Enter the Virtual World

Manufacturing Engineering, Oct 2007 by Waurzyniak, Patrick

A new generation of digital manufacturing software tools offer manufacturers a better virtual factory

Squeezing time out of the product development cycle means everything to manufacturers, who often operate on razorthin profit margins. With the latest generation of digital manufacturing and product lifecycle management (PLM) software tools, manufacturers in the automotive and aerospace industries can greatly compress time-to-market on new product development and cut costs using the newest 3-D simulations for process planning, which now feature much tighter links to industrial automation on the factory floor.

Over the past few years, digital manufacturing tools have grown up, with automotive and aerospace/defense manufacturers deploying more-capable solutions that offer more realistic simulations of factory-floor layouts and processes, including final assembly lines, robotic workcells, and industrial automation controls.

Digital manufacturing solutions are part of collaborative PLM systems and make up the manufacturing element of PLM, including integrated solutions supporting manufacturing process design, tool design, and powerful 3-D visualization simulation tools. The integration of digital manufacturing into PLM solutions is providing a critical link between design and manufacturing engineering, according to market researcher ARC Advisory Group (Dedham, MA), enabling the collaborative environment that is essential to successfully implementing concurrent engineering practices.

"This generation of digital manufacturing technology is taking full advantage of the digital definition and the 3-D simulation capabilities that are available today," states Dick Slansky, senior analyst, PLM and Discrete Manufacturing, ARC Advisory Group. "It's enabling a manufacturing engineer or the controls engineer to go out and actually simulate the production process and the production lines-the equipment, the robotic workcells, the manufacturing process-and build very accurate 3-D simulations of a robotic Body-inWhite welding workcell, paint, or final assembly, then integrate the actual digital model of the product itself, such as the Body-in-White panels, or the entire vehicle, that is going through the production line. It enables a complete synchronization and accurate simulation of the actualmanufacturing process."

Cutthroat competition, especially among automotive OEMs and suppliers, has made many automakers early adopters of digital manufacturing technologies, although many large aerospace/defense, shipbuilding, and heavy equipment manufacturing operations have also deployed these digital manufacturing tools and PLM to help cut manufacturing costs and compress product development cycles.

Two major software developers-Dassault Systèmes (Paris) with its Delmia Corp.'s (Auburn Hills, MI) digital manufacturing, and UGS PLM Software (Piano, TX) with its UGS Tecnomatix software-offer digital manufacturing software solutions along with PLM systems. In January, Siemens Automation and Drives (Siemens A&D, Nuremburg, Germany), a unit of Siemens AG (Munich), purchased UGS for $3.5 billion, and as of October, the UGS PLM unit is formally known as Siemens PLM Software. The worldwide PLM market reached $7 billion in 2005; it will nearly double to $13 billion by 2010, rising at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of roughly 14% over five years, according to ARC Advisory Group.

The Digital Factory concept has come a long way since its inception in the 1980s, when the former Deneb Robotics, now Delmia, first brought out its !grip robotic manufacturing tools, notes Robert Axtman, director of business intelligence for Dassault Systèmes' Delmia brand. "Digital manufacturing/digital factory are sometimes interchanged terminologies for what we offer through Delmia, and that has come along quite a bit in our environment and industries globally. We're coming from CAD through digital manufacturing/digital factory, to digital environment, to finally, as I coin it, digital business. Everything is being done digitally today.

"Everything's being transitioned not on a linear line, but on an exponential curve as technology increases and new methodologies occur," Axtman adds. "This digital technology's more affordable, with laptops available on the shop floor for operators to interface with engineering offices in real-time evaluation and real-time collaboration.

"We're offering our Workshop Instructions, where the processes and methodologies to manufacture the CAD-generated product-how to make the product and with what to make it-are being fed down digitally to the shop floor to the operator," he adds. "With this, the operator can see how to manufacture, assemble, disassemble, or machine that particular subassembly or part, on a screen in front of him in a simulated fashion, so that he can best optimize how to meet time and scheduling requirements for production. This is also a teaching aid, to minimize turnover if turnover does occur, so each will not take up valuable production time or machine tool time in training the next operator or the second or third shift operators. It can all be done digitally, with simulation validation."