Nov 4, 2019
About the Customer
Engineering is working with a customer that is an American company and industry-leading contract manufacturer of orthopedic implants and surgical instruments, particularly knee, shoulder, hip, ankle, spine and trauma implants, as well as veterinary implants. The customer is spearheading the revolution in additive design and manufacturing, a pioneering process that has the power and potential to transform businesses across all sectors. Through their innovative offering of services, additive experts, advanced machines and quality materials, the manufacturer empowers its own customers to build new and innovative products that improve the welfare of patients and humans worldwide. The customer’s flagship U.S. facility, responsible for the production of orthopedics, spine instruments and minimally-invasive instruments for orthopedic applications, combines their innovative practices in additive with traditional machining approaches for plastic and metal.
The Customer’s Challenge
Over an evaluation of this past year, the customer has identified that a widespread “job shop mentality” in their production plants has led to a complete lack of standard and consistent manufacturing data management processes. What do we mean by job shop mentality? Contract manufacturers often struggle with applying lean manufacturing principles to their operations due to a significant amount of custom work or lack of standard work.
Today, the customer manufactures many custom-built or tailor-made parts, often in smaller quantities, driving them to produce order by order. When looked at from an enterprise scale, this a highly inefficient way to execute subtractive manufacturing orders. Without the ability to manage part and tooling data and re-use standard process data, the customer is essentially starting from scratch with every order. Moreover, this approach will limit the growth of their exciting additive sector, in which rework, quality issues and uncontrolled processes are much more costly.
As a major step towards the elimination of the job shop mentality and the complete digitalization of their manufacturing data management processes, the customer was looking to implement solutions that would enable them to easily track and identify their true repetitive processes, understand how those elements are executed and organized, and evaluate the interactions between their processes, their people and their customers. Overall, the customer identified the following key points that were prohibiting this transformation:
- Lack of a central repository for their customer data;
- Inability to reuse data for either custom or standard work orders;
- No traceability of processes on the shop floor (in order to identify repetitive operations).
About the Project
Because of our joint expertise in delivering technology solutions in both the Machining and Medical Device Manufacturing environments, Engineering Industries eXcellence and AplusB Solutions have partnered with the customer to first develop a future digitalization roadmap for their flagship U.S. manufacturing facility, then to design and implement a set of integrated solutions to enable complete visibility across all their manufacturing processes:
1. Teamcenter Manufacturing
The first solution in scope will involve the extension of a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platform primarily designed to support the design and development of products that subsequently get manufactured. Now the leading PLM system used worldwide, Siemens Teamcenter originally grew out of the necessity to store and maintain all the digital data generated during the product development process after widespread adoption of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) applications. The product has expanded over time and now has extensive capabilities beyond that, which include mechanical design management, Bill of Materials (BOM) management, manufacturing data and process management and change management. The extension of Teamcenter will deliver a central repository for the management and synchronization of all of the manufacturer's design, production and customer data.
2. 3rd Party CAM Integrator
The second phase of this project will involve an application that integrates to Teamcenter and will connect external systems, specifically the customer's Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) tools, in order to enable the customer to easily review current data and manage generated data. With the integration platform in place, CAM system outputs that include NC programs, tools lists, operation lists and other manufacturing content can be stored and managed within Teamcenter, further extending the complete management of the end-to-end production process within one central repository.
3. Shop Floor Connect (SFC) for Teamcenter
The third solution in scope, Shop Floor Connect, is a Direct Numerical Control (DNC) application from AplusB Solutions that will enable the delivery of the customer's NC program files from Teamcenter to CNC machine controllers on the production floor. SFC is more than your traditional DNC system, as it connects directly to the centralized Teamcenter database, avoiding data duplication, managing revisions automatically and ensuring that only the correct information is being used on the shop floor. SFC will enable the customer's production operators to easily access current and released NC programs, drawings, 3D models and other data sources through a web-based user interface that runs on any browser-enabled device or controller. Operators will be able to pull and request any manufacturing or assembly information they need during the execution of their work. They will also be able to provide feedback and change requests back into Teamcenter, thus closing the loop and ensuring a completely traceable and controlled manufacturing process workflow from start to finish.
Engineering’s Advantage
Our team’s main goal for this project is to help establish a foundational digital backbone that will enable the customer to properly manage their data and control processes at both the engineering and manufacturing levels. Moreover, a centralized information management repository will create a growing data lake that can be utilized by the customer to identify standard areas for reuse. Once this is accomplished, the manufacturer will be able to work towards optimizing the utilization of this data to help synchronize the way they work in both additive and subtractive areas, from design down to production execution. Engineering Industries eXcellence is looking forward to supporting the customer as they begin their exciting digital transformation journey and is committed to delivering the right tools to harmonize all their manufacturing processes.
