Enter the Virtual World

Manufacturing Engineering, Oct 2007 by Waurzyniak, Patrick

The digital pipeline's first frontier was product engineering, notes Klem, and in GM's manufacturing engineering organization, the company uses the UGS CAD and Teamcenter, as GM has about 30,000 Teamcenter seats as its product development backbone. "We use the same, primarily Unigraphics, toolkit although we also have other entries into it, and we subscribe to a commercial-off-the-shelf [COTS] toolkit-we do not have customized tools," Klem says. "Teamcenter is really what holds it all the way through the manufacturing engineering group and into the plants. That's the consistent lifecycle story that we have. And with manufacturing engineering, there's a number of unique applications to manufacturing: 3-D plant layout; the Body-in-White Process Planner, and the simulation analysis capabilities, so there's a certain degree of niche tools that we use to complement what is already existing and continuing in the pipeline from product development."

To date, GM has fully deployed those systems into most plant environments. "We're continually looking at the capabilities, and we're looking for the best tools that GM needs," Klem notes. "You balance that with the integration capabilities versus functionality, cost to a lesser extent, but at the present time, maybe there's a bit of legacy. We have used the Delmia toolkit in the past for the simulation capability, workcell simulation, and some of the CCRW work."

Using best-of-breed applications, GM also has implemented Tecnomatix tools from Siemens PLM Software. "A lot of what Delmia and UG have wasn't there six or seven years ago," Klem notes. "They've gone through acquisitions to get there. What fits well with what we're doing is the Tecnomatix suite, and I see that playing very much into the Teamcenter integration base."

Product definitions for automotive body parts are mastered in Teamcenter, where manufacturing engineers access the data to first arrange it into an architectural bill of process, explains Shashi Rajagopalan, manager, Body-in-White manufacturing, GM IS&S. "Next, we start validating the weld-definition points. This is all done with the Unigraphics toolkit, today the NX toolkit weld assistant.

"We use a Delmia toolkit for workcell simulation, making sure there's no collisions, generating the off-line program," Rajagopalan adds, "and Autodesk's AutoCAD products. We also master a 3-D layout in conjunction with FactoryCAD, which is a Unigraphics offering. We have this mix of toolkits, and Delmia's is another key thing where we catch a bunch of collisions-it's basically costavoidance measures way-upfront, to be able to evaluate a new process going to an existing plant to see where the plant monuments have to be preserved, so we don't have to rip the entire plant out." Delmia Automation is used for the controls emulation portion. "As we redefine or validate, the Delmia workcell simulation can simulate the mechanical components of the workcell," he adds. "On the controls side of it, we use some of the automation tools to validate the control logic against the actual simulation in the virtual equipment set."