The beauty of SustainabilityXpress
31 July 2009
Process type: Design
When you’re under pressure to cut costs,choosing materials which minimise the environmental impact of your designs may be low on your list of priorities. But a new design-led sustainability tool makes this easy, writes Al Dean
While your workhorse design system can already evaluate a product’s performance, there are also moves afoot to help minimise their environmental impact. The field of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is growing and there is a clear trend that sees these tools integrated within design.
The real power of the system comes into effect when it is used to find materials with similar characteristics but have less of an environmental impact
While other vendors - notably PTC and Autodesk - have started developments in this area, it is the fruits of a technology partnership between SolidWorks and PE International, a well known global expert in sustainability and materials science, that has kicked me into action this month. I’ve been looking forward to getting my hands on this technology ever since the development team gave a sneak peek at SolidWorks World back in January and now the Sustainability tool has been made available on SolidWorks’ Labs website (labs.solidworks.com).
The PE International partnership with SolidWorks starts off with a part-only variant called SustainabilityXpress, with a fully fledged assembly analysis tool coming on stream later. The tools interrogate your part’s form, size, additional information such as material (if you haven’t got it set in the part file), and then offers up some options for manufacturing. For example, if your material is plastic you get injection moulded and extruded as options. Next up, it asks for geographic information - where your part is manufactured and where it will be used.
Once this first stage is complete SustainabilityXpress hooks into PE’s huge database and gives you all manner of information relating to environment issues. There are four or five pages of data on the environmental impact of sourcing the material, processing it, shipping it, using it and then disposing of it at the end of its life.
The key metrics relate to carbon footprint, energy consumed (over the complete lifecycle of the product), air acidification (which covers the emissions such as sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxides) and water eutrophication (the contamination of water and the resultant damage to the surrounding ecology).
Starting off with this baseline material the real power of the system comes into effect when it is used to find alternative materials with similar characteristics (such as material class (alloys, plastics etc), density, thermal expansion, yield strength, elastic and shear moduli, tensile/yield strengths, Poissons ratio) but have less of an environmental impact.
All of this information is presented graphically to help make your decision and simulation tools can then be used to test the performance of these alternative materials. The whole process can be documented and distributed using an automatically generated report.
SustainabilityXpress works directly within the SolidWorks environment to help assess and reduce the environmental impact of designs
Tools like SustainabilityXpress should already be an essential part of the design process. In this day and age our moral duty to minimise the environmental impact of new products has never been greater, plus materials are becoming scarcer and governmental and international legislation tougher. Perhaps the biggest challenge though is getting designers and engineers to use them.
Particularly in the US, I’ve often heard the suggestion that scarcity of materials and resources is a myth - something that baffles me every time I hear it. For fear of patronising the engineers and designers reading this, the planet is not a renewable resource, it’s a finite closed system and if we continue down this path, things are going to start running out. But, putting the ignorance of certain individuals to one side for a minute, we are also faced with the problem of a tough economic climate, where there is pressure for designs to be driven by cost cutting exercises.
The beauty of SustainabilityXpress is that it can also help achieve this goal. It can bring to your attention alternative materials that are not only better for the environment but can also help save weight, manufacturing costs, and of course money.
While SustainabilityXpress doesn’t have the richness of a material selection tool such as CES Selector 2008 from Granta Design (grantadesign.com), the fact that it is integrated into the design process is a major plus. For many years I’ve been waiting for the CAD vendors to make the logical connection between material selection and 3D-based design. SolidWorks SustainabilityXpress is the most design-integrated example of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) software I’ve seen. Let’s hope it’s the first of many.
Al Dean is Editor of DEVELOP3D Magazine. Working with SustainabilityXpress has been a life changing experience for him. He can now impress his mates down the pub, by explaining the meaning of eutrophication
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PLM - What’s in a name?
31 July 2009
Process type: Manage
It’s everywhere, it’s overused and it’s a marketing buzzword, but it also holds the key to developing, producing, and supporting profitable products. Jim Brown gives his perspective on that crazy little thing called PLM
By now, everybody knows what this “PLM” thing is all about, right? Now that the PLM market has matured, it seems that most of the misconceptions around PLM should have cleared up. But they haven’t, have they? At the risk of adding yet another viewpoint to the market, I will provide some perspective on the way I think about PLM. Why? I think it is important for manufacturers to get this right. PLM is much more than a marketing buzzword, despite the probable overuse of the acronym. Indeed, PLM holds the key to developing, producing, and supporting profitable products.
What’s in a name? For the software systems known as “PLM” – or “Product Lifecycle Management” – there has been confusion. Some of the confusion may be from the name itself. Although the name is intended to convey that fact that these solutions serve as the backbone for product information and processes across the product lifecycle, somewhere the part about “product information and processes” got left out. This leads to the PLM myth that the lifecycle is the centre of the solution. Truth be told, it is the product. The “lifecycle” is really intended to identify the ideal scope of the solution, starting from early requirements through the service lifecycle. But the very essence of the solution is cantered around the manufacturers’ products. And after all, shouldn’t that be the centre of their business?
The value in PLM
Let’s discuss the core value provided by PLM solutions. The solutions started, for the most part, with Product Data Management (PDM). They have grown well beyond those capabilities, but at the centre PDM is still a very fundamental component of PLM. Products, even those that appear to be very simple products, have complex information associated with them. Keeping all of this information in sync is a tremendous challenge. The challenge is extended when the information includes massive CAD files, with complex associations between them. Simply storing, revisioning, sharing, and protecting these files is a big job. But PLM is much more than product data.
Figure 1: The PLM Framework, broken down into Digital Product Development and Digital Design tools
Beyond information about the product, PLM is about process. Product innovation, product development, and engineering are comprised of a host of different, inter-related processes spread across different departments, different companies, and often-different geographies. PLM extends the core of data management to the processes associated with it. This intersection of the product with the associated processes is the essence of PLM. And of course processes aren’t complete without the people executing them.
The classification of PLM
So PLM is simple. It is a set of software solutions that enables manufacturers to produce more profitable products, by managing product data and processes across the product lifecycle. With that definition, the solutions in PLM can be broken into two major classifications:
Digital Design Tools – software tools designed to enable engineers or others in the product development process to play their role in designing a world-class product. These solutions are also sometimes classified as “Digital Prototyping” tools
Digital Product Development Solutions – solutions that help manage, coordinate, and control the process of bringing a successful commercial product to market.
Together, these solutions form a suite of solutions that help companies compete through better products, better product launches, and better long-term product profitability. Figure 1 shows a sample list of the types of digital design and digital product development solutions that comprise PLM. This list could also be expanded with a myriad of additional solutions depending on the individual company, industry, and products being supported.
As if this wasn’t enough, Figure 1 also highlights another key aspect of PLM, “projects.” Beyond the context of an individual product or process come product development teams and the projects they work on. Keeping product development projects – and their associated team members – working together is a big challenge. This challenge has increased in recent years due to global product development and outsourcing, where it is now rare for all participants in the team to be co-located. Given the importance of successful new product development and launch (NPDL) to company profitability, it is a very valuable capability for PLM to address projects in addition to the underlying products in development. To address this, PLM offers project management as well as collaboration tools. These capabilities play a key role in helping product development teams improve their project performance.
The role of collaboration
Collaboration tools themselves have received a lot of recent attention. Significant emphasis has been placed on the ability to more fully define a product digitally so it can be shared electronically. This allows more people to provide input and feedback early in the product development cycle, to get the product right the first time. It also provides valuable information to help sell and support the product after it is launched.
The ability to readily share rich product information, including 3D models, has enhanced processes from early design, to product documentation, to service.
Collaboration is also expanding as companies are leveraging social computing techniques in product development. The use of instant messaging, social networks, profiles, blogs, and wikis to help product development teams collaborate with their extended networks is highly compelling. Many companies, in fact, are starting to include “Web 2.0” concepts within the scope of their PLM solution. This is a natural extension to PLM, and will likely be commonplace in the leading PLM systems within five years as more manufacturers learn to take advantage of social product development approaches.
The expansion of PLM
Despite trying to simply the definition of PLM, it is important to realize that the scope of PLM continues to increase. PLM is expanding in several key dimensions
Product - A “product” consists of much more than R&D or engineering specifications, and needs to include a richer view that includes commercial considerations that define the “whole product.” In addition, the technical view needs to grow to include mechanics, electronics, and embedded software.
People - Product development and product innovation are expanding across the enterprise to more people inside and outside of the business. More functions are being added, for example integrating marketing, manufacturing, service, compliance, or even software development team members.
Lifecycle - Product-related processes are being integrated across previously disparate functions, encompassing early requirements as well as service characteristics of the product.
As PLM continues to expand, it is encompassing and integrating more processes and functions. For example, it is becoming much more common to address product compliance earlier in the product lifecycle, which drives the need to incorporate compliance information in PLM. In a similar way, costing and supplier information is being integrated to allow companies to “design for supply” in addition to designing the product for performance.
As the realm of PLM grows, so does the scope of the solution. This causes many to wonder where PLM stops and other systems begin. The most contentious issue is typically where to use ERP (Enterprise resource planning) and where to use PLM. A simple guideline is to use PLM for product innovation and product development, and then transfer to ERP for the remainder of the product lifecycle. While this is a compelling model, it is frequently too simple to work for most companies. PLM simply has too much value to offer in later stages of the product lifecycle, including manufacturing, service and support. In addition, integrating these “downstream” functions into PLM provides the opportunity to provide real-world feedback to product developers on how their products are performing after they transition from digital prototypes to physical products.
Three Dimensions of PLM Expansion: Product, people, and lifecycle
Perhaps a more compelling way to view the boundaries between PLM and ERP is to view PLM as the backbone for product-related content and processes, and ERP as the execution engine that manages the sales, procurement, and manufacturing processes. Effectively, then, ERP addresses the processes from product demand to fulfilment, and all of the associated financial transactions. Most companies today are approaching this by integrating the “release to manufacturing” and “engineering change management” processes between ERP and PLM first. But determining the roles played by the different solutions promises to be a big question moving forward – particularly as ERP providers mature their own PLM solutions.
At the core, PLM helps companies make more money from their products. That is the business reason that manufacturers of all kinds are investing in PLM. The path to that value differs by company, but the scope of PLM is expanding to encompass most possible business initiatives related to engineering and product development. As this scope continues to increase, it is becoming imperative that manufacturers develop a long-term vision for PLM, and then implement it in smaller, finite steps that provide value along the way. Developing a clear vision helps companies ensure that they can leverage their PLM foundation as subsequent initiatives arise and business needs change, without having to rework or replace solutions. And implementing in a “PLM Program” fashion allows them to reduce risk and gain value as they go, which is critical in today’s difficult, global markets.
I hope that this perspective helps provide some clarity as opposed to confusing the issue. I would love to continue this conversation on my blog at www.tech-clarity.com/ClarityonPLM or via Twitter at www.twitter.com/jim_techclarity.
