Recalibration of the product lifecycle process

Large manufacturing firms across Asia are enjoying a healthy recovery and consumer confidence is rising fast. But the balance of power within the industry is undergoing a major shift, as development across the region is driving living standards – and production costs – up, driving manufacturers to emerging low-cost hubs in Southeast Asia.

These emerging regional economies are creating a cache of new customers and a lot of fresh competition. At the same time, larger players from Western Europe and the U.S. are moving in to capture this new demand. As the market becomes increasingly competitive, customer buying behaviours are also undergoing a dramatic change. With so much new attention now being focused on these emerging economies, how can established regional manufacturers handle the pressures that come with new competition and stay competitive in a shifting marketplace?

According to a recent IDC Manufacturing Insights Survey, 50 percent of ASEAN-based manufacturing companies cited innovation as their key operational challenge moving forward, but also as key driver in justifying investment for tools and process improvement across the product lifecycle to achieve sustained innovation. Only half of the manufacturers in the region are confident in their ability to create and produce innovate products. If this doesn’t sound like a crisis of confidence, consider that just one third of the companies in the automotive and industrial equipment value chain across the region consider themselves to have a strong product lifecycle process compared with their peers in the industry.

With more pressure to drive innovation, manufacturers must enhance collaboration both within the organisation and externally across the entire value chain. That link between improved information sharing and innovation has become easier to identify, but companies still struggle to find and deploy the tools that can unify stakeholders and recalibrate the product lifecycle process.

In the automotive sector, Thailand has recently become a manufacturing powerhouse and carved out a reputation for being the “Detroit of the East”. During 2012, nearly 2.5 million vehicles were produced – 1 million of which were exported – making Thailand the 7th largest car exporter globally.

However, data sharing and the lack of visibility into product development projects are causing serious concerns. Auto manufacturers require important data to be available to geographically dispersed engineering teams in a way where it can be acted upon internally and externally. This becomes exponentially more important as product complexity increases, as it allows manufacturers to build a system of sustained innovation where new ideas for products, processes and services can be easily implemented.

Futuris Automotive is a supplier that provides made-to-order seat covers for major auto makers in Australia, the U.S., China and Thailand. Seat design engineers face the unique challenge of creating complex seat trim definitions. However, the creation and use of engineering data is extremely inefficient and due to this general lack of data, engineers are typically unable to make informed decisions. Not only does this slow the process of designing, engineering and sourcing, it also puts engineers in the position of making million dollar decisions without realising it.

To solve this problem, Futuris started using the first ever seat design software application to address the entire seat engineering process. The fully customised solution – the Seat Design Environment (SDE) – streamlines the process for creating flat patterns, trim costing and manufacturing documentation. It enables engineers to capture a complete digital product definition of a seat system to accurately and effectively share design details and drastically reduce both the need for physical prototyping and the product’s time-to-market.

By using master models that encompass both geometric and non-geometric data, Futuris accelerated the seat engineering and sourcing process and brought its products to market more quickly and cost effectively. The company solved the challenge of engineering cost effective seat trim cover designs in less time by reducing design iterations. It also reduced its reliance on physical prototypes by quickly and accurately simulating covering fit, and generating sew-ready flat patterns. Futuris reduced engineering time by automatically generating documentation and feeding information from the 3D master definition to downstream applications for procurement, ERP, manufacturing and quality. Perhaps most importantly, the custom solution – provided by Siemens PLM Software – helped the company provide team members with access to key information needed to do their jobs more effectively.

There has been a noticeable shift in strategy as automotive and industrial equipment companies are increasingly moving away from the traditional approach of make-to-stock and towards a make-to-order approach. This will place growing demands on the product lifecycle process as companies put this new strategy into practice and find a need to cope with increasingly complex products and increasing variants to satisfy customer demand. This will require tighter integration between the manufacturing and the product lifecycle process so companies can plan for the variant manufacturing through the design of the product and the manufacturing process.

The automotive sector of India’s Mahindra Group has been using PLM technology from Siemens PLM Software to address these challenges and ensure a product development environment in which innovation thrives. India’s fourth-largest automaker and the country’s second-largest independent OEM, Mahindra now has a seamless, integrated environment for new platform development. The company leveraged Teamcenter to achieve multi-site and multi-CAD interoperability with complete product security and concurrent design across multiple locations. CAD, product, project and process data are managed in a single information vault. CAD data is available to each site on a real-time basis, and the company is now able to do packaging studies and clearance analyses across different CAD systems. Mahindra was able to achieve huge reductions in the time needed to bring a new vehicle from concept to launch. In fact, Teamcenter has helped them to reduce that timeframe by 25 percent, and the company predicts a reduction of up to 40 percent on future projects.

As ASEAN’s automotive and industrial equipment manufacturers look to differentiate themselves from an increasingly crowded field, the product lifecycle process is an essential area for differentiation. As new products grow more complex, the process of driving innovation becomes more challenging. Manufacturers must rethink how they leverage PLM systems and embrace solutions that promote better collaboration between stakeholders and process optimisation tools. PLM is a cornerstone on which organisations can build a system of sustained innovation.