Factoring Future into Present

Achieving Engineering Process Management for Customizable Products through 'Windchill'.

Progress… What? Why? And, How?

Deploying solution like a seamless electronic engineering process management is more of a management plan to augment engineering processes rather than a technical decision. But it is the underlying technology, which is the driver.

More than just bringing in a technology to manage the processes, it is the radical change in how the processes will be managed that which will bring added value to business. Beginning and end is a ceaseless play. As in life, So in business. Today one might behold the business dynamics in awe. In bewildering speed market conditions are undergoing change and altering the fortunes of the companies. If there is delay in registering the reality of the market place and being connected to it realistically, then the business response system gets sluggish. This adds to the delay in 'time to market' and hence woe to the company's business performance.

To get better in the market place it means to comprehend the complexities and respond to it as swiftly as possible. This is like conducting a symphony in a fish market and yet achieving a desired harmonious result. This, one might reckon to be fight to progress. Agility and adaptability will be the hallmark qualities of the successful companies. To achieve this, configurable and easy customizable solutions are required to act as organization enablers. At Jyoti, we being awake to the market reality decided to start the complexity grappling process. Besides technology it was also a people building exercise to come into terms with the changing scenarios and in the way of accomplishing things. For instance, in the way of delegating, taking decisions, empowering etc.

Introduction:

Jyoti Ltd. is an electrical and hydraulic equipment manufacturing company with over 50 years of engineering excellence. There are five product divisions. These are Rotating Electric Machines, Pumps, Hydro-Electric Generating Systems, Switchgear and Electronics & Control Systems. Of these first three follow discreet manufacturing process. Nearing half of the revenue for the discreet products come from manufacturing customized products. This means, to achieve 'time to market' a tight integration between engineering and other functional departments is imperative. While trying to manage tight time schedules, there always prevails a natural danger of being prone to human errors, owing to multiplicity of departmental transactions required to manufacture a product. If projects are ill-managed then errors could prove costly and have effects at multitude levels bringing permanent dents. Realizing that the future growth path is on the customization and integration sort of projects on mass levels, it was decided to bring in more measure of collaborative and tightly integrated product engineering type of solutions with accent on engineering processes and life cycle manageability.

Of the many solutions available in the market place, that fitted well with Jyoti's engineering environment one was 'Windchill', a life cycle management solution from PTC Inc, USA. Early in the implementation itself it was perceivable that the inherent webcentricness of Windchill would provide software architecture which could keep implementation gaffes and blues at bay.

Existing Software based Engineering Scenario at Jyoti:

Matrix of software solutions is employed at Jyoti. At modeling level, AutoCAD, Mechanical Desktop and Pro/ENGINEER are employed. Design optimizations are done by in-house developed Fortran program, manual calculations and through means of software based analysis such as Pro/MECHANICA. Gradually the entire optimisation will be migrated to software based environment. Sometime back it was decided to predominantly adopt Pro/E based engineering platform at Jyoti. Reason being, that the information generated during engineering and its integration into manufacturing is 'parts' and not 'drawing' based. Pro/E mechanism in comparison to other software solutions provided 'part' based integration between Engineering and Manufacturing. The engineering data generated through collaborative designs and its revision control is managed through Pro/Intralink. Database is based on Oracle. The entire engineering team is transparent to Oracle. Since, Intralink transacts with it.

Engineering Processes is Business Driven:

Major portion of business in Jyoti thrives on customized solutions. This means that for every inquiry and purchase order received, a lot of engineering work requires to be accomplished. Further, this requires to be coordinated with other departments such as Costing, Planning, Manufacturing, Purchase etc. The engineering information generated gains associativity with data from other departments and this remains unique with a particular customer inquiry and purchase order throughout the product life cycle. To facilitate efficient management of projects, it requires keeping track of all the engineering information and its associated information in a hyper-associated way. Only then the non-linear wading through a maze of enterprise information achieved can bring added value to business system.

Boeing, one of the pioneers, has demonstrated innovative use of electronic automation to facilitate concurrent engineering and manufacturing planning. Design data is shared with second- and third-tier manufacturers during the design process, so that the final design is one for which the suppliers can build the components quickly and reliably, without need for design changes during the manufacturing process. This is the future of global manufacturing: virtual teams of companies sharing product design and manufacturing data electronically, over the Internet, throughout the design, manufacturing, and product sup-port phases of the product life cycle. The companies that learn how to do this, and soon, will be able to bring new products to the market much faster and at lower cost than their competitors.

Solution Envisaged:

Windchill to be integrated with the Pro/E and AutoCAD based engineering environment. Most of the business functions at Jyoti will be mapped onto the readily available objects within Windchill. A few unique business objects are being built from scratch and will be customised to meet Jyoti's need. And, attributes of the many objects available within Windchill will be extended to incorporate the attributes being used in the Jyoti's enterprise information system. Furthermore, the BOM from Windchill is being integrated with the Oracle based Enterprise Wide Information Management System which has been developed in-house at Jyoti. With time to come, the corporate vision is to get the engineering management integrated with a packaged ERP solution. This objective has been a propelling force in designing the configuration of Windchill.

Problems Faced and Remedial Measures:

Mental modeling to accept problems the way they are, was the first step. 'No problems at all…' response, was in itself viewed as a problem. But the reaction to it was to be empathetic. Before technology could be brought in, it was a series of meetings with managers and staff at all levels formally and informally to identify the areas of problems and probable solutions for them and company's preparedness. Slowly step by step enthusiasm grew into people. Corridors of Jyoti became abuzz with Windchill. There were and still are all sorts of reactions. Both positive and negative. On several occasions there were ponderings about putting the horse or the cart first. Mr. Rahul Amin, our Chairman and Managing Director, managed this dilemma and in fact on many occasions presented this dilemma to managers to resolve it themselves. By this slowly acceptance grew and a strong resolve towards amenable process started. There was an ushering of a 'Learning Organization'. As it is said a good planned beginning is like already a half task completed. So it was at Jyoti.

Most important characteristic of Windchill Implementation was "Essence of Team Work is to Collaborate and Work… not Compete and Work…". It was like a symphony orchestrated by Mr. Rahul Amin, bringing together all the functional people and empowering them to achieve integrated people and engineering process management system, delivering faster product development systems.

Berlin wall of the Engineering and Design Center Crumbles:

With webcentric Windchill and the fiber optics network, the engineering data is now flowing out of the engineering center. The engineering and design center can now be visualized as an octopus with its bi-directional tentacles spreading out corporate wide. This makes product data transparent globally. Further more, at the shop floor, which is far removed from the design center, employing Pro/FLYTHROUGH, it is possible to view 3D models, fly around it, explode it and make change requests through Windchill clients. This brings in visual assisted dialogue between design and manufacturing engineers. By this the engineering conflicts are resolved online and in a collaborative way. The other major impact is in bringing myriad contributors to product development. In any part of the company anyone and in any part of the day, whether customer, factory worker, supervisor, quality inspectors, …anyone,.. Any one…by raising change requests, which further on in the workflow processes achieves intelligent associativity, can now become a collaborative member to product enhancement process. Engineering center is no more sacrosanct and Product development is all catholic.

Conclusion:

Proof of the pudding is in the eating of it. To fail to plan is to plan to fail. Since a good planned beginning is made, in foreseeable future it is bound to result in seemingly collaborative and integrated environment for product development and enhancement.

References:

How Electronic Commerce Is Transforming Business Processes
Michael Keating, Philip D. Metz, Curtis Holcomb, Martha Nicholson, David L. Jones, and
James A. Welch
Web site: http://www.arthurdlittle.com/prism/Prism_1q99/prism_1q99.html

Innovation in a Wired World
Philip D. Metz
Web site: http://www.arthurdlittle.com/prism/Prism_1q99/prism_1q99.html

The Dance of Change:
The Challenges of Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations
Peter Senge, Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, Richard Ross, George Roth, Bryan Smith
Web site: http://www.fieldbook.com


Srinidhi Boray
Sr. Business Manager
Jyoti Ltd
Pro/E Design Service Center
Industrial Area ;Vadodara;
Gujarat;390 003; India
Work Tel: 91 265 381401
jyotirnd@wilnetonline.net
personal: sboray@hotmail.com