What Is Knowledge-Based Engineering?
Using KBE as a method for automated engineering design reduces design and drafting time from weeks to hours.
Knowledge-based engineering (KBE) has been used somewhat loosely throughout the past few years to mean anything from a process for capturing information in a logical format, storing that information and then automatically transferring it to the appropriate parties - products in the Product Data Management and Customer Relationship Management realm fall into this definition - to solutions that capture the engineering knowledge for defined tasks, which would normally reside in the brains of engineers, and translating it into software code that can then do the following:
- Automate the design of parts or systems.
- Generate 2-D/3-D CAD drawings.
- Create costed or priced BOMs.
- Be used to decrease design cycle times.
- Decrease sales cycle times.
- Decrease the need for application engineering.
Automated Engineering Design Application
Pacific Bearing Company, PBC (Rockford, IL) - a worldwide supplier of
innovative linear motion solutions - needed automation implemented for
a particular engineering projection, which involved an automated system
to design linear bearings. The business issues involved excessive
design costs due to manual engineering re-designs, lack of design
capacity, which caused poor response time to customers and sales, high
manufacturing costs due to design variability and the inability to
deliver product at the quoted price.
The solution was to encode rules for the creation of a limited number of product families. The goal was to have a feature-based system as opposed to a component-based system. The new automated system created geometries, BOMs, material data sheets, and routings and could be dynamically changed based on the features specified for the part. The features had manufacturing rules embedded in them to ensure cost-effective manufacture.
Although this is a very complex system, a user interface hides this fact from the end user, allowing the user to dynamically create all engineering output and get immediate feedback on the product's design and cost with a very high degree of confidence. If the customer accepts a design, then an order can be submitted directly to PBC. As new features are developed, they can easily be inserted into the existing design-to-order system.
The results with PBC included:
- Design and drafting time reduced from weeks to hours.
- Two new customers obtained within the first week due to more rapid response from sales.
- Due to the embedded manufacturing rules, drawings were accurate and manufacturable the first time.
- Costing is now accurate and profitability is much more predictable.
- Design capacity was dramatically increased without the loss in quality that can come from working a lot of overtime.
KBE History
KBE solutions have been around for the past 15 years, but its history is rooted in ICAD - the first knowledge-based engineering automation solution that focuses on capturing design and manufacturing intent through the application of knowledge. ICAD captures the generic product geometry as well as the non-geometric information such as product structures, development processes and manufacturing rules that combine to make up the overall product design. In the early days, ICAD was the first product on the market and users needed a lot of high-powered computing equipment and expensive software to use this difficult-to-implement and very resource-intensive product. Today, there are products that are PC-based, much less expensive, faster, web-enabled and linked directly with CAD tools; however, even with all of these changes, they are still difficult to use and implement. Successful implementations have been those that emphasized the people who implement the software as much if not more than the software itself.
How to Find the Right Software
Figure 1 shows the spectrum of physical product categories for
manufactured products. When studying Figure 1, try to think of where
the majority of your product lines fall. If your product line falls
into Catalog Products and/or Configured Product A, then a simple
configurator is probably your best bet. Configurators tend to be used
when a product can be ordered directly from a catalog and requires no
changes. Configurators also can be used for the selection of
pre-existing features or options. Basically, configurators are meant
for any pre-existing part or product that one doesn't need to alter.
If you fall into Configured Product B, Customs and Specials, Products Requiring Engineering Support and Designed-to- Order/Highly Engineered Products then a true KBE solution would be more appropriate. Configured Products B require the ability to dynamically change drawings, Customs and Specials are products that require a unique change to an existing product, Products Requiring Engineering Support are those that can involve standard parts, but which require complex engineering logic in order to make the correct product selection and Designed-to-Order products require complex geometries, calculations, data integration and the ability to play "what-if" scenarios as you iterate toward an optimum design.
What's unique about KBE software is that it is designed to be non-procedural and demand-driven - in other words, order-independent. For example, with order-dependent, procedural code, if there are 100 lines of code and a change is made to line three, chances are that most if not all of the code following line three will need to be changed. However, with non-procedural code, it's more akin to a "rules in a bag" concept where line three can be changed with no ramifications to any other line of code since they are not procedurally linked. Not only is programming time decreased, but also there should be a reduction in the number of system re-writes required over time.
Another attribute to KBE software is that it should work with your existing CAD system. Some of the KBE software has CAD language "glued" to it already, but if that CAD tool is not compatible with your pre-existing installed base, then applets/ APIs can be built to accommodate your needs. Finally, the tool should have the ability to be deployed over the Web and be object-oriented in design.
How to Find the Right Company to Implement KBE
Staff
Find a company that has a staff of engineers as their project
consultants. electrical (EE) or mechanical engineers (ME) tend to be
the best fit as most applications touch these disciplines. Engineers
talking to your engineers when defining the problem and identifying the
engineering rules is a much more effective method for data gathering
than having an IT professional try to define what the engineers and
others in the value chain (sales, manufacturing, finance and customers)
do on a daily basis and then try to translate that information into
rules. An IT person will simply not have the vocabulary or experience
to understand the implications of a statement such as, "Transition
spirals are used to transition an alignment from a constant radius
(circular section) to a tangent section (straight section) or a tangent
section to a constant radius." Remember that these are not IT
solutions, they're engineering solutions.
Fixed Price/Fixed Schedule
Fixed price/fixed schedule is another best practice. We've all been
through software implementations that seem to have no boundaries and no
end date in sight. Scope creep is a way of life in a time and materials
world. As Alan Cooper put it in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum,
"Every time you extend the functionality to include another
constituency, you put another speed bump of features and controls
across every other user's road. You will find that the facilities that
please some users will interfere with the enjoyment and satisfaction of
others. Trying to please too many different points of view can kill an
otherwise good product." Fixed price/fixed schedule does not allow for
this. In the end, someone will pay for the overruns. If the customer
causes the delays, they pay; if the developer is the cause, they pay -
real dollars. With this method, both parties have skin in the game.
Tollgate Approach
Look for a "tollgate" approach to both the project scoping and the
implementation. A good implementation consultant should help you define
the initiative, write a specification for the project, implement and
meet milestone deliverables, and then support and maintain the solution.
Due Diligence
Do your due diligence. Call references. Ask to see their applications
being run real-time - not just a canned demonstration. Find out what
they like or dislike -not only in terms of the end application, but
also in terms of support and maintenance throughout the process. Ask
them to walk you through how the relationship progressed from initial
contact to present.
High Cost
Expect a high price for the engineering consultant's services. Enter
into this knowing that it's not going to be cheap and you can't build
it using offshore developers (maybe for some of the coding, but not for
the rule-gathering and project-scoping phases). Remember that you're
paying for top-notch engineering expertise, not just software
development. The implementer's engineers should be very experienced in
very difficult engineering disciplines such as FEA, structural
dynamics, aerodynamics, etc.
First Impressions
Finally, remember that first impressions count. What level of detail
are you seeing in the initial document deliverables? Are you getting a
one- to two-page Statement of Work? If so, you're in trouble. Talk with
your engineers after the engineering consultants have interviewed them.
What's their opinion of these folks? Do they understand engineering and
more importantly, can they accurately explain your process back to you?
Also, did the consultants ask to talk with more than just the
engineering staff?
An experienced consultant knows that most of these applications touch sales, manufacturing, IT and finance. Getting the voice of these stakeholders early on in a project can make or break it. A recent example is with a major U.S. transportation company where the engineering consultant asked to speak with someone in sales about the initiative - even though the customer didn't initially suggest this, nor had anyone from sales been informed that this application was being built for them. Fortunately, sales was informed and the consultant learned that volume discounts and government pricing hadn't yet been addressed - both of which can be dealt with, but one must first be aware that there's the need.
How to Sell It to Management
Internal Measurements
First, take some internal measurements before the consultants even come to your door:
- How long is it taking your salespeople to turn quotes around to your customers because they have to wait for responses from application engineering?
- How much of what application engineering is doing involves true "invention" versus just performing known engineering tasks?
- How much iteration is there back and forth between the customer and sales to get the design, cost and price right? How long does this take?
- How much manufacturing scrap is there due to inaccurately engineered specs?
ROI
Second, do an ROI. A good consultant will do this for you. The costs
and benefits must clearly be identified. A rule of thumb with these
projects is an ROI of less than one year. Benefits are usually derived
from decreases in sales cycle time, design cycle time, errors and
increases in engineering productivity, especially on more value-added
tasks. Also, the knowledge of an aging workforce is captured.
You'll need to know the salaries of all of the engineers involved in the process (i.e., the senior engineer may make $100,000 + 35 percent added for benefits) and you also will want to determine what percentage of the engineer's job comprises work that could be automated. This does not necessarily mean that workforces will be downsized - although some management may require that you commit to headcount reductions before getting the green light for any KBE project - but the case could be made that these engineers could spend their time doing more valuable activities for the company - such as inventing.
Costs will be made up of the daily consulting rate, which may be between $1,500 to $2,000 per day and the software, which varies according to who's selling it and how they're selling it (e.g., node locked versus floating versus enterprise-wide licenses). Maintenance for the software is typically 20 percent of the price of the licenses and support is usually priced in blocks of days at the daily rate.
Another cost, which is a "soft dollar" cost, is the amount of time your en-gineering staff will need to be pulled off of their usual duties in order to spend time transferring knowledge to the consultant. It could be one day, it could be 30 days - it all depends upon the level of complexity associated with the product or process.
How to Drive KBE Down Through Your Organization
Identify a Champion
Identify a person to take on the role of champion for the project term.
This person should be high up in the organization and have influence
over the various people involved in your project. Sometimes this person
is the CFO, sometimes the VP of manufacturing, the VP of engineering or
maybe even the director of sales. The champion will vary by company and
by project within the company. Every organization has a different power
structure. Some groups are driven by finance whereas others by sales.
The champion only needs to do two things for you:
1. Show up at the "kick-off" meeting so that everyone knows who they will ultimately face in instances of success, but more importantly, of failure; and,
2. Agree to be the "go-to guy" when roadblocks occur. Calls to the champion should be infrequent - pick your battles.
Metrics
Successful programs also set up methods for metrics early on. How will
you measure success? Will it be by headcount reductions, increases in
sales, decreases in design cycle time, decreases in rework, etc.?
Whatever management cares about the most, measure it.
Internal Project Manager
Finally, don't assign the role of internal project manager to the
person who could eventually be out of a job due to automation of
his/her engineering tasks. He/she will have a vested interest in making
sure that the initiative fails.
Conclusion
Be excited about implementing a KBE solution within your organization.
This technology is still new enough that you'll be thought of as a
cutting-edge visionary. It also has been around long enough that most
of the software is mature (Versions 7 and 8 - if you see Betas, RUN)
and the good consultants have enough jobs under their belts to make
sure that you end up looking like a superstar. Expect pushback from
those who feel threatened regarding potential job loss and maybe even
from those in management who fear decreases in the size of their
fiefdom. The smart and secure manager will see KBE for what it is - the
wave of the future.
