Managing Change across Virtual Design and Manufacturing
Aileen Hadianto, ENOVIA, and Deidra Donald, DELMIA

Today, change is the norm in manufacturing environments. Input from customers, marketing, and financial and competitive reports flows in daily, influencing product development decisions from concept through maintenance. At the same time, pricing wars, customer segmentation, and shrinking market windows are placing enormous pressures on manufacturers to streamline global operations, collaborate across suppliers and systems, and do it all faster, better, and cheaper leveraging digital tools and technologies. To keep pace, most large development organizations have implemented digital design and manufacturing solutions to streamline lifecycle processes and reduce the need for physical prototypes. Some perform digital manufacturing planning and simulation entirely in 3D, creating a “virtual factory” environment before releasing designs to production.

Gaining Visibility and Control of Change Processes
With more digital product and production data being created and captured, there must be a methodology for organizing this information so the development of the virtual product (design) and the virtual factory (planning) can be concurrent and transparent across the product lifecycle. Unfortunately, the evolution to digital is often accomplished one domain at a time, so improvements made in design, for example, may be stalled in production if the systems can’t provide access to the same lifecycle data. As a result, designers make design decisions or changes with little or no insight into the company’s ability to manufacture the product, or the customer’s ability to maintain it at the time it is released to production. 

What is needed is a common data model or framework that links digital design, digital manufacturing, and production requirements and provides a lifecycle view of the complete product definition. As a critical enabler of a successful Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) strategy, this unified framework should:  

• Introduce production rules into design processes from the conceptual phase of development. 
• Give manufacturing planners early access to in-work designs to allow for concurrent design–manufacturing planning and ongoing manufacturing input into design decisions.
• Provide a robust yet flexible configuration management system that allows changes to be effective for design only, manufacturing only, or both.  
• Provide a change management system that enables bi-directional communication between design and manufacturing planning to request, incorporate, consume and reconcile changes. 
• Enable design change impact analysis on related manufacturing processes and resources.
• Provide the above capabilities in a collaborative 3D environment to establish a virtual product and virtual factory definition that evolves together throughout the product lifecycle.

To fulfill the above requirements, Dassault Systemes (DS) has implemented a breakthrough approach to managing lifecycle data and change impacts in the form of a Product, Process, and Resource (PPR) data model (See figure 1).  In a traditional PDM system, the PPR data is usually authored in multiple CAD/CAM applications and copied to a PDM system upon release to manufacturing planning. The product structure must undergo a series of non-trivial restructurings throughout its lifecycle to generate the multiple ‘views” of product data needed to support specific production and maintenance activities.  In such a system, it is virtually impossible to gain a comprehensive view of change impacts across design and manufacturing processes.

In strong contrast to the traditional PDM data model, DS PPR data model includes unlimited relationships between the PPR objects, which are recorded according to specific configurations.  Why PPR? Simply put, PPR comprises the three functional and material areas impacted by any change in the product definition.  The relationships between and among the three must be maintained in real time across disciplines, data sources, and suppliers to provide decision support for concurrent lifecycle processes and “guided exploration” of design alternatives and innovation.   

Figure 1:  Configured PPR data model

Configuring Relationships to Manage Change Impacts
The logic behind the DS PPR data model is simple yet powerful in its reach. Each part is linked with at least one manufacturing process and one resource.  Therefore, any of the relationships between the PPR objects can be exploited at any time to enable the earliest possible evolution or change.  Since such relationships are explicitly defined and managed within the database, one is able to directly see the impact of changes from one class of object to any other.  (e.g., “If a part is changed for product number 50-100, which manufacturing plans are affected?”).  Having this PPR knowledge early on is essential to avoiding serious time and cost overruns during planning and production.  Without it, designers may make a ‘simple’ change that could derail a production schedule half way around the globe.

Managing Change to Improve Business Agility
The Product, Process, and Resource data model provides the foundation for a unified product lifecycle management (PLM) environment.  The integration of the virtual product and virtual factory facilitates intense collaboration between design and manufacturing planning, letting them evaluate designs and make changes quickly and accurately in the virtual development phases when the cost of change is low.  This results in optimized designs that mature rapidly with faster production ramp-up and overall time-to-value cycles – a clear competitive advantage. (See figure below.)

Figure 2:  Benefit of performing changes early in the virtual development phases.

Finally, to ensure rapid and seamless communication, DS PPR-based change management application is available as easy-to-use, web-based applications so that enterprise stakeholders from marketing to maintenance can directly participate in the change process anytime, anywhere. (See the following figure)

Figure 3: ENOVIA LCA Change Management coverage

The ability to quickly and strategically respond to change is critical to survival in the 21st century marketplace. To create a global business model that is responsive to customers and competitive threats, manufacturers must “build in” operational agility. Failing to track and manage change can forever bury key processes and real production costs deep inside a maze of application silos. ENOVIA LCA Change Management unifies people and processes far beyond traditional design and production planning functions, providing the path to a truly ‘live’ product and factory development environment where constant change offers opportunity, not chaos.