Shop-floor link to PLM could save millions; vendors respond to the notion

Manufacturers could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year by creating direct feedback loops between production-management and product-design applications, according to a University of Michigan engineering professor. And at least two software vendors claim to be developing solutions to forge those links.

For one, product life-cycle management (PLM) software vendor UGS is integrating its well-known Teamcenter PLM platform with production-management applications it acquired in the purchase of a company called Tecnomatix.

Teamcenter is a suite of applications for managing and sharing product-related data throughout an enterprise. The shop-floor applications being linked to Teamcenter are part of what UGS dubs the Tecnomatix Production Management portfolio. This suite contains these applications:

• Tecnomatix FactoryLink for shop-floor connectivity (SCADA/HMI);
• Tecnomatix manufacturing execution system (MES) for production monitoring and control; and
• Tecnomatix Production Management Portal for manufacturing event reporting and shop-floor intelligence.

“Production Management significantly expands the footprint of PLM by creating a tight link to the factory floor,” said Ziyon Amram, VP of manufacturing solutions for UGS, when the links between the two platforms was announced in September. “Our manufacturing customers worldwide expressed the need for this type of integration between PLM and production management, and UGS is proud to be the first to deliver it.”

Users of the FlexNet MES from Apriso already can define manufacturing processes and build reporting structures for feeding information to higher-level systems, says Fred Thomas, Apriso's automotive industry director. Later this year, he adds, Apriso will release a solution for moving data from its system directly to PLM applications.

Ed Goldman, a UGS marketing manager, says this type of feedback can be particularly helpful to manufacturers because “many designs cannot be tested sufficiently through prototyping or virtual imaging,” which means design flaws will only show up as the product is being manufactured.

Dr. Michael Grieves, codirector of the PLM Development Consortium in the University of Michigan's College of Engineering, is more direct. “All manufactured products deviate from their designs,” he says. “Currently manufacturers do very little to control—or even track—the condition of products as they are being built, except with very expensive products like airplanes, or in industries like pharmaceuticals where regulatory compliance is required.”

The cost of lax production tracking is “in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars annually,” Grieve says. “Manufactures should realize that MES solutions can serve as building blocks for improving product designs. The return will be the ability to integrate what the production people know about building the product with the design.”