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Digital Manufacturing - Critical for PLM Success
Ed Miller, CIMdata

Business Challenges Drive Investments
In today's increasingly competitive economy, industrial companies worldwide are investing in initiatives to improve their competitive position and allow them to be successful over the coming years. Many of these investments are devoted to information technology (IT) initiatives as companies seek the best ways of utilizing IT to improve their business operations.

In this situation, many alternatives compete for these investments. Most of which focus on solving specific issues for limited areas of the business. However, a few alternatives offer opportunities to truly transform businesses and help companies become significantly more competitive. Digital manufacturing is such an initiative.

Digital manufacturing, a solution for collaborative process planning, allows industrial companies to transform the way they define the manufacturing processes that will be used to produce their products. This is achieved by creating an environment in which manufacturing process definition is conducted in collaboration with product design activities. Digital manufacturing builds on many previous initiatives and utilizes process simulation technologies that have not been previously available.

Digital manufacturing enables collaboration on a much greater scale than has previously been achieved, thus fostering innovation in product and manufacturing process definition. It is an integral component of full product lifecycle management (PLM) initiatives, and is essential for any manufacturing company that wishes to pursue a comprehensive PLM strategy. The results demonstrated by early adopters have been tremendous and clearly indicate that digital manufacturing offers forward-thinking companies one of their most significant opportunities for improvement.

Digital Manufacturing is Key to PLM Success
Digital manufacturing is an integral component of a full broad-based PLM strategy. However, it is important to understand that digital manufacturing isn't just a potential component of PLM plans, but a critical component that provides many of the benefits that PLM promises. In fact, many of the long-term benefits that companies expect from PLM investments are simply not achievable without a clear and comprehensive digital manufacturing program as an integral component of a company's PLM strategy.

The recognition that digital manufacturing is an integral component of an overall PLM strategy is still relatively new for most companies. In many cases, companies that have invested in digital manufacturing over the past several years have done so with a view of digital manufacturing as a "point solution" separate from their PLM strategy. Although many of these companies have experienced good value for their efforts, the more advanced companies understand that digital manufacturing is a critical part of PLM. These are the companies that are receiving the highest level of benefits from their investments.

Let's clarify the overall role of PLM, so that we can better understand the context for digital manufacturing. CIMdata defines PLM as "a strategic business approach that applies a consistent set of business solutions in support of the collaborative creation, management, dissemination, and use of product definition information across the extended enterprise from concept to end of life - integrating people, processes, business systems, and information."

The key aspect of this definition is that PLM is defined as a "strategic business approach," and not just some kind of technology. Of course, PLM is enabled by the use of many different technologies, but it is not a technology in and of itself. Technology provides necessary components of PLM initiatives, but the critical role of technology for PLM is to facilitate implementation of transforming business processes that provide improved business operation, enable collaboration, and foster an environment for innovation within an enterprise and its extended footprint of partners, suppliers, and customers.

One critical aspect of a comprehensive PLM program is incorporation of the full definition of the product, including all components that comprise it. While traditionally, many PLM initiatives have primarily addressed the mechanical aspects of a product, it is essential to also address the electronics, embedded software, and even documentation that are an integral part of the product as it is delivered to customers. Indeed, in some industries, the supporting packaging and labeling are equally critical to the actual product in terms of its impact in the market place.

Another inherent component of a product's definition is the description of the manufacturing processes that are used to create the product. Providing a mechanism to describe, simulate, optimize, and finalize these manufacturing process definitions is the role of digital manufacturing; these definitions are part of the process of product definition, not just an after-the-fact reporting of how production was done.

Digital Manufacturing - Back to the Future
CIMdata defines digital manufacturing as, "solutions that support effective collaborative manufacturing process planning among engineering disciplines, such as design and manufacturing. The solutions use best practices and access to the full digital product definition. This includes tooling and manufacturing process data, which support integrated tool suites that work with the product definition to support visualization, simulation, and other analyses necessary to optimize the product and manufacturing process design across the different engineering disciplines supporting the product requirements."

The term digital manufacturing has become the most common term used to describe this growing area of investment. However, some of the vendors use alternative terminology to describe this market space; terms such as manufacturing process management (MPM), collaborative MPM (cMPM), and others are often seen. Undoubtedly, the various acronyms used in industry will continue to evolve.

As with the broad concept of PLM, digital manufacturing is a strategy that supports a company's initiatives and is not merely a set of technologies. Digital manufacturing embraces, and even requires the use of various technologies, but those technologies do not automatically provide digital manufacturing just by their implementation. Digital manufacturing is implemented as a suite of processes and best practices that the company uses to achieve optimal manufacturing process definition.

The concept of incorporating manufacturing process definition into the overall product definition is not new. In fact, many different industry initiatives over the past few decades have focused on this critical aspect of product definition. Examples of these initiatives include design-for-assembly, design-for-manufacturability, concurrent engineering, and computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) to name just a few. These initiatives have all been concerned with ensuring that manufacturing process definition is treated as an integral component of the product definition/design process, to ensure that manufacturing constraints and capabilities are considered during the design process.

So, digital manufacturing is not a new concept, it is just the most recent incarnation of a common desirable theme in industrial companies - ensuring that products are defined and designed so that they can be effectively manufactured, resulting in high quality products that can be produced at the optimal cost.

Development of technologies that support digital manufacturing has been underway for many years, and the technologies have progressed to the point where they are quite substantial. The impressive environments that these technologies now enable can begin to deliver on the vision that industry has had for the effective use of information-based solutions in engineering and manufacturing for many, many years.

The breadth of digital manufacturing solutions has continued to evolve and mature. Today, full manufacturing facility definition, including tooling, assembly lines, workcenters, ergonomics, and resources is an integral part of the manufacturing process planning environment. Full understanding of the production of products, including machine operations and human interaction in assembly are the result. Simulations of all facets of the production process can be developed and utilized to optimize the processes. Feedback from actual production operations are incorporated and utilized to effectively modify the process definitions to take maximum advantage of real experiences and better utilize capabilities and resources. The virtual product definition can now be seen as a full simulation of the creation of the product, from raw materials through final assembly.

Digital manufacturing impacts the overall product lifecycle, but is primarily focused on supporting the portion of the lifecycle that is centered on the manufacturing engineering activities. Of course, these impact the lifecycle from the early stages of product design all the way through final production of the product. Digital manufacturing's overall role in the product lifecycle can be visualized as in the following figure.

Figure #1 - Role of Digital Manufacturing in the Product Lifecycle

One of the important characteristics of digital manufacturing is that it fully incorporates the product and process definition into a comprehensive and consistent approach. The result is a tremendous clarification of the relative roles and boundaries between PLM and enterprise resource planning (ERP); two of the primary areas of investment for industrial companies. The clarification of this boundary should clarify and facilitate future development of integrations between these two major areas of investment.

Digital Manufacturing's Value is Being Demonstrated
Digital manufacturing is not just some new technology that is in the process of being evaluated to assess whether or not it can provide value. Rather, digital manufacturing has already been implemented in many industry-leading companies around the world, and it has already been validated by demonstrated benefits that companies have received.

CIMdata has conducted research into the benefits experienced by companies that have implemented digital manufacturing solutions in various forms. The results provide a clear indication that digital manufacturing solutions are already producing substantial value. Since this is still a developing area of solution development, the potential for additional improvement as commercial solutions continue to mature is very good.

Benefits derived from implementation of a full digital manufacturing strategy include:

• Shortened product development cycles
• Faster time-to-market
• Reduced manufacturing costs
• Support for lean manufacturing and agility initiatives
• Enabling "design-for-X" initiatives such as design-for-manufacturability, design-for-assembly, etc.
• Improved product quality
• Enhanced product knowledge dissemination
• Many others

For all of these, the theme for achieving them is the same - enabling manufacturing process development to be conducted earlier in the product definition lifecycle, so that product design can take advantage of manufacturing knowledge and result in higher quality products that can be produced more quickly at lower cost.

Although digital manufacturing has demonstrated value in many aspects of business performance, and that value has been measured and reported, clarifying the value of digital manufacturing is still a major challenge for most companies. This issue is consistent with broad-based PLM initiatives as well; quantifying and clarifying the value in a manner that is acceptable and compelling for company executives remains a critical issue, and not one that has been easily resolved.

Priority Actions
Based on the current industry situation regarding digital manufacturing, there are a number of priority actions that most companies should take. Foremost is to establish the vision for your digital manufacturing program, within the context of your overall PLM strategy, and launch your program accordingly. Based on your objectives, it is critical to clarify the value that digital manufacturing will bring, but also to clarify the impact that it will have on your operations as well. Support for digital manufacturing, in the form of commercially available solutions, is already substantial and will continue to improve as both technologies and industry best practices are developed further.

Digital manufacturing offers an excellent opportunity for business improvement and can be a major contributor to overall bottom-line company performance. As a part of an overall "total lifecycle" PLM strategy, digital manufacturing provides an excellent opportunity for high payback investment in most industrial companies. Forward-thinking companies are already moving to take advantage of this opportunity, and winning companies will certainly take advantage of it soon.

About the Author
Ed Miller is president of CIMdata Inc. (www.CIMdata.com), a global firm providing consulting and research in PLM solutions, best practices, and technologies that help companies develop products in the evolving world business environment. Contact him at e.miller@cimdata.com