Unleashing the True Potential of Multi-Discipline Engineering with PLM

Autodesk discusses industrial pain points and how to combat or reverse them.

Autodesk has sponsored this post.

(Image: Autodesk.)

(Image: Autodesk.)

When you step into your first engineering job, it’s hard to fathom how much of your career is spent looking for data. If you’re lucky, you join organizations with clear and intuitive cloud-based product lifecycle management (PLM) and data management systems. But without them, chances are you spend, on average, a day a week searching for what you need instead of doing engineering work.

Engineers don’t want to spend time playing cat and mouse with a CAD file that has been superseded. They want to ensure they have the most up-to-date information so they can solve complex problems. And these engineers can’t provide innovation or value to the problem when, after searches fail, they resign themselves to recreating information: duplicating work, approval processes and sources of truth.

“By having one source of truth for the model you can look at the system as a whole and identify where a challenge in one area can be affected by another,” says Jonathan den Hartog, senior director of Product Management, Product Development and Manufacturing Solutions at Autodesk. “If you don’t have the data upfront, you might not see that.”

Den Hartog explains that cloud-based PLM can give engineers back a day every week by providing the information they need when they need it.  With that time and information, engineers can springboard projects forwards. They might discover a part that needs no update, saving development even more time. Or they can investigate new materials and processes to cut costs or make products more sustainable. He said, “This is the core of engineering and what it means to be an engineer. To give them a day back a week, this provides the time to perform these value [adding] engineering tradeoffs.”

The question remains, what automotive and industry trends made these data management challenges a problem in the first place, and how can PLM be used to combat this? By truly understanding these questions, engineers can significantly improve efficiency and reduce costs and time to market.

How Did Data Management in Product Development Get So Difficult?

Products used to be less complicated. For example, if you bought a car, most of the deliverables were mechanical. You would have a radio, the spark-plug system and maybe automatic windows, if you were lucky, but that was the extent of the electronics. Similar analogies can be made about most industrial products: mechanical and electronics were once two discrete markets. Today, the line is blurry, perhaps meaningless.

“Increasingly, these markets are competing to offer a lot more,” says den Hartog. “Engineers need to deliver a machine that’s more responsive to where it’s operating. It needs on-board processes to improve how it works. So, you are not only delivering structurally sound mechanical equipment, but also software and electronics design.”

This brought more and more electronics and software specialists into the engineering and product development side of the industrial and automotive sectors. The result was more electronics in products, but also data isolation and silos. The electronics engineers would use their software and the mechanical engineers would use another. Since these tools didn’t speak clearly to each other, sending information between teams became manual via email and spreadsheets.

“The challenge we see is there is not much structure to how the data is organized,” says den Hartog. “You can work on the wrong version, and it’s hard to have access to the right data at the right time, even if it’s just because someone is away from their machine.”

Each team also represents a different internal or external stakeholder at a different department or partner organization. So not only is data dispersed, but engineers also deal with too many cooks in the proverbial kitchen. In these situations, the question remains who makes the final decision and how do you ensure that the work done by one team doesn’t negatively affect the work of another?

“Years ago, it would have been a standup meeting at whiteboards,” says den Hartog. “But as teams are more distributed and in more places around the world you need to do that digitally. PLM provides an important framework to guide design changes that are asynchronous, without requiring people in the same room at the same time.”

The Difference PLM Makes When Producing Complex Products

Based on these challenges, consider this scenario: A mechanical engineer designs an automotive bracket that connects to a printed circuit board (PCB). The electrical engineer designing the PCB notices a thermal issue that requires a larger chip. Though all change order procedures are followed—stakeholders are emailed, and Excel sheets are updated—it’s Friday afternoon and the mechanical engineer took an early weekend after submitting the designs. Now come Monday the floor has produced a bracket mold, which costs tens of thousands of dollars, that is not compatible with the new PCB. These issues happen all the time, wasting time, money and crew morale.

With proper data management and a PLM system, these issues can be avoided. Consider how the situations would change, den Hartog explains, “Even if the engineers live in different parts of the world and work from home a cloud-based PLM and data management system can ensure they are working from the same pool of data and information—a single source of truth.”

(Image: Autodesk.)

(Image: Autodesk.)

Now the electrical engineer notices the thermal issue. They produce a new PCB design which triggers a change order in the PLM system. As a result, automated checks and approval tasks are sent to all the PCB’s internal and external stakeholders. This includes the mechanical engineer who is now responsible for updating the bracket’s design. Better yet, PLM enables stakeholders to move forward and make more coordinated changes as the design evolves.

“With PLM there is a structured flow to make design changes, to make it clear how it’s made and reviewed before people execute on it,” says den Hartog. “It brings order to change management. This is a more repeatable and consistent project where everyone is on the same page. It’s also more resilient and agile. If the composition of the team changes, the process is still guided by the PLM system.”

This PLM process flow has an added side benefit: since designs are finalized in relation to each other, it enables most changes to happen earlier in development—when it’s most affordable to make them. Additionally, these changes become easier to handle because processes are more agile. This is because you know who makes the changes and why, and that you are all working on the same information. This also makes it easier to redesign other parts and give feedback on any changes.

This focus on agility, speed and real-time data enables engineers to focus their efforts on value added tasks that improve the overall product performance. Perhaps with that extra time the mechanical, electrical and procurement engineers will discover a new supplier that can make the smaller PCB without the thermal issue. That supplier can then be added into the PLM system, so they can also collaborate on the project. Now there are two potential PCB suppliers, adding resiliency during supply shortages. And if the supplier is switched up, as needed, the manufacturing floor can quickly switch up which bracket version is produced because it is instantly notified in the PLM system.

Why Engineers Should Consider Autodesk PLM to Solve Pain Points

Traditionally, some companies have shied away from PLM because it is perceived to be expensive, complex and time consuming to implement. But den Hartog notes that that isn’t the case with Autodesk PLM. “It’s fast to implement within weeks to months. This compares to a year for traditional solutions. This is thanks in part to it being a cloud-based platform and the products being highly configurable. Customers can implement PLM and customize to their own needs either with a partner or on their own.”

He adds, “if you’re like many companies you have data all over, so we’ve created a cloud-based solution that performs data management and expands it to other departments from engineering, to supply chain, to quality and manufacturing. It automates process workflows, captures change history, provides traceability and KPI dashboards. This reduces time wasted coordinating project tasks, reporting and auditing manually.”

(Image: Autodesk.)

(Image: Autodesk.)

For instance, a wide variety of in-house and third-party tools can be integrated within Autodesk PLM due to its open API systems. “We strive to be open to Autodesk and non-Autodesk data and tools. Even tools that are not our CAD. We also don’t charge to access information on its own. We make it available to customers as they don’t just work with Autodesk PLM, they might want to connect it to ERP or other tools. We want them to easily and securely access this data.”

In other words, customers can easily customize workflows on their own. With traditional PLM this customization process can be disruptive and difficult, and the standard workflows included with the software might not accommodate every user. Autodesk PLM has digital workflows that can be configured easily to tailor the implementation to the needs of each customer.

“While PLM is helpful to guide teams through a structured design approach it needs to be flexible for each organization,” concludes den Hartog. “So, you need to accommodate changing processes. Autodesk makes a point to make the adaptability self-service so customers can make new workflows on their own or ask Autodesk partners for examples. We believe it is important this is simple and flexible so users can reconfigure as needed.”

With these automated workflows and everyone working from a single source of information, manufacturers can significantly reduce inefficiencies and costs, while improving the quality of their products and time to market. For more information, visit Autodesk’s PLM solution center.