Product realisation: arguably the most vital part of the design and manufacturing process. It ’s when a real product, the physical embodiment of your IP is turned from an idea into reality.

What ’s more, without a well-crafted product design and production process – all coordinated to work together to ensure that the assembly flows seamlessly across the manufacturing floor – your idea will remain nothing more than a beautiful drawing or something less yless than your original vision.

For years, the way products are designed and their manufacture planned has remained more or less similar – complete with some inherent fault lines that can increase costs and delay development. Siemens has looked at the process to see if it can be streamlined.

A Remarkable Symphony
To visit a modern manufacturing plant is to witness a jaw-dropping symphony of people, parts, materials, robots and machines – all working down to the minute or second to hit schedules. It looks incredible.

But behind the scenes, the way goods are designed and planned for production remains based on aged processes. This is not to criticise anyone. A great piece of design is a major accomplishment. And it can be a hugely complex task that, in some instances, can involve millions of parts and thousands of people and partners – often coordinated across countries.

Furthermore, in key markets such as electronics (faster processors, miniaturisation), automotive (the green agenda and emissions) and aviation (the green agenda and the drive for composite-based aircraft), there’s a relentless drive for improvement that means new designs must be achieved more quickly.

Given the complexity, there’s an understandable reluctance to move beyond tried and tested development processes. This said, our customers report common problems across the development and production chain with some areas susceptible to causing costly delays.

Common Challenges
One of the most important issues we see is that the design team uses separate systems to their manufacturing colleagues. In practice this can mean that designers pass over their creations to the manufacturing guys who have to try to create the subsequent process plan using the software they’re used to. In this scenario – which is quite common – information can get out of sync so it’s hard for everyone to see what’s happening. This increases the scope for failure.

Moving through into the creation of the manufacturing floor layout, we regularly encounter problems here too. These tend to be based around the fact that layouts are created using 2D floor plans and paper blueprints that take time and effort to create. While an essential part of the process, they are quite inflexible and we often find that any changes to the floor’s layout do not get reflected in the plans.

This can become especially problematic in fast-moving markets such as consumer electronics where production systems must be continuously extended and refreshed. Why? Because 2D plans lack the intelligence and connectedness for manufacturers to know exactly what’s in production to make smart decisions and act quickly.

Following on from the layout, the manufacturing workflow typically progresses through into process validation. Here we also find a potentially major barrier to efficiency: manufacturers typically wait for actual equipment to be in place to see how it performs. If it doesn’t do as well as expected, it will be too late to look for an alternative solution and, in our experience, any breakdown in this process can cause serious delays.

Finally there are two other areas at the end of the production chain where customers report challenges: throughput performance and manufacturing execution.

Because of the complexity of the modern floor and, more often than not, a lack of coordination between different software and planning systems, it can be hard to isolate areas or cells in production that are delaying the line. And, when it comes to the last piece of the jigsaw – manufacturing execution – customers often report difficulty in comparing planned process performance to actual performance.

Again the issue here is complexity, with challenges in feeding back information from the shop floor into product design, engineering and manufacturing teams.

To continue, please read "A Better Way: Finding Efficiences" Part II

APMEN Sept 2016, Metrology & Design