The meaning of life

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Magazine Article, Source : The Manufacturer
Zone : Innovation Design and PLM
Published : June 2004

Looming environmental legislation is just one reason for closer design collaboration between OEMs and their suppliers. John Dwyer asks how the best manufacturers are putting such collaborations in place and what problems they encounter

A s laws on waste throw the onus for safe product disposal back to the manufacturers, you would think that designing a product with its entire lifecycle in mind would move from luxury to financial imperative.

The looming legal pressures on manufacturers are clear enough. First up is the End Of Life Vehicles Directive, followed by the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive, and its companion the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) in Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive. Since the list of modern purchases that contain electronics grows all the time, surely industry should be clamouring for ways to track the modern product lifecycle.

Apparently not. The tool widely promoted as the means to this end is product lifecycle managment (PLM). PLM is a wider extension of the product data management (PDM) technique developed in the 1990s to allow drawing office managers and others to keep track of the electronic computer aided design (CAD) and paper files that describe both the product and the specifications, regulations and much else that impinge on its design.

It’s not just an engineering industry issue. Consumer packaged goods maker Procter & Gamble aims to save $100 million by using PLM to integrate formula management with packaging design and artwork. Analyst ARC reports that over half of the 400-plus food and drug product recalls the US Food and Drug Administration issued in the first six months of last year were due to mislabelling. Deloitte says producing correct artwork accounts for half the product development time.

But though many design managers have adopted PDM, their boards haven’t given much thought to its PLM relative. Richard Parr, a designer at sterilising equipment maker Bioquell of Andover, Hants, sums up a general view. Bioquell uses Design Data Manager (DDM), a PDM system from CoCreate value added reseller CSI Europe of Newbury, Berkshire. Says Parr: “I can’t see the point of spending more money developing something for the sake of it when what we have works perfectly well.”

For him and many others, PLM is not so much a tool promoting product innovation as ‘jargon’: “There’s a lot of it out there and it’s just people trying to sell stuff.”

CSI managing director Joe McBurnie doesn’t find manufacturers rushing to track products from cradle to grave: “Not that many customers are concerned with end of life issues,” he says. “Their concern is more about the lifecycle of the product to the point where they release it to customer and they then want to get traceability for a given period of time.”

AMR analyst Nigel Montgomery says no company in the world yet has PLM, and no vendor is capable of providing it: “Companies have failed to bring together the relative budget holders that choose a PLM strategy. The budgets are for product development, design, marketing, all in separate cost centres with separate budget holders with separate focus areas. It requires companies to think at a bigger picture level.”

PDM user Phil Driver of Cannon Avent concurs. Avent designs and makes infant feeding equipment and related products. Driver says of PLM: “We’re wandering our way there slowly. The corporate culture is not really ready for it, but it would be good if we did have it.

“It needs a decision from very high up within the company, because it’s quite an investment, not only financially but in terms of man-hours to transfer existing data into the system.”

That is one of two reasons why Leicester-based British United Shoe Machinery hasn’t gone for PLM. BUSM’s Mark Blatherwick cites the difficulty of capturing historical, paper-based information in a form PLM could use. We’ll come to the other reason shortly.

PLM’s promoters like to characterise it as a strategic, not a technology issue, but the kit costs money. Lifecycle management implies collaboration among a range of contractors and suppliers. For that to succeed, says McBurnie, these collaborators need technology that allows them to read and write files over the web, not just deal with files that are published by one partner or another: “You involve them in that process. It’s live data.”

This means the lead design organisation must know who took out what electronic product document or file, when, and why, what they did with it and when they put it back. Rob Ritchie of electronics component maker Bulgin says: “Files can be overwritten if you’re not careful.”

Says McBurnie, one missing or corrupt file among the hundreds that describe a complete assembly can cause severe delays and disruption late in a project.

Parr knows this all too well: “Before DDM, we had several designers all working on the same job. No matter how hard we tried to control who was working on what, we still experienced data loss with parts, assemblies and drawings being overwritten. The workbench system on DDM means this problem no longer exists.”

The task is complex enough if an organisation only has to manage the files in one CAD system. If it has three, and it has to manage the files exchanged with far-flung contractors too, it becomes nearly impossible. McBurnie’s advice is to invest in a design management or PDM system that will support multiple CAD systems, “because you don’t know what you will be using tomorrow.”

Driver says PDM is a good launching pad for PLM: “When we start a project, the concept designers get a brief, they put it into a folder and all the subsequent work is put in that folder as well: word files, excel spreadsheets, whatever, as well as the CAD file or the illustrations files.”

For Driver, the next desired step is workflow. With that, he says, each product “can be tracked – where that is, who hasn’t made a decision and who hasn’t done what. That would be ideal. So much gets to a certain level and then stops, waiting for actions to happen.”

Some barriers to PLM are simple matters of infrastructure. At Avent, the concept designers, detail designers and production are all using different data vaults on different servers.

Agreement is also needed on non-technology issues. Philips of Holland’s set top box (STB) business, based near Paris, introduces a new satellite, cable or terrestrial platform a year. The operation uses an Agile PDM system to manage the long list of documents exchanged within the organisation during the production phase.

Philips STB uses three electronic manufacturing service (EMS) suppliers and an original design manufacturer (ODM) who both manufactures and does development work. Those inside and outside the company who create all these documents store them on one huge Oracle database.

Claude Vandelle, chief information officer of Philips’s STB operation, says there was no problem about the budget for the system because the IT department, in which every department shares, took charge of the project: “We look at this as a global investment for the company.”

And there was no difficulty about transferring files, says Vandelle. The legacy data was held in a previous, internally developed system called Bals.

But Philips encountered two problems when it installed the system: “The first was to agree one way of working, the processes behind the system. The second was the security model. We have several partners, and we needed a security model that made sure everybody could share but not see data they don’t need to see.”

Other parts of Philips use different PDM systems, largely MatrixOne, and there is pressure to standardise. If this argument held sway, STB might have to give up a system it is delighted with.

At BUSM, however, such a concern is far from Blatherwick’s mind. The second PLM stumbling block is economic. Though BUSM has a PDM system, “there’s little development work going on. We’re trying to consolidate at the moment, so what design work there is is on a support and maintenance basis.”

BUSM’s main market has been Europe and America, and “bits and pieces in the far east. We continue to try and make progress but we have been known for making technically advanced automated systems to suit the US and European

markets. But the far east and China are quite happy with simpler machines that are much less expensive and a lot of [shoe] manufacturing is moving out that way.

“In addition, with the opening up of eastern Europe there’s a cheaper labour market in the newer parts of Europe. The traditional manufacturing companies in Germany, the UK and Italy are moving their factories that way. That just means our market is awash with second hand machinery.”

For most manufacturers, this kind of worry is much more pressing than whether they need a PLM system. As outsourcing to far flung places becomes the norm, those taking a hammering worry about how to deal with the competition, and those doing the hammering worry about how to manage the supply chain; ARC believes the car industry might have eight layers of suppliers.

Perhaps manufacturers are indifferent to environmental legislation because it doesn’t make the business problem any worse.

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