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If you have problems exchanging and managing engineering data in your supply chain, you should have been at Longview's fifth annual Collaboration and Interoperability conference this month. Representatives of major manufacturers talked about some of the world's toughest data management challenges what they're doing to overcome them. (5/21/09) Collaboration & Interoperability Conference 2009
Once upon a time, people in factories made products. Some still do, and for them, collaborating with suppliers and exchanging data among CAD systems aren't important.
But many products are so complex and the requirements for them so demanding that no one company can make them all. Boeing's 787 Dreamliner is one of the most extreme examples. Although commercial airliners contain will over 100,000 unique parts, Boeing divided the aircraft into just over 300 major subsystems and subcontracted the detailed design and manufacture of these to suppliers around the world.
Figure 1 - Major subassemblies of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner (courtesy of the Boeing Company and the CIC).
In the automobile industry, Magna International supplies complete body assemblies, interior packages, door assemblies, power trains, and electronics subsystems to automobile manufacturers on three continents. The coordination between suppliers such as Magna and automotive OEMs is far more complex than it was when Henry Ford's Rouge river plant took in coal, iron ore, sand, and wood and produced finished automobiles.
Most of the participants at CIC 2009 work for makers of air and spacecraft, automobiles, and the U.S. Department of Defense. One large maker of power tools also was represented. These organizations are struggling with engineering data exchange and management on a scale most engineers would only have nightmares about. Yet their experiences are instructive to the rest of us.
CIC sessions are varied and interactive. Discussions are wide ranging and tend to spill into the halls during breaks and carry over to meal times. The issues discussed at this year's event broke down into six major categories:
- The cost and complexity of implementing and upgrading PDM systems.
- Costs of translating CAD models from one system to another and the errors introduced by that process.
- Managing the design of complex systems across multiple design offices at remote locations.
- Embedding product manufacturing information into 3D models.
- Long-term archiving and retrieval of design data.
- Collaboration between designers of product geometry and engineers who simulate physical performance.
There are no quick fixes, no packaged solutions to the problems outlined above. But by exchanging ideas with their peers in other industries and companies, CIC participants discovered a variety of approaches to managing collaborative processes more efficiently.
The CIC is a model for a different type of user conference from the ones organized by software suppliers. Conceived by David Prawel (founder of Longview Advisors), the purpose is to provide and forum for discussions that cut across a particular brand of software while focusing on a limited range of important problems that the leading software companies largely ignore.
In period of tight travel budgets and lean staffs, executives don't like to approve travel to educational events and managers find it hard to get free of their offices for three days. Yet without exposure to new ideas, it's hard to invent solutions to seemingly intractable problems.
For details about CIC, its sponsors, and next year's event, visit http://www.3dcic.com .
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