Visualization for Everybody
Product data is the lifeblood of the manufacturing organization. In too many cases, however, this critical data is not readily available to those without access to the CAD system on which the models and related product definition information reside. These individuals are too often deprived of direct access to product-related information, and in these situations, groups must often rely on static, paper-based drawings and other documents that often are inadequate for conveying the huge amount of dynamic data relevant to their work initiatives. This is especially cumbersome in communications between globally dispersed groups and facilities. Today more than ever, enterprises in all industries need to be able to view, print, markup, and collaborate on all types of data throughout their product-definition processes. This means providing access to it for people in disciplines inside and outside of product engineering, as well as to their extended enterprise of suppliers, partners, and customers.
The Power of Visualization
As an element of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), visualization technologies provide broad access to product definition information, helping workers detect and resolve problems early in the development lifecycle—and lets more people apply their knowledge and experience throughout the product definition lifecycle. Visualization brings high-quality information to multiple disciplines and allows users to contribute insights from their own areas of expertise to improve the product being developed.
Through the use of these visualization technologies, manufacturers can convey product definition information to non-engineering groups much more effectively through 3D-viewable data generated directly from CAD models. Depending on the particular needs of various groups, users can animate assemblies, rotate and zoom in for closer inspection of components, add color-coding, view cross sections, measure and annotate, ghost exterior parts to reveal interior details, and even do product fly-throughs. Part of the power of visualization also is that detailed product-related data (e.g., part attributes) can be linked to them and is just a mouse-click away.
Opportunities Inside the Company
A wide range of downstream groups within a company can benefit from visualization capabilities: manufacturing engineering, shop-floor personnel, and maintenance and repair to name just a few. Other groups potentially benefiting from product data visualization include product packaging, technical publications, sales, marketing, procurement, quality assurance, and testing.
Manufacturing Engineering. For tooling engineers and process planners, who ordinarily don’t have the same CAD systems as product designers, a multi-format visualization and collaboration application is a reliable means of gaining an early understanding of the product being developed—that they will be expected to produce. This allows them to provide feedback to the design team about the manufacturing implications of a design. They are able to develop tooling and process designs from high-quality, intelligent graphical data that can includes product manufacturing information with fewer risks of error. They can then develop work instructions that include exploded views, drawings, renderings or other illustrations and instructions generated in the visualization tool directly from the engineering data. With the right visualization tool, they can generate BOMs for parts, sub-assemblies, or the entire product, whether those components were designed in one CAD application or several.
Shop Floor. Rework is the bane of manufacturing with its direct, negative impact on time-to-market, costs, and therefore on profitability. Often the cause of rework can be traced back to miscommunication due to incomplete, inaccurate, out of date, or unclear data. Although many organizations provide their shop and plant personnel with access to workstations on the shop floor and the ability to print drawings, a more powerful alternative is to install a multi-format visualization application on these workstations so machine tool operators can view and manipulate 3D or 2D design data. They can query it for dimensions, geometric tolerances, surface-finish quality, welding specifications, and other critical product manufacturing information. If the visualization application supports precise measurements they can obtain any useful dimension not appearing on the drawing. They also benefit from having access to the BOM and the tool path, setup, and jig information it contains.
Maintenance and Repair. Depending on the type of product or contractual arrangements, maintenance and repair activities may take place at the manufacturer’s facilities, a sub-contractor’s facilities, or the customer’s site, but in all cases will require maintenance and repair documentation. This information can be delivered along with a multi-format visualization tool in the form of on-line manuals containing embedded engineering drawings and models of the product or installation. Maintenance and repair technicians then have access to very high quality product information that they can not only consult, but also manipulate and query.
Leveraging the Extended Enterprise
More broadly, tremendous opportunities exist in utilizing visualization to convey product-related information across the extended enterprise including suppliers and contractors, customers, and product development partners at multiple dispersed sites.
Suppliers and Contractors. In a just-in-time, on-demand world, ensuring that sufficient capacity is available when needed means understanding how the product design impacts on manufacturing processes, equipment, and materials requirements. Whether production is handled in-house or contracted out, it is prudent to involve manufacturing engineering and outside contractors in product development activities as early as possible. For design organizations the challenge involves clearly communicating product definition information so quotes for production or outside design work are accurate. This challenge is typically met by delivering product definition information as engineering drawings or as 3D models. Of course, the manufacturer must be able to accept product definition information in its delivered form, and this has often meant deploying the same design software as used by the design and engineering organization, regardless of its suitability for manufacturing’s own purposes. This issue is compounded for contractors who work with multiple customers who use a variety of design applications. A multi-format visualization tool provides an effective alternative by working around CAD format incompatibilities. Visualization applications with on-line, real-time collaboration features make it easy to bring stakeholders together to respond to questions, review design proposals, and refine design elements.
Customers. Increasingly, companies are involving their customers in the product development process in order to better capture and confirm requirements. These customers, however, may not have in-house design resources or expertise in the particular CAD applications the company uses. How, then, does one communicate product definition information effectively? Despite their underlying complexity, 3D models are particularly good at communicating design information, and unlike engineering drawings, no particular technical expertise is required to understand them since they provide a realistic view of designs. A multi-format visualization application with markup functionality can be used to enable both technical and non-technical people to work with information-rich product definition information in meaningful ways, bringing their particular expertise to bear on the product design.
Product Development Partners. Close collaborators, of course, aren’t always close. They can be located within the same building but more often than not are out of town or possibly continents away. Additionally, they might be using different design tools. There are many times during the product development process when it is desirable to bring expertise from such partners in dispersed locations to bear on a design or manufacturing issue. Visualization tools that include markup functionality are a first step in establishing an efficient feedback mechanism among team members—tools that can also bring together product data that have been authored by various design tools. They make it easy for individuals to participate in workflows in an effective way, to provide input that can be shared conveniently with other members in a timely manner. Some situations, however, demand more immediate interaction. In these cases, real-time collaboration allows participants to co-view and annotate relevant information on-line as they exchange ideas and explore design alternatives using the markup features of their visual-collaboration tool.
Selecting the Right Solution
The right visualization application for most organizations is the one that gives them the broadest insight into their products by supporting all of the types of data the product team and other members of the organization are likely to need. A good visualization tool serves the needs of product engineering, manufacturing engineering, the shop floor, sales, marketing, training, maintenance, customer service, and any other group that benefits from the use, re-use, or re-purposing of design and product-related data throughout a product’s lifecycle. It enables employees involved in product development, product support and sales support to see product data without resorting to the authoring applications; to interact with it; to interrogate it; to engage other team members by providing feedback. To maximize the benefits it delivers to these organizations, any visualization and collaboration solution must integrate with a number of different host environments such as Product Data Management (PDM) and corporate portal systems. Ideally, integrations are available “off-the-shelf,” but at the very least the visualization and collaboration solution should provide a robust application programming interface (API) for custom integrations by the vendor or by third parties.
PLM solution suppliers have been very active in developing and enhancing visualization tools and technologies for such applications, and multiple commercially available visualization solutions can be found. The capabilities of these commercial offerings vary according to the primary intent of their focus, and the particular constraints of various environments. So although a single approach may not solve all problems, there are clearly a variety of solutions available today that can be utilized to solve a particular company’s needs.
