows you to see everything at the same time, link everything to everything. This means when you do a new function, you understand the complexity when it comes to assembly, and then you have the view that you never had before. That's PLM. So, many of our competitors describe PLM as a collection of tools. It's not about a collection of tools that you connect together. It's about the capacity of a system to model and play with the life of an entire product.

ME: How can PLM improve productivity for the manufacturing engineer?

Charles: At Dassault Aviation, for the Falcon, they were able to reduce their costs and deliver ahead of schedule. The costs of tooling on their assembly lines were reduced by 40%, which is absolutely never seen in the industry. They did this by going to the shop floor and doing what the Japanese are doing. Out in the future, the people on the shop floor will have a strong voice, to give their knowledge, to share their knowledge, on the product design stage.

ME: That isn't the case for North American manufacturers right now? Is this way the Japanese model has the edge in product development?

Charles: I think it's less so here. It's more the consequence. You know that with our DELMIA brand name in digital manufacturing, more than 50% of DELMIA revenues are coming from Asia. If you look at Toyota's 2003 annual report, they have what they call the Digital Reform. What they illustrate is not the product, it's the manufacturing of the product. It shows how focused they are on managing their recurring costs, because this is about what it costs. Manufacturing is a recurring cost. Normally recurring cost is the real cost to make a product.

ME: How does PLM help manufacturers lower costs and improve productivity?

Charles: PLM has a lot of reuse of process knowledge-what manufacturers experience about the next sequences, plus the experience about the most reliable course of action to do something. In the future, I think PLM will apply to the full production system, not to the product only but to the production system itself. And that's our definition right now. A concrete example is the way that the Boeing 787 (formerly designated the 7E7) is going to be assembled on the shop floor, where people will not use any more worksheet instructions, reading drawings on what to do on each step. They will see what they need to do online, connected. They'll play that movie on what to do. In front of them, they will see in 3-D the exact set of things they should do to fulfill their operations.

ME: So shop-floor workers will access the PLM system's 3-D visualizations? Charles: Working on the shop floor, looking at the screen, they'll use this tool at a 3-D station. It will be at every station.

ME: Some manufacturers already enable viewing reference tools on the shop floor. How is this different?

Charles: It's going to go to the next stage, which is not only to be used as a training or a reference tool, but it will be the tool you follow to do the job. So if during the flow, the assembly flow has changed or there's a new configuration, you'll go online to get a new set of instructions showing exactly the work you have to do. It's a checklist, and you go back to the master database, because you cannot go to the next step without having done certain things. So it's also a traceability tool. That's the revolution which is going on in the shop floor.