Feb 9, 2018
About the Customer
Engineering has joined the first team to implement Siemens Next Generation Planning (NGP) in North America. This exciting new project is delivering cutting-edge technology to assist in manufacturing planning for one of America’s top submarine manufacturers.
Designed to focus on large, complex structures, 4th Generation Design (4GD) has become the primary location for engineering data. Taking this data to the next step in the manufacturing world, NGP utilizes engineering data to create, structure and manage planning objects such as processes and operations.
The Manufacturer's Need
Countless scalability challenges arise when producing ships comprised of several millions of parts. Our customer is often faced with:
- duplication of work;
- excessive rework;
- and lost traceability of the planning process.
About the Project
- In products this large, production begins prior to design completion. Within Next Generation Planning (NGP), Manufacturing Planners will be able to begin their work alongside Designers, enabling a long lead time for production.
- Furthermore, the design is constantly changing. NGP will provide a collaborative Change Management process across disciplines. When Planning is notified of a design change, they will be able to run a Manufacturing Impact Analysis to pinpoint exactly where the design part was utilized in the manufacturing plan to adjust accordingly.
- Change Management in the current process can be time-consuming; often, there is no traceability of what changes were made. In the future, NGP will allow a concurrent working environment for Planners to distribute the work and automatically record each update to the manufacturing plan.
- Also due to the complexity of the product, the process of training Manufacturing Planners is extensive. NGP is designed to provide an enhanced user experience for the customer. The web interface is easy to navigate and task-oriented, so each user will have a designated working space for each planning discipline.
Engineering’s Advantage
As the first customer to implement NGP, the solution will be tailored to meet each of our customer's requirements. Engineering is excited to enhance their manufacturing process by providing better support for scalability and performance, as well as signifacntly increase the accuracy from Design to As-Built.
Engineering’s leading Manufacturing Engineering and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) teams provided their expertise and the following services to the customer:
- Manufacturing System Integration
- System Design & Implementation
- System Validation
- Software Maintenance & Support
