COE Feature
Getting Much More Value Out of What You Already Paid For; Moving from 'What If?' to 'Which If?' in Product Development
By Dennis Nagy, Principal, Technology Business Consulting
Major manufacturing enterprises have invested significant time and money over the years in CAD, CAE, and PDM--or collectively Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), as it is now being called. Isn't it time to fully leverage that past investment and achieve the full payback potential? In this brief article, l highlight my views on how CAE and Intelligent Digital Prototyping - iDP - can drive PLM to significantly greater sustained profitability and business value. I'll briefly explain what iDP actually is, why it is particularly important in today's tight economy, what needs to be done to reach much fuller payback, and what obstacles need to be overcome along the way.
WHAT IS MY PERSPECTIVE?
My entire 30-year career, crossing the spectrum of CAE/iDP from R&D through software development/support to sales, marketing, and executive management, has always been driven by my conviction that iDP can have a profound impact on shareholder value creation within the global manufacturing economy. I am now convinced more than ever that iDP will drive PLM to significantly better business decisions, actions, and strategic payback.
WHY IS iDP ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT IN TODAY'S ECONOMY?
Our Global economy is in a declining slump. Executive management is under tremendous performance-cost pressure to bring the right (from the customer/market requirement perspective) innovative, higher quality, more cost-effective products to market faster than ever before. They are asking: "How can we accomplish (much) more with even less resources, outsourced and globally distributed, and better leverage our past technology investments?" In manufacturing enterprises, the product lifecycle is the core of their business. The traditional design-build-test cycle has been accelerated significantly over the past 20+ years by the increasing mainstream use of CAE/simulation to tighten the design-evaluate-revise loop and examine more significant revisions earlier in the life cycle.
Dave Burdick, former Gartner executive and founder of Collaborative Visions, makes a compelling case for treating PLM as much more than just a peer system to the other enterprise business systems of ERP, SCM, and CRM. "PLM is the intellectual property (I.P.) ecosystem of the enterprise." Data from many manufacturing enterprise environments clearly shows that the design/development phase, although only ~5% of the overall product lifecycle cost, actually influences (locks in) between 70% and 80% of the overall product lifecycle costs. Since products must be created ("born") before their lifecycle can be managed, iDP (as the key enabler of complex technical product creation) can drive PLM to breakthrough levels of innovation, profitability, and sustained enterprise shareholder value.
HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?
Let's first clarify some terminology: prototypes are collections of descriptive/behavioral model (computer-based and physical) of a product in development. They provide the basis for making predictions about the life-cycle behavior of multiple manufactured instances of a candidate design. Why are the predictions needed? To make "better" (more profitable) development (i.e., business) decisions as early as possible, where they will have the most positive impact on lifecycle costs.
WHAT IS INTELLIGENT DIGITAL PROTOTYPING?
"Digital" means the synergy of simulation (virtual) and testing (physical) information, all captured, stored, accessed, and processed in networks of computers. "Digital" is thus more than "Virtual." iDP, to live up to its name, must drive the reliable, more automated extraction of significantly better business decision help from the prototypes it creates.
So here is where we come to the strategic payback potential of iDP: Digital Prototypes, because they are intelligent synergies of computer-based and physical models and simulation/test results, with parameterization of all key design variables, already contain "locked" within them much more ability to drive the development process to make faster and better innovative business decisions. They contain the raw information and physical relationships to reveal the sensitivity of designs to all key design parameters and navigate the design space toward better designs. That's a mouthful of techno-speak, but fortunately the relevant technology is much more mature and available than its current level of usage would indicate.
We can advance from the "What if?" of Virtual Prototyping (VP) to the "Which if?" of iDP: Powerful (robust) optimization engines/tools can be overlaid on automated iDP-centric iterative processes to drive those processes toward significantly better outcomes in less time. This is the key point of this article: if you don't remember anything else about what I have written-remember this!
What do we mean by "robust"? We must include variability-based engineering to achieve the full potential of iDP. The Real world is variable, not deterministic, especially for large-series production and varieties of actual usage of a single design. It's not "uncertainty"--- "Variability is certain." A robust optimum design (one not very sensitive to minor changes in design assumptions/requirements and in-use environments) must account for variability of in-service conditions, manufacturing tolerances, and material properties. This point leads to the subject of Robust Design for Six-Sigma (DFSS) but that's the subject of another article.
WHAT ARE THE TYPICAL OBSTACLES IN THE WAY OF GREATER iDP USE AND BENEFIT?
- Accurate methods: math, physics, and algorithms: "Can we trust the results?"
- Digital processing/communications speed: "Can we get the results in time?"
- Graphics speed and power: the human interface: "Is it easy enough to use for the average engineer?"
- Incompatibility of tools: "How much valuable time is lost?"
- Business processes in product development: "Does it fit the way we do things around here?"
- Company culture: fear of change: "I don't know how to use this stuff--what does this mean for my job/organization?
- Executive vision/buy-in: strategic value of iDP. "What's the payback"?
The first three (primarily technology-centric) issues have been largely resolved. The last four (now primarily business-centric issues) must be the focus of our attention going forward. At this point technology clearly leads business --the primary obstacles today to greater iDP business benefit are business issues within the vendor and end-user markets/companies.
A MAJOR BARRIER IS STILL INCOMPATIBILITY OF SOFTWARE TOOLS
Software tools and computers are now so fast that as much as 75%-90% of engineers' overall time is often wasted in between the running of each tool (data manipulation, checking, and transfer) rather than leveraging their unique experience, judgment, and creativity and the full power/scope of the available tools. End-user enterprises must take the lead in solving this problem (pressure on vendors) and resolving their position on the business conflict between:
- Integration: master vendor "in control" of the iDP technology environment) vs.
- Federation: a web services (P2P-like) environment of linked "best-of-breed" tools from many vendors using common, workable standards (XML, J2EE, SOAP, .NET, etc.).
One current example from General Motors' Powertrain Engineering (presented by John Givens at Daratech Summit 2002) shows the engine-development software workflow process is interrupted in 17 places by the need for engineers to interpret and re-enter data. The final major obstacles today lie in the areas of company leadership, culture, and business processes. Senior executives don't yet have sufficient vision of iDP strategic business benefits to
- shake up their company's development culture ("innovate or disintegrate")
- adopt the remaining necessary technology (a small % of their past investments) to leverage those significant past investments in CAD, CAM, CAE, PDM
- Re-engineer their development processes to be iDP-driven
WHAT ARE THE TRUE COMPETITIVE DIFFERENTIATORS TODAY?
One of my clients recently asked: "If we have the same kind of people, tools, and information sources as our competitors, how can we beat them?" The answer is clearly processes: the enterprise-unique blending of people (organizational structures, cultures), tools (hardware, software, communications), and intellectual property (I.P.) (data, information, knowledge), into executable operational processes. Processes are the recipes for success. Technology tools alone are not sufficient to support successful iDP. People, intellectual property, and processes must also be aligned for an effective whole iDP solution.
When properly implemented and exploited, iDP gives companies freedom of choice in their product innovation. Remember: Digital prototypes already contain, "locked" within them, much more ability to drive iterative development processes. Product development professionals can systematically consider and evaluate orders-of-magnitude more product concepts and potential designs (i.e., work further "outside the box"), leading to faster, better, decisions and more innovative business results.
Although technology leads business at this point, there are still some key technology issues to be further addressed:
- 1st: Process federation/integration to dramatically accelerate development cycles.
- 2nd: Optimization engines must be overlaid on entire multi-level, multi-disciplinary processes to provide strategically effective decision drivers
- 3rd: Variability must be incorporated in the entire automated, optimized processes
Pursuit of this so-called "Holy Grail" of iDP draws encouragement from the emerging evidence that it
- Can achieve unprecedented breakthrough levels of timely product quality and innovation,
- Will require a lot of hard work and discipline to get there…but doesn't necessarily require massive further investments in hardware and software,
- Will require a lot of "outside the box" process innovation, some pioneering (risk), corporate cultural change,
- Will elevate the strategic importance of those who lead the way in MAKING IT HAPPEN.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Dennis A. Nagy is a 30-year veteran of all aspects of CAE and digital prototyping. He has performed research, software development, and faculty teaching at Princeton and Stuttgart Universities during the 1970s, product planning and software development at SDRC, and CAE end-user management at GE in the early 1980s. His management career began with his key role in the opening of SDRC's first German office in 1981, through building the international business activity at MSC (1985-90), and leading all of MSC's global sales and support organization as senior vice president until 1997. He has held executive management positions at Fluent, CenTOR and Brentec, and was most recently president and CEO of Engineous Software, a venture-backed early-stage leader in the emerging Process Integration/Design Optimization market segment. Dr. Nagy holds a Ph.D. in structural engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.S. and M.S. in civil engineering from MIT.
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