Drivers_and_Barriers_for_Shifting_Towards_More_Service-Oriented_Businesses-_Analysis_of_the_Pss_Field_and_Contributions_from_Sweden

Manufacturing system to support design concept and reuse of manufacturing experience Andersson Petter , Isaksson Ola 1 2 1,2 1,2 Department for Product Development and Methods Improvement, Volvo Aero, Trollhättan, Sweden Functional Product Development, Applied Physics and Mechanical Engineering, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden Abstract Life cycle responsibility for manufacturing companies increases the service content coupled to the product. One consequence is that transferring knowledge gained from all life cycle phases has an even more decisive impact on the definition of the product concept, here referred to as the functional product. The paper focuses on transferring experiences from the manufacturing phase and how to account for these in the design phase. Based on an empirical study at two companies, an automotive and one aeronautical company, current practices were identified. Manufacturing experiences are captured and managed in a manufacturing context whereas the use of experience in the design phase is discussed. Finally a generic approach to support the use life cycle experiences in earlier phases of product development is suggested, where the design and manufacturing case serves as an example. Keywords: Product Development; Manufacturing Experience; Manufacturing; knowledge sharing; Engineering design 1 INTRODUCTION Life Cycle Responsibility increases amongst manufacturers today. The industry is challenged to understand different life cycle phase’s impact on the product, e.g. manufacturing, operations/usage, disposal etc. These factors are “product” focused whereas life cycle dependency implies accompanying services, such as maintenance and repair, customer training etc. The term used for products, having a service contend, is called “Functional Product” [1], whereas Product Service Systems is used in a similar manner. The service integration in manufacturing challenges the competences, roles and responsibilities of manufacturing companies [2]. Consequently the emphasis on information and knowledge increases for manufacturing companies as the use and re use of experiences from various life cycle phases’ increase [3]. Meanwhile, the impact that up stream processes such as the design phase has on the robustness and efficiency of manufacturing is well known. A structured reuse of manufacturing experience involves incorporating learning from current or previous products in the design process in order to avoid recurrence of manufacturing issues on new products. In the present study we have investigated how experiences gained in the manufacturing phase can be identified, adopted and eventually used in a designer’s context. This serves as a relevant example of where experiences are used from one life cycle to another. The challenge to manage experiences and learning within manufacturing obviously cover a broad range of issues, where knowledge takes on many different forms. Even so the competitive power of succeeding in managing experiences in the organization is a strong motivator to continuously improve the experience management process [4] In particular the feedback from manufacturing to tailor engineering design systems accounting for manufacturing experiences have also been discussed by Brissaud [5]. They point out that the different context of the engineering designer verses the manufacturing context is missed out due to that experience management systems are often defined from a manufacturing context. One approach is to take the viewpoint of the engineering designer, where the engineer’s context is enriched by integrating information from later life cycle phases. Boart et.al. [6] have shown that using the functional product development approach manufacturing process alternatives can be used as design parameters in early stages of product development. They argue that both the capability to quantitatively assess impact of varying Manufacturing Design Parameters, and the availability of these Design methods are needed to succeed as an early phase design method. In the Design engineers’ toolbox, the CAE system plays an important role. The CAE environment has become a center point for the product modeling and much focus is set on the master model concept. Not only is the CAE used for geometric modeling (CAD), but for actually modeling the virtual product. As an example, template modules of parameterized CAD files are used to provide the design engineer with predefined blocks where rules are embedded in the parametric constraints [7]. At the same time as design methods focus on a master definition, the engineering environment gets increasingly heterogeneous with a dispersed set of data sources. Baily et al, [8] describes an “An Intelligent System for the Optimal Design of Highly Engineered Products”, where Knowledge Based Engineering is fused with product Control Structure, Conventional Master Model and Linked Model Environment to collectively render an Intelligent Master Model. This system provides multi-disciplinary design The 41st CIRP Conference on Manufacturing Systems, 2008 137 P. Andersson, O. Isaksson optimization in a web based environment for global collaboration. In Europe, a collaborative platform for multi-partners and multi-engineering was developed in the European founded 6th framework project VIVACE (Value Improvement through a Virtual Aeronautical Collaborative Enterprise), [9]. 2 CURRENT PRACTICES FOR CAPTURING AND USING EXPERIENCE FROM MANUFACTURING A study was conducted at two companies, one in aerospace and one in the automotive industry with the aim to understand the current practices for capture and reuse of experience, i.e. engineering knowledge, in manufacturing. The study was defined to cover four product development phases; concept, detailed design, manufacturing preparation and serial production in three different organizational disciplines; design engineering, manufacturing engineering and manufacturing operations, according to Figure 1. 3 CHALLENGES FOR REUSE OF MANUFACTURING KNOWLEDGE IN ENGINEERING DESIGN From a design engineering point of view the experiences as perceived, captured and partially logged/documented is typically “atomized”, i.e. found in the explicit manufacturing context. These “Elements of manufacturing experience” (EME) are different in character and format, e.g. experience related to manufacturing is; Problem reports, statistical information, list of operations, product structure as well as reports of experience from projects that are stored in Lessons learned databases. 3.1 Heterogeneous environment The information is stored in different vaults and is usually accessed through special tools. Consequently EME exist in a heterogonous environment, See Figure 2. ERP MES Problem Reports Cp, Cpk List of operations X Product Structure ….. PDM al e ia Ser n tio t duc d pr o p g g urin u n n fact nufa a tion Man eparat r pr Figure 1. Four PD phases and organizational disciplines. Questionnaires were used including, one department from each discipline, giving approximately 180 forms to analyze. The questionnaires where performed prior to the interview and both the questions and the preliminary result from the survey was used as a basis for discussions in the interviews. A report [10] from this study points out that it is common with recurring problems, although the frequency of them is perceived quite differently among the respondents. The perceived involvement where significantly different between the design engineers and manufacturing engineers in early phases, where the manufacturing engineers indicated a much lower level of collaboration. It was also noted that manufacturing experience from earlier projects is usually made available through the composition of new design teams where competence from the manufacturing disciplines is included. Even so, 90% of the respondents believed there will be less recurrent manufacturing issues if collaboration between manufacturing and design increased. The usage of experience databases where also investigated and it was found that as the amount of information grows, the design engineers prioritize other engineering tasks and are reluctant to follow the procedure to go trough the sources of manufacturing experience. t e t cep o c s Con ase ph p l iled e ai Det ign e g des Design Engineering Manufacturing Engineering Manufacturing Operations Manufacturing Execution System Figure 2. Heterogeneous environment The Manufacturing Execution System is a set of integrated functions which provides an infrastructure and a production management system. One of these functions is to collect statistical outcome from the production e.g. Cp, Cpk, etc. This data is used to follow up manufacturing requirements to ensure a robust manufacturing process. Enterprise Resource Planning In the companies Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, various data and processes of an organization is integrated into a unified system. Examples of modules in an ERP system are, Financials, Projects, Human Resources, Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management and Manufacturing, where the latter provides information about Manufacturing Process, Manufacturing Flow, Quality reports, etc. Consequently, the ERP system can provide a large amount of manufacturing experience. Product Data Management The PDM environment is usually tightly integrated with the CAD system for the management of product data related to the geometry definition. This system is also providing the link between product definition and manufacturing engineering task, such as lists of operations sequences and NC programs. 3.2 Design context verses manufacturing context Different character of more or less isolated data elements that is stored from a manufacturing context/view. This problem 138 Manufacturing system to support design concept and reuse of manufacturing experience has been approached in Data Mining [11] where intelligent tools for extracting useful information and knowledge has been developed but the context of usage in a designer’s context remain. As mentioned in chapter 2, experience Databases tend to be large and often difficult to grasp. Although a product development project is working with the same goal, to produce the best product possible, it is a natural tendency in larger organizations to experience a distance between people in different organizations. This gap is not only manifested in human to human communication, but is also apparent in the surrounding system environment, See Figure 3. As an example, the design engineers work in a CAE environment that provides full access to component structure and the master definition. Although the manufacturing engineers work in the same system, they have a different view and limited access of the product structure, as there role is to grab an existing component definition and create a list of operations to be executed on the shop floor. From the other side, manufacturing operations has a set of tools, generally referred to as the Manufacturing Execution System (MES), providing an interface between the manufacturing engineers and the operator of a machine. impact on the PD life-cycle and therefore a possible greater impact on product cost. 4. Manufacturing feedback to the CAD environment is still limited and usually a process of updating embedded rules. If successful, the embedded rules directly in the design tools can be quite powerful whereas the process of doing so may be sensitive and difficult to keep updated. 4 TOWARDS A DESIGN SYSTEM TAILORED TO MAKE USE OF EXPERIENCE It is a necessity to understand the view of the receiver in the feedback loop and the engineering environment that surrounds him. How does the “element of experience” on the atomic level relate to his view' In more detailed example, how do we make the design engineer understand the meaning of statistical data presented from an individual milling operation' The result could be highly dependent on previous operations and the status of that machine at that particular time. To what type of geometry topology is data related to' What project' To answer these questions the design engineer needs to have a clear view of how the EME relates in the context of engineering design. Figure 4 describes the feedback loop in a design to manufacturing context where an element of manufacturing experience, in this case a statistic report of characteristics such as Cp and Cpk are presented in; a) The context of component structure b) The associated manufacturing process c) The process activity, the milling operation. In the same context, a problem report is presented for a drilling operation, prior to the milling. Design engineering Component Design Engineering CAD Manufacturing Engineering MES a Manufacturing operations Figure 3. Reuse of manufacturing experience. The study revealed that although systems for capturing manufacturing experience existed within the manufacturing organization, the knowledge of its existence or how to access the information was not common knowledge among design engineers. In Figure 3, the experience feedback loops from manufacturing operations are also visualized, both the explicit type with a system integration shown with dotted lines as well as the implicit type with a human to human transfer. 1. The shortest feedback loop goes from manufacturing operations back to the production system (MES) and can be a fully automated process where NC programs are adjusted based on sensor signals integrated in the machine. Experiences here are quite close to data patterns, and local in character. The context is far from the designer’s context. 2. The feedback of information from manufacturing operations back to manufacturing engineering effects decisions regarding production flow, tools and machines. The manufacturing engineer has a central role in managing experiences in this phase. 3. Knowledge about manufacturing impact of design decisions made by the design engineer has an ever greater Sub-Component Sub-Component Sub-Component a Sub-Component b Manufacturing Process List of operations A1 A2 A3 An Probl. rep A1: drilling Ocular notice C Statistics A2: Milling Cp: 1.25 Cpk:1.30 C Figure 4. EME in a component and process context. 139 P. Andersson, O. Isaksson The consequence of this approach has many dimensions as it relate to several different business systems. It highlights important issues such as setting requirements on transparent interface protocols, neutral formats, etc. Requirements on a design system that integrates experience use 1. Need to interactively search, find, retrieve and integrate experience related information from several different sources Need to keep the experiences up to date close to real time Need to build on the designer’s context and expand functionality rather than building a completely new tool. that the contextual diversity increases as life dimensions are introduced in the product concept. cycle It is also noted that there is a demand for more manufacturing capability information in the concept phase, both in order to predict cost and to avoid recurrence of manufacturing issues. Finally, to achieve an effective reuse of manufacturing experience for the designer engineer it is important to provide the feedback in the design environment, giving the design engineer access to information in a context he can understand. 6 REFERENCES 2. 3. [1] Alonso-Rasgado, T., Graham, T., Elfström, T., 2004, Design of functional (total care) products, Journal of Engineering Design, 15/6:515-540. Tan, A. R., McAloone, T. C., Gall, C., 2007, Product/Service-system development - An explorative case study in a manufacturing company, International conference on engineering design, 334. MANUFUTURE A vision for 2020, A report of the HighLevel Group November 2004, ISBN 92-894-8322-9 (http://europa.eu.int). Siemieniuch, C. E., Sinclair, M. A., 1999, Organizational aspects of knowledge lifecycle management in manufacturing, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 51:517-547. Brissaud, D., Tichkiewitch, S., 2000, Innovation and manufacturability analysis in an integrated design context, Computers in Industry, 43:111-121. Boart, P., Isaksson, I., 2006, Enabling variation of manufacturing process parameters in early stages of product development, ASME, IMECE2006-14459. Hoffman, C. M., Joan-Arinyo, R., 1998, CAD and the product master model, Computer-Aided Design, 30/11:905–918. Bailey, M. W., 2001, FIPER: An Intelligent System for the Optimal Design of Highly Engineered Products, Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems, part. II sect. 8.1. VIVACE project: (www.vivaceprojects.org) 5 CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION [2] It is noted that the Functional Product approach clarifies the principal need to transfer knowledge and experiences between different domains, illustrated in Figure 5. [3] Production Production Production Dispos Dispos Dispos Re-Cycling Service Service Service Operation If the traditional focus has been to define a product based, mainly on a functional requirements perspective - a Functional Product perspective highlights the need to account for knowledge from all life cycle phases. The contextual challenge for design teams increases further, and making experiences available for a designer is a challenge. The situation in this paper has focused on the manufacturing process, but the challenge is universal and the argument is Marketing Marketing Marketing [4] Product Product Product Support Figure 5. Knowledge transfer to new projects [9] Product Product Product dev Marketing Marketing Marketing [5] Knowledge Transfer [6] Service and Service and Service and Operation Disposal Disposal Disposal Re-Cycling Production [7] Product Product Product dev Product Product Product Support [8] [10] Andersson, P., Wolgast, A., 2008, Current industrial practices for re-use of manufacturing experience in a multidisciplinary design perspective, International design conference - DESIGN 2008 (Submitted for publication) [11] Wang, K., 2007, Applying data mining to manufacturing: the nature and implications, Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, 18:487-495. 140