Sep 17, 2018
About the Customer
The customer is a global Automotive Manufacturing giant with headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. The brand is known for luxury vehicles, buses, coaches, and lorries. Engineering Industries eXcellence has been working with the customer’s plant in Alabama, where the customer manufactures 2 vehicle models and their variations. Interacting with a mixed group of the customer’s personnel including people from Planning, Paint, Body Shop and Assembly, our Manufacturing Simulation team helped train a group of the customer’s engineers on Plant Simulation basics and how to apply the digital tool to their current objectives.
The Customer’s Need
When we started our project, the customer had already installed Siemens Tecnomatix Plant Simulation, the leading manufacturing plant simulation software in the world which enables the simulation, visualization, analysis and optimization of production systems and logistics processes. Using Plant Simulation enables companies to optimize material flow, resource utilization, and logistics for all levels of plant planning. The simulation tool can be leveraged to analyze global facilities, an entire plant, or simply a few machines in a production line.
While the customer’s management team understood the operational improvements that the utilization of Plant Simulation could offer, their end users on the factory floor had little to no knowledge about the tool and how it could improve their work and efficiency. With one of the few established practices in North America dedicated to Manufacturing Simulation technologies and their application in manufacturing, not to mention an experienced team of technical experts skilled in configuring, implementing and integrating Siemens’ Tecnomatix suite of products, it is no surprise our team was called in to support. Driven by the need to improve decision-making in their plant, our division was asked to design, lead and evaluate a plant-wide Plant Simulation training initiative to help encourage user acceptance and ownership of the new system, and as a result help the customer drive improvements in their Alabama factory.
A Trainer’s Perspective: About Our Project
My task at hand was to deliver training on the basics of Plant Simulation, but after the first few days spent interacting with the end users, it was clear to me that basic textbook training in itself would not fulfill the goals of the people attending the training. In line with our software training methodology at Engineering, I switched the training to be a live interactive model fed with the information and knowledge of all the attendees. The group had several discussions on how they needed the simulation to work, which reinforced the foundation of "What are the inputs of a simulation model?" and "Why should I simulate?" My favorite approach is to challenge the attendees and exemplify with something they feel related to, which I found very effective for this group of passionate people who wanted to learn.
By the end of the training program, we were able to achieve a simulation model resembling a macro overview of the customer’s entire manufacturing process as well as the basic knowledge to use it and build on it. As a result of our hands-on training approach, the users also acquired the simulation basics we were aiming for from the start, because they felt the model they were building would help them make decisions on the actual plant floor in the future.
The Engineering Advantage
Following the training, we had all participants fill out anonymous evaluation forms, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Everyone left feeling ready to take on the new system and most importantly truly came to realize the benefits Plant Simulations could offer in their daily work lives as well as for their factory and business as a whole. Instead of telling a customer "That is not part of the training material this week," we took our own passion for the product and our experience working with it on the shop floor to adapt the training on the fly and make it a more valuable experience for everybody in the room. This flexibility and unwavering dedication to adapt to the customer's needs is truly a trait of all the experts and trainers at Engineering Industries eXcellence. We raise the bar to differentiate ourselves, and the results can be seen on the factory floors of every customer we work with, no matter where they are in their digital transformation journeys when we step onsite.
