ARC Boston Forum Track Focuses on Digital Manufacturing and Process Optimization

Transcription

1 INSIGHT# ECMDH JULY 20, 2006 ARC Boston Forum Track Focuses on Digital Manufacturing and Process Optimization By Dick Slansky and Greg Gorbach Keywords Digital Manufacturing, Production Management, MES, PLM, Production Process Optimization, Virtual Simulation, Validation Summary At the recent ARC Forum held in Boston, a track dedicated to Digital Manufacturing and MES featured presenters from a cross section of industrial verticals that ranged from jet engine manufacturing, to automotive production, to consumer A common theme for participating companies was the use of Digital products and packaging. The common theme for all Manufacturing technology and presentations was the use of Digital Manufacturing applications that enable the design, implementation, and optimization of and MES technology and applications that enable the their production systems. design, implementation, and optimization of their respective company's production systems. Additionally, these companies offered a look at how they are fundamentally changing the way in which their production processes are created, visualized, validated, measured, and optimized. Analysis ARC's Greg Gorbach kicked off the Digital Manufacturing and MES track with an overview of collaborative manufacturing strategies and review of some of the market forces affecting and driving these strategies. Gorbach presented a manufacturing strategy roadmap that examined the relationship between market drivers, collaborative strategies determined by these drivers, and the elements of technology, applications, and solution sets that address the strategies. Gorbach also made the case for how the product lifecycle for manufacturing has extended well beyond just design/build to now include support/maintain. THOUGHT LEADERS FOR MANUFACTURING & SUPPLY CHAIN

2 ARC Insights, Page 2 ARC s Dick Slansky presented an overview of the Digital Manufacturing environment that included the technologies involved, the industrial verticals affected, and the value proposition and benefits available to a company s optimized production processes. The primary benefits focused on accelerated product launch, cost reduction, and process knowledge capture. Digital Manufacturing was presented as an integrated suite of tools that supports manufacturing process design, tool design, plant layout, and visualization through powerful virtual simulation tools that allow the manufacturing engineer to validate and optimize the manufacturing processes. Slansky also pointed out how production management plays a key role in an end-to-end Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution set. GE Aircraft Engines Al Hufstetler, VP of marketing for UGS/Tecnomatix Digital Manufacturing solutions, presented for UGS' customer, GE Aircraft Engines. The presentation focused on how GE Aircraft Engines leverages the collaborative capabilities of UGS' Teamcenter to integrate and share product design and production processes across GE's entire distributed design/build environment. Hufstetler showed how GE Aircraft Engines is using this integrated design/build GE Aircraft Engines is using an integrated design/build environment to implement environment to implement continuous process continuous process improvement, utilize improvement, utilize concurrent engineering concurrent engineering methods, and to optimize their production processes. methods, and to optimize their production processes. General Motors Jim Caie, Director of Common and Advanced Control Systems at General Motors Controls, Conveyors, Robotics, and Welding (CCRW) group, presented a view of how GM is applying Digital Manufacturing technology in the design and simulation of production systems for assembly cells, metal forming, and conveyors in their automotive assembly plants. Caie pointed out that the use of GM is using Digital Manufacturing technologies to enable a strategy of these technologies helped to enable GM's strategy common design and re-use of of common design and re-use of components in components in production systems. production systems. GM's long-term goal is to Benefits included pre-startup validation institutionalize simulation of production systems and commissioning of control systems; reduced project and debug time; and, to validate all CCRW hardware and software design. Caie demonstrated how using Digital virtual training of shop floor personnel Manufacturing tools, such as DELMIA and E-

3 ARC Insights, Page 3 plan, along with CCRW common code templates, allowed them to autogenerate control logic for their production systems, as well as build and maintain a library of common code templates. He cited numerous benefits gained from using a Digital Manufacturing approach, including: having control systems validated, commissioned, and ready to go at the start of production; significant decrease in start time and debug; the ability to pretest all production systems; and, providing a virtual training environment for shop floor personnel. Johnson Controls Automotive Kevin Hooks, Senior Project Manager for Manufacturing Systems at Johnson Controls Automotive, provided a look at an approach they used to formulate a manufacturing intelligence system. Working with manufacturing intelligence and visualization solutions provided by ICONICS, Hooks outlined a set of Using production KPI dashboards, metrics and analytics, and quality status updates, program goals that included a rollout across 72 Johnson Controls was able to make North American plants, standard deployment significant progress in achieving their goals of delivering products with zero methodology and training, and standardized data defects, eliminating recall exposure, models and applications. increasing asset utilization, and, most importantly, standardizing IT platforms. As a Tier 1 supplier of automotive interiors to nearly all major automotive OEMs, Johnson Controls has spelled out several success factors which Hooks defined. These included delivering products with zero defects to their customers, eliminating recall exposure, increasing asset utilization, and, most importantly, standardizing their IT platforms by reducing up to 50 percent of existing applications. Hooks pointed out how Johnson Controls set out to accomplish this by re-conceptualizing and defining their production systems architecture from plant floor through execution systems to visualization and manufacturing intelligence. Using production KPI dashboards, metrics and analytics, and quality status updates, Johnson Controls was able to make significant progress in achieving their original goals. Procter & Gamble Javier Ayala, Supply Chain Solutions Manager, Procter & Gamble, provided an overview of how P&G is improving, sustaining, and designing highly efficient production systems through the capture and utilization of reliability knowledge. Working with packaging technology provider Zarpac, P&G focused on optimizing their production processes through key

4 ARC Insights, Page 4 reliability concepts, such as metrics, uptime, Procter & Gamble is improving, throughput optimization, and performance prediction. sustaining, and designing highly efficient production systems through the capture and utilization of reliability knowledge. For example, one of the metrics is directly tied to They found that manufacturing uptime. In this case, the metric UT Av depends performance improves when the focus is on Uptime instead of Downtime, because on the "Time You Are Trying to Run", defined as behaviors are different. "Uptime + Unplanned Downtime". Manufacturing performance improves when the focus is on Uptime instead of Downtime, because behaviors are different. With a Downtime focus, production meetings tend to focus on the largest DT event that happened yesterday. Everyone tries to restart a down operation as soon as possible, and there is a concerted effort to eliminate the largest DT, which is typically due to breakdowns. In other words, the focus on Downtime reinforces fire-fighting behavior. On the other hand, with an Uptime focus, production meetings tend to be more positive, and they focus on the targets and strategies for the coming shift or day, equipment is checked and cleaned before starting, and everyone's focus is on increasing the length of the production run. The focus on Uptime reinforces proactive behavior, and it gets results. Similar observations were made for optimizing throughput. To get more cases of product, it didn't help to run the filler, or bagger, or whatever piece of equipment that was perceived to be the constraint at a much faster rate. Instead, operators were asked to run at a constant rate and try to extend the run length. The speeds were then set to match the rate/reliability of the P&G Case: Two Different Sites, Same Production System, Same Products

5 ARC Insights, Page 5 pace-setting operation. Again, the focus on Uptime improved throughput. Case study results sowed improvements from 6 to 10% using this approach. The last part of the presentation focused on Performance Prediction, and how to set rates and targets appropriately. Questions considered, for example, included, "What equipment speeds will deliver the highest thruput?" and "If I improve machine 'x s' performance, what will be the impact to total system throughput?" For further information, or to provide feedback on this Insight, please contact your account manager or the author at ggorbach@arcweb.com or dslansky@arcweb.com. ARC Insights are published and copyrighted by ARC Advisory Group. The information is proprietary to ARC, and no part of it may be reproduced without prior permission from ARC.