Aaron Lidor likes to draw his designs by hand and see them on paper. He's an engineer, not an artist, but having the ability to follow the lines with his eyes, measure with a protractor, erase, and redraw gives him a sense of personal control that can't always be achieved with a computer model. Yet, every project he starts has a budget and a timeframe, so there's little room for rework .

Lidor, a mechanical design engineer at Rapiscan Systems, a maker of metal detectors and baggage screening machines used in airports, transfers his freehand drawings to Autodesk Inc.'s Inventor, a 3-D computer-aided design (CAD) application. Here, he makes a virtual prototype of the X-ray machine he's designing and can even simulate how it will be used in the real world, as bags move down a conveyer belt to be screened, for instance.

In this virtual environment, Lidor can ensure that what he designs will work as a functional product. There is, however, another step that he has limited control over: how that design is moved through manufacturing.

Despite the fact that manufacturers are finding ways to integrate various aspects of their organizations, there remains a distinct disconnect between engineering and manufacturing. The January acquisition of product lifecycle management provider UGS by automation giant Siemens was the first large-scale effort by a controls vendor to combine these two worlds in one company. Others may follow, but for now it remains a somewhat novel concept.

The irony is that these are two departments that should be closely aligned, since they depend on one another to meet company mandates for high-quality products that incorporate customer-specified features and are delivered on schedule. A misstep in the process costs time, money, and, potentially, customer loyalty.

Certain industry segments that can't afford to miss a beat due to the competitive landscape have opted to let technology sew the seams together. Companies in the automotive and aerospace & defense sectors, for instance, employ software that not only simulates product design, but takes that model a step further, simulating the production process as well. The concept, called digital manufacturing, is the linking of product development design with actual production. Digital manufacturing is a subset of product lifecycle management (PLM), and while it is not a new idea — 15 years ago it was called simultaneous engineering — today's technology has improved on that of years past, when most organizations were not ready to make the digital leap.

"Clearly, some of the historical challenges in engineering integration have just been because of the way companies are set up and the way the budgets are set up," says Paul Loftus, managing partner of Accenture's North American Industrial Equipment practice. "They are separate; therefore, the value of integration has not always been apparent."

Taking the Lead

Today, however, industry experts point to two major PLM players who are providing simulation software for digital manufacturing: Dassault Systemes and UGS Corp.

"These are very powerful simulation applications that don't just do factory layout, but also robotic workstations, machine tools, conveyers; and they simulate production systems very accurately," says Dick Slansky, an analyst at ARC Advisory Group. By taking a digital definition of the product and running it through a virtual production environment, processes can be validated and manufacturing equipment proven before the project gets the green light. This shortens the ramp-up time, reduces the costs, and gets product out the door faster, Slansky says.