Below is an excerpt from IDC Analyst Connection from February 2021. Complete the form below to download the full interview.
Questions posed by: PTC
Answers by: Jeffrey Hojlo, Program Director, IDC Manufacturing Insights and Product Innovation Strategies
Q: How do you address challenges in design for manufacturing to ensure products are launched without delays?
A: Design for manufacturing (DFM) combines modeling and simulation of product and part specifications, production processes, and tooling early in the design engineering phase. Manufacturers that integrate manufacturing engineering processes into the design phase can attain goals such as reducing costs, decreasing downstream errors and waste, and achieving consistently high-quality products, assets, and processes.
Mitigating the classic organizational barrier between design, engineering, and manufacturing is the first step toward DFM. However, many organizations aren’t motivated to share data and knowledge or work collaboratively, nor do they possess the technical capacity to enable these activities. Engineering domain leaders across mechanical, electrical, software, systems, and manufacturing ask why they should share data with others outside of their area. But as businesses have collectively accelerated toward a digital world in the past year, with pervasive remote work, these barriers are starting to fall. Organizations realize they need to work in a connected, platform-based way so that they have the flexibility to respond to disruption.
Technically, manufacturers must unify customer and demand data, plant information, resource libraries, and process information. They must justify this data and information with upstream design and engineering data. Building a digital thread across data silos becomes the foundation of collaboration, digital twins, engineering change, DFM, and other initiatives. PLM excels in the creation and management of the digital thread: enabling eBOM/mBOM connectivity, leveraging 3D models across the organization, and providing structured data for engineering and manufacturing collaboration. Yet many organizations, with old on-premises design and product data tools, continue to work in siloed fashion, resulting in high process and quality costs and slow time to market. However, we are seeing a shift away from siloed working processes in recent years, a change that accelerated during the pandemic, as manufacturing organizations leverage cloud infrastructure and applications to work across their organization and industry ecosystem more easily. These companies are beginning to realize the benefits of unified decision support through a cloud-based platform approach where data can be shared securely and easily and then combined with other data models for a cross-domain view as required.
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