Efficiently Managing Design Data
MacDon Industries finds profitable method to leverage design productivity across its entire engineering organization.
A simple question motivates MacDon Industries Ltd. (Winnipeg, Manitoba), a leading maker of agricultural equipment: "How can we make harvesting better?" As "The Harvesting Specialists," MacDon has been building and perfecting harvesting machines for more than half a century, always with one single goal in mind - making harvesting easier and more productive.
From the engineering perspective, MacDon has faced and solved its challenges head on. But one major dilemma - common among companies focused on the design, development and manufacture of mechanical products - needed to be answered: "How do we efficiently manage the large amount of design data being generated by our engineering group?"
The only answers that Jon Cook, engineering information manager for MacDon, had for the 32-person CAD design organization were either to acquire a separate, expensive product data management (PDM) software system or to develop a custom application that would handle some, but not all, of the company's needs. Neither alternative really solved the needs of MacDon, but the only other alternative - not managing the extremely valuable design data at all - would prevent the company from recognizing substantial savings through engineering efficiencies.
Currently MacDon has implemented the custom program to automate processes and procedures as well as enforce standardization of files, but it does not deliver all of the functionality MacDon is looking for without a significant effort from the engineering programmer that it has on staff.
CAD Productivity Explosion
MacDon has experienced a major design productivity boost with Solid
Edge from UGS (Cypress, CA) - a CAD system for mechanical design
professionals - creating tens of thousands of parts. MacDon's 12
product lines and 50 different configurations contain up to 3,000 parts
each. Designers need access to common parts for use in multiple
products and configurations. Another 70 MacDon employees in purchasing,
parts, manufacturing and service also need access to the valuable
engineering data.
With the many variations in sizes and configurations across MacDon's broad product offering (tractors, mowers and bailers), engineers could waste a lot of time recreating existing designs, fixing errors caused by using outdated design files and searching for data. "Without a set of rules and guidelines governing the use of CAD, MacDon would be in a mess," says Cook.
"What we have found through experience is that if you leave file organization up to individuals, shortcuts are taken and the entire system becomes very difficult to manage," explains Cook. "This is exponential with the number of people creating and editing information."
Cook says that a fully functional design data management system that is almost invisible to the CAD user could save significant amounts of time, provided it had a comprehensive search engine, delivered the files to the workstation and managed the check-in and check-out process. The PDM system also should have strictly enforced system rules for attribute management and file integrity to realize these potential timesavings. One of the issues that Cook is dealing with currently is the prohibitively slow response from the file-based "Where Used" reporting. The other major issue is that Solid Edge files, once created, never leave the central file server, so the network has to handle a high volume of traffic.
No Clear Answer in the Market
But implementing a PDM system would be costly and difficult. Cook
estimated that it would cost more than $250,000 just to buy the
software, pay for a complex implementation and train users. Then there
would be yearly software maintenance fees and the cost of having
engineers away from their jobs taking training classes.
Hiring a custom programmer to develop a MacDon-specific file management system might avoid the costly, bolted-on product data management option. However, the problem with this solution was "re-inventing the wheel," and the technology lacked some key functions Cook desired, such as checking files in and out of central computer servers or recording product assembly structures in a common database in order to perform critical "where-used" queries.
The potential savings more than justified implementation of a PDM software system, but its costs and effort would be substantial. The custom program option was technically possible, and is currently in use at MacDon, but lacked some important capabilities and would require substantial and continued resources to meet the company's needs.
Design Data Management Technology
MacDon volunteered to alpha test a design data management software
system - Solid Edge Insight, a technology that merges powerful design
data management capabilities with its Solid Edge 3-D mechanical CAD
software. Cook immediately knew he had an effective solution for the
CAD users working at the design level and for himself in the role of
Information Technology (IT) implementation.
MacDon's first experience with the software was astounding. Cook notes that after only one hour, he installed and implemented the tools easily. Initial implementation time has been cut from four hours per workstation with traditional systems to 20 minutes with this design data management system, Cook estimates.
"The biggest bonus for me is that design data management will now be invisible to the user - the engineer who needs to focus on design," says Cook. "The benefit to MacDon is two-fold. First, we remove the burden on the engineer to learn and implement what historically has been a complex, separate software system. Secondly, we significantly increase the individual's design productivity."
Examples of the design productivity gains that MacDon measured with this design data management system include:
- Searching for design files takes seconds instead of minutes.
- Probable 50 percent reduction in network traffic will provide designers with faster response times, allowing more design time.
- Opening large assemblies, a major time consumer, is much faster with a software system managing the data.
Cook concludes, "If CAD includes design data management that is used by - but invisible to - the individual designer, it passively but powerfully enforces our design rules and makes all of our data consistent and of much greater value than ever before."
For more information contact Mike Paludan of UGS/Solid Edge (Cyprus, CA) at (256) 705-2544 or Solid Edge (Plano, TX) at (800) 498-5351, via its website at www.solidedge.com.
