For a design team, a loosely stated requirement is often misleading. That's why it is important to capture requirements in a structured manner—in a requirements database maintained by requirements managers—before they are passed along to the product development teams. The role of the requirements manager may not exist in the current scenario, or it may have been fulfilled by the marketing team. But it is essential to analyze requirements properly before taking them up for development.
Companies can use best practice methodologies like an affinity diagram, a Pugh matrix (decision matrix), or quality function deployment (QFD) for analyzing, prioritizing, and mapping requirements to existing features or to new features that they can deliver. These methodologies also require companies to benchmark what competitors can deliver to satisfy a given requirement.
A true product lifecycle management (PLM) system emphasizes the fact that product requirements should be communicated clearly to all stakeholders of product development, including the design, testing, materials, supplier, manufacturing, production engineering, and service teams. Increasing the visibility of product requirements is the first step in implementing any PLM system.
Increasing Productivity
The design starts from a concept generated by a given market need. The design team must be given a highly efficient environment in order to be able to work with maximum productivity. The use of computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools has been common in the industry for the last decade, but the real challenge is storing the generated CAD data in a centralized, secure, and easily accessible place. It's also important for design engineers to be able to check in or check out these files on a daily basis during the design cycle. This gives designers more control over the product design, since the centralized storage of product data makes for an information-rich product development process.
Furthermore, incorporating a strict approval mechanism enables designers to do things right the first time. Precise CAD data is an important element of analysis for the CAE or computer-aided process planning (CAPP) teams, since erroneous or improper CAD data makes CAE and CAPP efforts useless. Also, ensuring that CAD data is precise results in precise engineering bills of materials (EBOMs) for the manufacturing resource planning (MRP) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
CAD data cleanliness and control is not only important for the design team, but also for the subsequent product development teams down the line. For this reason, CAD data management is considered the heart of PLM.
Healthy Collaboration
Bringing people together is the main objective of any PLM system. When product development people are closer (virtually speaking), they can collaborate more efficiently. Due to current globalization trends, as well as the trend toward leveraging competencies and resources that are geographically separated, it has become mandatory to collaborate in a virtual environment. The health of the collaboration can be parameterized with three basic questions:
* How secure is your collaboration environment?
* How efficiently can you collaborate?
* How many resources is your collaboration environment consuming in terms of the network and hardware and software?
Collaboration plays a vital role when your design teams are separated geographically. It also makes lot of sense for organizations that outsource the whole product design to third-party organizations or suppliers. Collaboration enables the host companies to give product design feedback to the design partner companies or suppliers in the early stages of the design, rather than after completion. This is critical, as issues detected early in product design are less expensive to fix than issues that are detected later.
Reducing Time-to-market
Manufacturing organizations are striving to answer the question of how to reduce time-to-market. Companies can obtain more market share and profit if they introduce a product to market sooner than their competitors do. Thus, they tend to minimize cycle time whenever possible. Product cycle time as a whole can be broken down into cycle times for design, engineering analysis, validation, buying, process planning, and piloting.
Product development involves cross-functional teamwork, as the following functions are generally involved: marketing, design, engineering, purchase, testing, production engineering, manufacturing, and quality. In a conventional product development cycle, these cross-functional teams work serially, one after the other (also termed serial engineering). This conventional method actually ties product cycle time to a certain period, as only one team can work at a time (while the other teams wait for the results). For example, the analysis, testing, and purchase teams will wait for the design to be completed before proceeding.
The idle time of other teams can be used to shrink the overall cycle time of the product. This leads to the concept of concurrent engineering, where cross-functional teams can start their work at a predefined point of the previous step of the product life cycle. For example, the engineering or purchase departments might start the analysis and buying processes when the design is 60 percent complete. And the manufacturing planning team might start once analysis and testing is 50 percent complete. Concurrent engineering can shrink product cycle time phenomenally by leveraging the maximum time resources possible from all stakeholders of the product.
However, the impact of rework in concurrent engineering is heavy compared to serial engineering. For example, when there is a design change after 60 percent completion of the design, it will impact the work of the analysis and testing teams, since they have already started their work. But this impact can be easily managed in a digital workplace.
If analysis and testing is being conducted in a digital environment that is seamlessly integrated with the CAD environment, then the impact of design change is minimal: this is the power of digitization. It is strongly suggested that the product development environment be digitized as much as possible in order to attain successful concurrent engineering.
Nowadays, there are CAD tools that are tightly integrated with native CAE and CAPP tools. Concurrency can be easily achieved with the kind of digital environment that allows for designing, analyzing, simulation testing, and product planning, since these activities do not necessarily have to be conducted physically. This also reduces the cost of building physical prototypes.
SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/product-lifecycle-management-expediting-product-innovation-19933/
Companies can use best practice methodologies like an affinity diagram, a Pugh matrix (decision matrix), or quality function deployment (QFD) for analyzing, prioritizing, and mapping requirements to existing features or to new features that they can deliver. These methodologies also require companies to benchmark what competitors can deliver to satisfy a given requirement.
A true product lifecycle management (PLM) system emphasizes the fact that product requirements should be communicated clearly to all stakeholders of product development, including the design, testing, materials, supplier, manufacturing, production engineering, and service teams. Increasing the visibility of product requirements is the first step in implementing any PLM system.
Increasing Productivity
The design starts from a concept generated by a given market need. The design team must be given a highly efficient environment in order to be able to work with maximum productivity. The use of computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools has been common in the industry for the last decade, but the real challenge is storing the generated CAD data in a centralized, secure, and easily accessible place. It's also important for design engineers to be able to check in or check out these files on a daily basis during the design cycle. This gives designers more control over the product design, since the centralized storage of product data makes for an information-rich product development process.
Furthermore, incorporating a strict approval mechanism enables designers to do things right the first time. Precise CAD data is an important element of analysis for the CAE or computer-aided process planning (CAPP) teams, since erroneous or improper CAD data makes CAE and CAPP efforts useless. Also, ensuring that CAD data is precise results in precise engineering bills of materials (EBOMs) for the manufacturing resource planning (MRP) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
CAD data cleanliness and control is not only important for the design team, but also for the subsequent product development teams down the line. For this reason, CAD data management is considered the heart of PLM.
Healthy Collaboration
Bringing people together is the main objective of any PLM system. When product development people are closer (virtually speaking), they can collaborate more efficiently. Due to current globalization trends, as well as the trend toward leveraging competencies and resources that are geographically separated, it has become mandatory to collaborate in a virtual environment. The health of the collaboration can be parameterized with three basic questions:
* How secure is your collaboration environment?
* How efficiently can you collaborate?
* How many resources is your collaboration environment consuming in terms of the network and hardware and software?
Collaboration plays a vital role when your design teams are separated geographically. It also makes lot of sense for organizations that outsource the whole product design to third-party organizations or suppliers. Collaboration enables the host companies to give product design feedback to the design partner companies or suppliers in the early stages of the design, rather than after completion. This is critical, as issues detected early in product design are less expensive to fix than issues that are detected later.
Reducing Time-to-market
Manufacturing organizations are striving to answer the question of how to reduce time-to-market. Companies can obtain more market share and profit if they introduce a product to market sooner than their competitors do. Thus, they tend to minimize cycle time whenever possible. Product cycle time as a whole can be broken down into cycle times for design, engineering analysis, validation, buying, process planning, and piloting.
Product development involves cross-functional teamwork, as the following functions are generally involved: marketing, design, engineering, purchase, testing, production engineering, manufacturing, and quality. In a conventional product development cycle, these cross-functional teams work serially, one after the other (also termed serial engineering). This conventional method actually ties product cycle time to a certain period, as only one team can work at a time (while the other teams wait for the results). For example, the analysis, testing, and purchase teams will wait for the design to be completed before proceeding.
The idle time of other teams can be used to shrink the overall cycle time of the product. This leads to the concept of concurrent engineering, where cross-functional teams can start their work at a predefined point of the previous step of the product life cycle. For example, the engineering or purchase departments might start the analysis and buying processes when the design is 60 percent complete. And the manufacturing planning team might start once analysis and testing is 50 percent complete. Concurrent engineering can shrink product cycle time phenomenally by leveraging the maximum time resources possible from all stakeholders of the product.
However, the impact of rework in concurrent engineering is heavy compared to serial engineering. For example, when there is a design change after 60 percent completion of the design, it will impact the work of the analysis and testing teams, since they have already started their work. But this impact can be easily managed in a digital workplace.
If analysis and testing is being conducted in a digital environment that is seamlessly integrated with the CAD environment, then the impact of design change is minimal: this is the power of digitization. It is strongly suggested that the product development environment be digitized as much as possible in order to attain successful concurrent engineering.
Nowadays, there are CAD tools that are tightly integrated with native CAE and CAPP tools. Concurrency can be easily achieved with the kind of digital environment that allows for designing, analyzing, simulation testing, and product planning, since these activities do not necessarily have to be conducted physically. This also reduces the cost of building physical prototypes.
SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/product-lifecycle-management-expediting-product-innovation-19933/
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