Bob Klem has seen a lot change in the 30 years he has been with General Motors. But one of the most significant events in the manufacturer's operational history is happening right now. The company, he says, is in the midst of a global transformation that emphasizes a new kind of vehicle. This vehicle is not a new automobile; rather, it is a change agent — a driving force, so to speak — that will move the 100-year-old company into its next century.
For the past 10 years, Klem, GM's Information System and Services global director for manufacturing engineering, has been working with his European counterpart, Richard Woodhead, on developing digital toolkits that will alter the way GM manufactures its cars and trucks. The toolkits define the workflows and sequencing standards for building each of GM's products. For example, there are about 4,000 weld points on an automobile, each varying in size, the type of weld gun required, and the duration of the weld based on stress analysis. A digital model, residing in a global component library, standardizes the way welds are made and how parts go together, regardless of where in the world a part is built.
The toolkits, which Klem develops and Woodhead fine-tunes for each site around the globe, represent a virtual model of engineering designs, manufacturing assets, and validation methods. "Once you have all of these three segments aligned, you get a high degree of reuse of the digital data, so you are not constantly reprocessing the plant," Klem says.
The digital designs eliminate rework and program delays, and reduce the overall capital investment. But this effort represents so much more than just cost cutting and efficiency gains.
"It's our biggest lever to get to what could be a short-term competitive advantage in digital manufacturing," says Woodhead, director of manufacturing engineering, Information Systems and Services, for GM Europe.
Digital manufacturing, also referred to as "the digital factory," has been loosely defined as the digitization of the design-to-manufacture processes. It is the ability to integrate CAD, product lifecycle management (PLM) tools, simulation software, analytical applications, and, in the very near future, control technologies. Together, these technologies create a virtual world in which a product can be built and validated prior to commissioning any of the equipment used to build it or producing physical prototypes. But the concept can be hard to grasp. Just think of it in terms of "Second Life" — the popular 3D virtual business world where companies like IBM and Reuters do business online — except that in the simulated digital factory, it's all about pushing a digital prototype onto the virtual factory floor.
Many organizations already have the technology they need to create a digital manufacturing environment, but they've yet to discover the big-picture potential of integrating it all. "There are people out there that understand the isolated areas of process simulation for the flow of a chemical plant on the process side or to simulate the layout of the factory on the discrete side, but they don't understand how it all comes together in a truly integrated digital product model," says Dick Slansky, an analyst with ARC Advisory Group.
In fact, one of the biggest inhibitors of the digital manufacturing concept is a lack of awareness or understanding of what these advanced technology tools working together can do, Slansky says. In addition, fear and unease are often associated with the unexplored territory of digital manufacturing.
Other inhibitors that Slansky and others cite include cost, the inherent learning curve, the potential for cultural clashes between departments, a lack of standards, and even unreliable telecommunications infrastructures that limit the ability to share data globally. Collectively, these issues may delay the adoption of digital technology, but they won't stop the inevitable digital revolution in manufacturing, supporters say.
Case in point: GM. The company has encountered all of these issues in one form or another over the past decade, but the benefits of digital manufacturing ultimately outweigh the risks. "It absolutely changed our world," GM's Klem says. "Just like the Internet, it has changed the way we do business."
GM, however, is a pioneer in digital manufacturing. Other companies are still struggling to get started.
A revolution can be an overnight uprising or it can be a long, tedious affair. In manufacturing, it's typically the latter. As Slansky points out, many companies doubt the credibility of the digital factory idea. They see value in pieces of it, but not the big picture.
"I think it's a bit of a dream," says David Rudzinsky, vice president of information systems and CIO at Hologic Inc., a medical device manufacturer. Rudzinsky is a self-proclaimed skeptic. As a company regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, Hologic needs as much electronic traceability as possible, but there will always be limitations and exceptions to the rule. "The business would love to make everything paperless, and me, too. I'm just not sure we can get there," he says.
Rudzinsky understands the digital factory to be a paperless environment where systems rely on electronic records and automated processes, resulting in fewer mistakes and the ability to scale as the company grows. Hologic, which makes diagnostic imaging equipment for women's healthcare, already uses PLM from Agile, recently acquired by Oracle Corp., which allows the company to "design for manufacturability." But once the design gets to the factory floor, there's a speed bump — people. Some of Hologic's product assembly steps require manual intervention. "Until you eliminate all people, you won't have a fully automated digital factory," Rudzinsky says.
Agile's software does, indeed, bring Hologic's design engineers closer to its manufacturing engineers by acting as the single source of truth where design history and all of the steps to validate a product coalesce in one system. In addition, Hologic uses the Oracle E-Business Suite and manufacturing software, which means that when a design change happens in Agile, it can flow to Oracle manufacturing. But closing the loop on the factory floor is a different issue. If there are defects or problems on the factory floor, there is no way to automatically flow those back to the design process so that they can be fixed.
It's an integration issue, and one that Rudzinsky and his peers grapple with on a daily basis. "We had the 'who's who' of medical device manufacturers in the same room talking about this and we all have the same issues," Rudzinsky says. "We have lots of good point solutions, but how do you get to that integrated solution that will allow you to achieve this total digital system?"
And how do you do it affordably? There's typically a $100,000 to $300,000 start-up cost associated with getting workstations and software in place to run the digital factory. Then there's the cost of services and training. In the PLM market, for example, 60% of supplier revenue is generated from support and maintenance services, ARC's Slansky estimates. All together, the digital manufacturing environment can be a pricey proposition.
The cost issue joins a host of others in a rapidly changing market for digital manufacturing technologies. This year alone, Oracle announced its purchase of PLM provider Agile; rival SAP unveiled a PLM roadmap; and, most important, Siemens acquired PLM vendor UGS.
While Oracle's and SAP's PLM initiatives could be seen as part of the integration journey, the Siemens-UGS announcement was a head turner. "Siemens and UGS pre-empted everyone and turned the industry upside down," ARC's Slansky says. "They are taking a completely different perspective on the PLM tool."
Closing the Final Loop
Siemens is working on integrating UGS Tecnomatix, which digitally defines, simulates, manages, and executes manufacturing operations, with the physical inspection technology that comes out of Siemens Automation & Drives, the unit into which UGS now reports. This will not only build in quality assurance, but also close that loop that Rudzinsky and others have expressed concern over — getting data from the factory floor back to design.
"One of the things we've been trying to drive for a while is the integration of electrical and control logic as a validation of the HMI and PLC programs," says GM's Woodhead. "We've been piloting this in various places ourselves, but we see the Siemens-UGS acquisition as a key enabler to drive that to the next level. It's the next step forward in digital manufacturing."
And if Siemens is working on it, it's a safe bet that others are, too. Dassault Systemes, for example, is creating a digital manufacturing package that relies on a manufacturing hub. It is a data repository that houses and translates data from its CATIA CAD product to its DELMIA software, which provides simulation and validation of manufacturing equipment. This virtual commission system has been tested at several companies in the United States, Europe, and Asia Pacific for the past three years, Dassault Systemes officials say. They have already established partnerships with Schneider Electric, Omron, and Mitsubishi to feed their respective controller information back to the hub, and they are in talks with Rockwell Automation to do the same, officials said.
Integrating control engineering "is the last link in the digital business of a company," says Bob Axtman, director of business intelligence at Dassault Systemes-DELMIA. "And we are three to four years ahead of the game."
Crossing Boundaries
Integrating electrical and control systems information together with PLM may be the last link, but it certainly isn't the final step because the definition of the digital factory will continue to evolve to encompass the supply chain, outsourcing partners, and even customers.
The concept of "one digital factory," where everything is contained, is not necessarily the desired outcome for any company moving in this direction. Rather, it is the digitization of data. "I don't see one digital factory. I see a fleet of digital factories, some of which you own and some of which you don't own," says Vivek Bapat, senior director of solutions marketing for SAP.
The characterization is particularly applicable to companies that operate in multiple countries around the world. They may outsource manufacturing or receive products from suppliers in many different locations. In order to organize an approach that is orderly and effective, SAP has an initiative it informally calls "the business of products." It is a blueprint, so to speak, of the perfect plan to bring together PLM, design, and manufacturing. Of course, the plan is also based on SAP's own product portfolio, which includes its ecosystem of partners from Visiprise on the MES side to Geometric Software, which specializes in PLM integration.
Identifying how the digital factory will impact other aspects of the business is an important discussion to have, observers say. "Design to manufacturing gets you out the door, but then what?" asks Hologic's Rudzinsky. "It's half the story. Once we ship the product out the door, then what?"
To that end, Oracle emphasizes collaboration and management as two important aspects of digital manufacturing. There must be a deliberate shift toward creating PLM and production hubs, the big software supplier says.
"I truly believe that the business side will put pressure on the IT side to get an integration going between traditional PLM and the rest of ERP that encompasses manufacturing, services, and service operations," says Manish Modi, vice president of manufacturing and PLM development at Oracle. This goal was a motivating factor behind Oracle's acquisition of Agile, he says.
That kind of pressure, however, can create internal strife in many companies due to the fact that IT, engineering, and manufacturing have been independent departments historically (see Breaking Down Walls). To truly move to a collaborative digital factory model, organizational structures will have to change.
"We've seen more progressive companies creating manufacturing/IT groups," says Kevin Tock, vice president of MES at Wonderware. "Once that happens, different kinds of discussions start to come to the forefront in order to figure out what is really important."
What's important is having flexibility in manufacturing, quality built into the product design, and the ability to make customers happy. To that end, Tock, Oracle's Modi, and SAP's Bapat all see MES, supply chain management, and even CRM as important pieces to close the digital factory loop.
All of which, of course, can complicate the concept of the digital factory. Therefore, as the definition of the digital factory begins to embrace all aspects of the organization, some believe the need for standards rises correspondingly.
Wonderware points to industry standards, such as ISA 95 and B2MML (Business-to-Manufacturing Markup Language), which define the way MES and ERP systems exchange information. But corporations must take it upon themselves to define internal standards as well.
For GM, standards and infrastructure were two of the biggest obstacles in the move toward the digital factory. In addition to building digital libraries, Klem and Woodhead had to establish a common set of practices and work standards. If the lead unit in building a car is in Asia Pacific, for example, there have to be identical processes around the globe so that the work can be seamlessly transferred.
"The model has worked in North America and Europe because there are similar infrastructure capabilities," Klem says. "But the challenge we face now as we move into other countries is that they don't enjoy the same richness of infrastructure and connectivity, in terms of speed." That means if an engineering center is trying to send data to a remote location that does not have a solid telecommunications infrastructure or enough bandwidth, it can disrupt the digital flow.
But GM, which has been working on creating a digital manufacturing environment, takes the infrastructure issue in stride. After all, the company is doing things today it never dreamed of doing years ago. "The vision has been there for a long time and the industry has made improvements in infrastructure and basic computing that [are] allowing us to do things that we never could have done a few years ago," Woodhead says.
Eyes On the Prize
The lesson from GM and others is that it is essential not to lose sight of the ultimate goal, no matter how unattainable it may seem at the moment. In fact, it's important to understand that most manufacturers are probably already involved with the digital manufacturing concept in some way, shape, or form. "Nobody ever says, 'Today, we do it manually and tomorrow we'll be all digital,' " DELMIA's Axtman says. "But people are starting to wake up and realize they are already using an aspect of the digital manufacturing solution. If they are using CAD 2D or 3D, they already have part of the digital factory solution."
The digital revolution is upon manufacturing, but it won't happen overnight in a big bang.
"You need to roll up your sleeves and get into the business in order to understand how to make it all work within the context of your business," GM's Klem says. "You learn by doing."