Oct 5, 2021
About the Customer
Engineering Industries eXcellence’s design automation practice has been working with a global leader in consumer goods to help them digitalize, optimize and transform how they design their world-class products. The customer is an industry leader in Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), designing and manufacturing products for beauty, healthcare, feminine and family care. The company has been recognized for deploying the best technology across its global production sites, which keeps them at the cutting-edge of innovation within the industry.
- Beauty consumer products
- Healthcare consumer products
- Feminine consumer products
- Family care consumer products
The Customer’s Need
As a global leader in the consumer sector, our customer knew that product innovation demands improvements in products every year. Despite being a large consumer goods company with an expansive portfolio of products, before our collaboration, the customer was still manually performing analysis for each product design within their feminine product and family care segment. Each product produced by the customer had over 150 parts to be designed, and the customer would release a new line of product design variations every 3 or 4 months. They were struggling with simulations of these products, which are notoriously complex. Dependent on manual processes, product model creation was simply becoming too time-consuming, costly and error-prone.
The customer needed a strategic partner and system integration specialist to deliver a solution that would enable them to standardize product analysis processes, classify product parts in a standardized way and enable visibility of product design changes and operations across the product lifecycle. That is where our Product Design Automation and Product Analysis Digitalization expertise came in to play.
- Product design digitalization
- Product analysis digitalization
- Product simulation digitalization
- Automated product parts classification
- Product rule, definition and constraint management
About the Project
In order to help the manufacturer innovate faster and get their products to market ahead of the competition, our team needed to help the customer automate their product design and simulation processes. Cost-effective consumer products require an efficient model creation process because of the number of components that are designed for these products as well as the high number of operations involved in their production and assembly. For a mass-produced consumer product, it is paramount to have a well-constructed product data model.
For that reason, our team first compiled all of the customer's product and manufacturing workflow data into a single database. Accurate and complete product data management is critical to ensuring quality in product and process, enabling manufacturers to validate that their final product will adhere to all functional specifications during the product analysis phase and preventing issues downstream. By consolidating product properties and features into a digitalized and reusable data structure, we were able to make it significantly easier for the customer to efficiently manage their product design data and variations. The services our team delivered included:
- Collection and standardization of all product design and manufacturing workflow data
- Creation of a user interface that captures all engineering product design variables
- Development of customized product configurator that auto-generates product models and drawings
- Delivery of product configurator tool able to automate complex product analysis and simulation processes
- Delivery of solution within a Cloud structure to enable users to run simulations simultaneously
- Ongoing support for solution expansion and augmentation as customer's product and market needs evolve
About the Solution
Leveraging Siemens Teamcenter, NX, NX Open and Simcenter 3D, our team transformed what was before a highly time-consuming, computer-intensive manual process into a strength of the customer’s workflow to market. The customer saw immediate gains in process efficiency, including reducing product analysis time from 6 months to 6 weeks – a huge cost-savings for a mass-produced consumer product.
The benefits of the solution we delivered included:
- Simplified data collection and access: by automating manual design and simulation processes, end users can access product features such as part contact settings, material properties and dynamic loads from a Cloud structure and run simulations simultaneously.
- Significant time reduction in product analysis cycle: from 6 months to 6 weeks, the value of design optimization becomes apparent, and this time savings proves that automation can achieve dramatic improvements in time-to-market.
- Full design reconciliation with real-world product ahead of production: by building the product data model into the manufacturing planning process, with design verifications feeding the manufacturing bill of materials and process automatically, the customer can easily define and enforce all workflows, constraints, rules and processes according to their product requirements.
Engineering’s Advantage
For over a decade, our team has been implementing digital solutions to develop complex product design models which would be impossible without automation. This helps manufacturers innovate products, improve speed-to-market and consistently meet industry standards and requirements. Leveraging our extensive experience in design automation, we were able to provide all the solutions, services and expertise required to ensure the successful design and delivery of this customer's world-class consumer products. This is an ongoing strategic digital partnership that we look forward to continuing and expanding as we innovate with the customer together.
- Faster time-to-market
- Lower operational costs
- Reduced design errors
- Alignment of engineering and production
