Juliann Grant, Author at Adaptive Corp

10 Jan 2019

CATIA, Dassault Systèmes Juliann Grant 0 comment

Three Tips from an Expert in Composites Design and Manufacture

Over the course of his career, Adaptive’s CATIA expert, Bart Schenck, CATIA Application Specialist has been a pioneer in the use of the CATIA V5 composites module, supporting aerospace, defense, industrial equipment, and nuclear industries as an operations technician, an account manager, and now, at Adaptive, a technical support engineer. He’s seen successes and mistakes in the arena of composite design and manufacturing, and he’s got lots of experience that he’s ready to share to help manufacturers do things the right way…

Composites is an especially challenging arena: few manufacturing or design processes exist that contain more variables than that of composites. That’s because in composites, manufacturers start with flexible material made up of fabric and resin, which has to be mixed at a perfect ratio, then formed to a precise shape, and then cured at the right temperature for an exact amount of time. That’s a lot more variables than carving away at a single block of metal or casting a metal part in a mold.

Schenck explains that the manufacturers he works with don’t often bid a manufacturing process, receive the contract, and produce. Instead, they typically have to prove they can do the work before the contract is awarded, by producing a single part and thereby demonstrating they understand the design received and can deliver the correct end result. Only then might they win the contract to produce tens, hundreds, or even thousands of parts.

Tip 1:
Ensure you have personnel who have composites experience—either hire them or educate them

Composites are more of an industrial black art than a science, according to Schenck, and as such, there’s a lot of tribal knowledge held by those with significant experience in doing the work. Which means that the first key for manufacturers wanting to get composites right is either having the right people in place already—experienced composite engineers and manufacturing staff—or securing the training required to develop competency in the desired composite techniques and processes. In some cases, manufacturers may need to start with education or consulting to help select the most efficient and repeatable composites process for bidding on a contract.

Tip 2:
Choose the appropriate composites process and understand associated tooling needs

After you’re sure you have the right people in place, the next vital step is determining the process you’re going to use, which begins with understanding the types of parts you need to create. The process you choose will also dictate the tooling you need—for example, a hand-layup requires tooling with a very low coefficient of thermal expansion so the parts don’t change size, since you’re curing parts in an oven or autoclave. Tooling is one of the hidden risks Schenck has identified over the years—he’s seen plenty of manufacturers make a mistake early in the process and incur a lot of risk and cost later on.

Tip 3:
Make sure initial parts and tooling are accurate

With a clear understanding of the parts to be made and the chosen process—and tooling—to make them, manufacturers lastly should focus on the accuracy of the initial parts and tooling. In Schenck’s mind, the only way to ensure part and tool accuracy is to integrate software tools that will not only help manufacturers prepare digital models for the manufacturing process, but will also capture lessons learned and best practices as institutional knowledge for the future. Schenck can’t emphasize the need for accuracy enough. Manufacturers live and die by the accuracy of their parts, and he believes cutting corners on horsepower and capabilities that contribute to accuracy is simply foolish.

Given his experience, it’s no surprise Schenck recommends CATIA for composites—in his view, it leads the field in power and functionality. He gives an example of a frequent customer pitfall: not spending enough time with a part’s geometry up front—not considering that the engineering edge of part (EEOP) isn’t what the manufacturer needs to build to because they need to give themselves margin for the manufacturing process. With CATIA, it’s a simple process to extend the edge of the part to the manufacturing edge of part (MEOP) to ensure ease-of-manufacture and increase the likelihood of final part accuracy.

CATIA also captures the knowledge gained from each manufacturing process and stores it to help inform future work. With high turnover rates, attrition, and an ever-changing industry, it’s smart to be able to define and store digital processes that mimic real-world needs for physical manufacturing. It’s also smart to capture the tribal knowledge that typically only exists in workers’ heads.

Adaptive would be happy to share more information about CATIA’s composites capabilities, as well as Schenck’s extensive experience with both software and manufacturing processes.

23 Jul 2018

3DEXPERIENCE, Consumer Goods, Dassault Systèmes Juliann Grant 0 comment

DELMIA: The Missing Link for Consumer Goods Manufacturers

Connecting Digital Design and Manufacturing Improvements

Digital design and simulation are standard engineering practices by now. But the recognized value of those digital processes raises two questions for manufacturing operations. How do digital files stay relevant and current when the digital design transitions into physical production? And how can organizations apply digital best practices beyond the design and simulation phases?

The answer is powerful solutions like DELMIA, part of Dassault Systèmes’ My Product Portfolio for consumer goods manufacturers. DELMIA helps global businesses reimagine approaches to manufacturing, by virtually planning, analyzing, revising, and simulating production flows—from the supply chain down to machine tool paths. Doing so allows manufacturers to optimize production planning, asset productivity, on-time delivery, and customer relationships, while simultaneously reducing working capital, production cycle times, and inventories.

DELMIA also ensures digital continuity, a shared digital landscape connecting all stakeholders to improve visibility into, control over, and synchronization across manufacturing operations and supply chain processes on a global scale. Because in this day and age, having your digital house in order is vital for any enterprise that expects to be competitive in a crowded and fast-paced consumer goods marketplace—manufacturing digitalization isn’t an option, it’s a necessity.

With the world, economy, and particularly the consumer goods market moving faster than ever, manufacturers are looking for every possible efficiency—looking to get the most out of manufacturing, logistics, supply chain ops, and everything else. Everyone wants to be faster, develop faster, build faster, and sell more. Using technology to uncover and create operational efficiencies is the best way to do it.

Engineer, Operate, Optimize

DELMIA enables manufacturers to address three fundamental aspects of manufacturing: engineering or designing the process, operations information and management capability, and optimization or continuous improvement of systems.

To improve engineering practices, manufacturers use DELMIA to review and structure all industrial processes, with the goal of eliminating time and waste. By creating digital models that virtually simulate products, processes, and factory operations, they can improve processes to quickly respond to the competition or a market opportunity.

Specific engineering capabilities offered as part of DELMIA include collaborative manufacturing, to connect manufacturing stakeholders; process planning, allowing for design and validation of manufacturing processes; robotics, for programming and simulating industrial robots; fabrication, for programming and simulation of machining and additive manufacturing; and ergonomics, for designing human-centered production and workplace environments.

To address operations efficiencies, DELMIA manufacturing operations management (MOM) solutions provide manufacturers with a continuum of visibility, control, and synchronization of operational activities, in a common platform to ensure unified visibility and control. Functionality includes the ability to examine and improve global production processes, schedules, and resources from workers to IIoT equipment, as well as to increase labor efficiency and productivity.

DELMIA can also help manufacturers make advances in quality across manufacturing operations, while also extracting data for regulatory compliance and continuous improvement. In addition, it allows manufacturers to synchronize warehouse manufacturing, inventory, and logistics—just in time—and perform maintenance, maximizing asset performance and uptime, and avoiding unplanned or service disruptions.

Above all, DELMIA helps manufacturers optimize—continuously. For sales and operations planning, the platform offers advanced modeling and optimization capabilities to simulate any scenario in a sales and ops cycle, to consistently deliver maximum value. For master planning, DELMIA advances global decision support with real-time visibility and predictive analysis for master planning and scheduling and material requirements planning. And for detailed production scheduling, it helps reduce lead time and inventory by optimizing production within and across production lines, work cells, and assembly operations—all while improving asset utilization and throughput.

The Prodtex director of production technology, Peter Helgosson, sums up the benefit: “Virtual simulation with DELMIA enabled us to prove our build concept, verify the assembly path of the parts in the factory, and more efficiently balance the workload between stations, thereby reducing overall lead times.”

Not Just the Software, But the Solution

DELMIA on its own offers a wide variety of benefits, but as part of Dassault’s 3DEXPERIENCE platform and, more specifically, the My Product Portfolio solution for consumer goods manufacturers, it delivers even more value. My Product Portfolio offers not only the software platform but also a set of industry process experiences, focused around collaboration and community, project management, BOM and change management, mechanical design, performance testing and simulation, mold and tooling, and machining. With it, manufacturers can collaborate on a global basis and improve communications, with the aim of reducing time-to-market.

In addition, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform streamlines internal operations, establishing a single source of truth for all information about a product, enhancing cross-functional communication, and enabling the tracking of product data from design to production. In this day and age, consumer goods manufacturers can’t afford to do less.

To learn more about how DELMIA can help your organization, please Contact Us and we put you in touch with the right DELMIA expert.

Also, you can review videos and other materials on our DELMIA LinkedIn PointDrive page here

10 May 2018

3D Printing, Additive Manufacturing Juliann Grant 0 comment

Adaptive in the News: Design2Part A New Era of 3D Printing

In this Design2Part article, Frank Thomas explains how 3D Printing has evolved as a valid approach for manufacturers to enhance their agility on the plant floor by employing 3D printing for additive manufacturing. Whether they create replacement parts, tooling or jigs, the advancements in the durability of materials has enabled 3D Printing to be a dependable solution that is more affordable than ever before. Here are a few excerpts from Frank:

Thomas said that until fairly recently, additive manufacturing was used most often as a tool to create parts that you could hand to somebody so that they could see it, touch it, and provide some input as to what might need to be changed or modified. But that’s changed in recent years as new materials have been developed that enable printers to make stronger, more durable parts.
“Metal printing has always been there, but that has an economic value proposition that’s a bit challenging for it,” he said in an interview. “The ABS and nylon and other plastic 3D printers, up until the last couple of years, weren’t necessarily dimensionally accurate, and then they had challenges creating a part that’s functional. That’s what I think is different about the market today, compared to just, really, a couple of years ago.”
If the demand for 3D printed metal parts is going to grow significantly, especially for critical use cases, OEMs will have to be able to count on high-quality parts. Thomas believes the additive metal industry is up to the challenge because he’s already seen major improvements in quality in recent years.
“At the end of the day, this is really a materials game. If the materials that we’re able to bring to the market provide the end use quality that people are looking for, that’s critical.”

Read the entire article here

10 Apr 2018

Additive Manufacturing, Metrology Juliann Grant 0 comment

Adaptive in the News: Metrology for the Masses

Our very own Frank Thomas was recently interviewed by Digital Engineering for the April issue that was focused on Design for Additive Manufacturing. In this article “Metrology for the Masses“, Frank is quoted a few times where he explains some of the challenges around metrology in manufacturing.

It was good to note that the metrology market is on a growth curve for the next ten years:

The global metrology market will experience a compound annual growth rate of 6.82% through 2027, growing from $607.9 million in 2016 to $1.25 billion in 2027, according to a report by Market Research Future. That includes traditional coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) as well as portable CMMs, laser scanners and optical digitizers.

Among Frank’s comments, he noted:

Many engineers don’t understand how laser scanning or otherforms of metrology can help them, according to Frank Thomas, metrology and additive manufacturing solution specialist at Adaptive
Corp. “It would surprise you how many engineers—when we show them the ability to 3D scan a part in a minute or two and in three mouse clicks, tell them if it matches their tolerance requirements or not—have never seen that,” Thomas says. “It was not nearly as fast and simple in the past as it is today.

Read the full article here

19 Mar 2018

Cloud, PLM Strategy Juliann Grant 0 comment

Solve Cross-Functional Collaboration Challenges with Cloud PLM

A study performed in January 2018 by CIMdata, in partnership with leading PLM solution providers, uncovered compelling insights into plans for cloud PLM adoption. CIMdata’s motivation for the survey of industrial companies was a belief that cloud adoption in the PLM space was slower than in other enterprise application areas—a belief that was surprisingly not borne out by responses. What CIMdata did find is that cloud PLM seems poised for significant growth in the near future.

Some of the most intriguing information in CIMdata’s paper about the research, Cloud PLM: Understanding Adoption Prospects, has to do with the benefits survey respondents expect to reap from cloud PLM. Topping the list is making data management easier for IT teams, as well as easy scalability, lower costs—for both startup and ongoing maintenance—and greater simplicity and predictability for future upgrades and validation of implementations. Top concerns respondents expect to face with cloud PLM implementations are issues with integration, security, inability to customize, lack of confidence in cloud-based performance, and potential data-lock-in.

But the most interesting metric has to do with the biggest challenges respondents’ face with their PLM implementation, particularly the fact that cross-functional coordination is number one on the list. This ubiquitous concern is independent of PLM, of course, and speaks more to the intractability of many entrenched organizational structures. Over and over the issues that arise during any kind of enterprise platform implementation are how to get information out of departmental or team silos and into a central repository to be accessed company-wide.

Doing so requires not only a procedural change, from one software platform and set of habits to another but also a cultural change that can be similarly tough for an entrenched corporate structure. Overcoming resistance to change is a universal, perennial challenge for companies and organizations large and small, but it’s the first step toward making meaningful improvements that can help productivity, employee satisfaction, and ROI.

One of the best tools for overcoming resistance is, ironically, one of the sources of concern: a cloud PLM solution. But it’s better seen not as a new piece of software mandated for company-wide adoption, but as a single source of truth—a single location where all product and part information resides, connected and cross-referenced, so all teams and departments can access any information they need, any time they need it, and know with total certainty that the data is up to date.

The move to a single source of truth must begin with the enterprise making a clear decision to change. To guarantee cross-functional collaboration takes root, there must be clear organizational goals driving the activity. Executive sponsorship of the process is key, paired with team accountability, to ensure everyone in the company moves forward together.

Benefits of Cloud PLM

When a company gets onboard with cloud PLM, every department, every team, and every individual stand to realize the benefits. The “single source of truth” means a single platform delivering all the functionality the enterprise requires, making installation, administration, and maintenance easier for everyone. It also means a central repository—a central location where all product data is stored and where everyone can find the information they need. This ultimately reduces the burden on individual departments, especially engineering, that no longer have to respond to multiple requests for information tailored to another department’s needs.

PLM based in the cloud offers anytime, anywhere access and, typically, high availability, without the attendant burden on the corporate budget to finance or IT to maintain a capable system. High-end PLM platforms are also easy to integrate with a wide variety of other enterprise systems, such as ERP, CRM, MRP, SharePoint, and more.

In addition, a cloud PLM platform enables the complete enterprise collaboration package: all of the different activities and actions that combine to deliver business intelligence and reporting, including design, simulation, virtual manufacturing, additive manufacturing, and inspection and metrology.

In the end, with an integrated, comprehensive cloud PLM system, it becomes much more than a piece of software, but a single source of truth for all teams who take an active part in bringing a product to market. This is the level of true collaboration that will help to improve an organization’s bottom line.

29 Jan 2018

Life Sciences Juliann Grant 0 comment

Product Development for Life Sciences: From Digital Concept to Physical Device

Manufacturers in the life sciences arena share the same goal: spending less time and fewer resources to develop more reliable products or services. Every manufacturer comes at that goal from a different place—with different strengths and weaknesses, needs, and technological capabilities. But regardless of what goods and services are being provided, the basic stages of the product development process are much the same across the industry.

Not every company will need to go through all stages, in fact, the steps required could vary by product being developed. But the typical ones—concept, scan, design, simulation, test, and submit—cover the range of steps in the process that every organization will have to work through to take a product from idea to production.

Stages in the Typical Product Development Process in Medical Devices

Concept

Everything begins with a concept, whether for an innovation or a product redesign. The concept itself begins with requirements, which can come from anywhere, from any stakeholder, be it internal R&D, requests or input from stakeholders, and/or market research. Regardless of the source, agreed-upon product requirements have to be carefully defined and tracked throughout the development process, and robust collaboration methods can help combat what are typically disparate systems in most organizations. Then, from the requirements, a product design is created via advanced CAD tools.

Of course, a product concept isn’t always for mass-production. Often it’s for a baseline product that will be tailored to a specific patient, taking into account differences in bone density, body structure, heart function, or other characteristics. The need for technology to utilize a patient’s real information in simulations is growing in the life sciences field, from implants, stents, and brain simulations for medical devices, to anatomical simulations such as physiological flows and thermal heating, to human body and consumer product interaction like hearing aids and shoes.

Scan

In order to simulate reality to create a customized part, manufacturers need to scan the body—in most cases, this means comprehensively processing standard 3D image data, such as MRIs or CT scans and exporting them as models suitable for CAD or CAE. The models can also be used for 3D printing, in cases such as a dentist scanning a tooth to create a crown or a doctor scanning a limb that needs a prosthetic. For example, the Cleveland Clinic and the Veterans Administration (VA) are experimenting with using 3D printers to print custom components to fit knee braces on veterans.

Design

Design is the one step every company performs. The key step in product development, design means taking all of the available requirements and data and developing the end product in a CAD system. Manufacturers who make use of an advanced CAD system tuned to the particular needs of life science applications can perform highly complex design and analysis tasks, including taking photos and converting them to 3D models, incorporating human mechanics and virtual reality, and even reverse engineering physical parts. In

addition, embedded collaboration tools in advanced CAD platforms also introduce the web into tools used for marketing, creating high quality rendering or animations, which helps teams create marketing information and technical documentation for regulatory purposes much earlier in the design cycle.

One medical device manufacturer saw firsthand the wisdom of an integrated, life sciences–appropriate design platform by trial and error. After working for two months with design tools less tuned to the organic nature of life science applications, they abandoned their prosthetic development and started again with an advanced platform—which yielded a satisfactory working design in three weeks that included smooth curves, multiple part assemblies, and complex yet stable models.

Simulation

A completely digital design file allows for enormous cost savings when it comes to the next typical product development stage: simulation. Traditionally, medical device developers would create a new design, build one or more prototypes, and put them on a piece of testing equipment that simulates use and/or wear to determine how the design functions. The test equipment might need to run for weeks or months before delivering results, and if the product design isn’t robust enough, new designs and prototypes would need to be created and tested for the same amount of time. Not only is this physical testing process time-consuming, but it also can be extremely costly.

For example, companies that develop parts for total knee replacements can spend as much as 12 weeks and $100,000 per test to predict wear on a component over a number of gait cycles. But with simulation packages built into an advanced CAD platform, the same analysis done virtually can take anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours and cost only the operator’s time. The dramatic reduction in time and expense makes it much easier for companies to rapidly optimize their designs for a quicker time-to-market.

Testing

The same simulation tools can also help with testing, the next typical stage in the process. An advanced platform can correlate simulations data to real-world use tests, which is akin to putting strain gauges on physical equipment. The unique simulation tools make the real-world testing process more accurate and less costly than any other method out there.

Compliance Submission

The final stage in the product development process is submitting the product for regulatory compliance. Unfortunately, for many small or even mid-sized companies, the submission process isn’t always well defined and can be especially challenging due to siloed information across the organization. A comprehensive software platform can help here too, particularly with the compilation and collection of information required for submission.

Beyond the traditional process steps, the other challenge for many companies is communication between teams, departments, and particularly information systems. A powerful solution will be built around unified, flexible platform capable of being a central storehouse for all product information, from design and production to documentation and compliance, to support team collaboration and accelerate data-sharing efficiencies.

By creating a single source of information and a single source of the truth within an organization around the product development process — organizations like yours can produce more reliable products with more speed and less cost.

Visti our Life Sciences page and explore the many projects and capabilities we can help with…

28 Nov 2017

Dassault Systèmes, Life Sciences, White Papers Juliann Grant 0 comment

White Paper: Optimizing Medical Device Development with Full Regulatory Compliance

How to Integrate Quality Throughout Your Product Lifecycle

A variety of factors are vital to the long-term success of a company and a product line, including price/cost, time-to-market, and more. But in this age of global communication—particularly in this era of social media usage, when an opinion or comment can go viral—one of the most important priorities for any company is product quality. That’s especially true for medical device manufacturers—companies whose customers’ lives often depend on the quality of the manufactured product.

The challenge many manufacturers face, however, is maintaining quality, as well as traceability and transparency, not just at one point in the product lifecycle, but throughout. That challenge is often compounded by siloed design, production, and change systems that don’t easily share information with each other or provide accessibility to all stakeholders in the process—something that impacts more than just the product itself.

As a new paper from Dassault Systèmes, “Optimizing Medical Device Development with Full Regulatory Compliance,” notes:

“Quality information must be highly visible throughout an organization to ensure that any and all decisions…are informed in a timely, efficient, and accurate fashion.”

Unfortunately, even when companies know that quality is so important, they don’t always make it the focus, as they scramble to get products to market or as different teams struggle with poor cross-functional communication. And that’s a problem. As the article points out:

“Achieving product quality is a multidimensional challenge and failure to manage quality in an integrated way throughout the total product lifecycle jeopardizes a company’s profitability and reputation.”

The ideal solution is total transparency of the product lifecycle across functions, organizations, teams, stakeholders, and more. And that’s exactly what a PLM system—an enterprise-wide, cross-functional solution that provides a “formalized, systematic approach for managing all aspects of product quality, reliability, and risk”—can deliver.

PLM platforms also help organizations optimize design controls, communication, and product/technology reuse. By handling requirements management for both mass-market manufacturing and specialized, configure-to-order business models, as well as requirements validation through simulation and systems engineering, PLM solutions enable manufacturers to maintain traceability of customer needs being met throughout the lifecycle, from concept to design to finished product feature. In addition, search tools and integrated processes such as quality management solutions save manufacturers money and ensure communication and transparency organization-wide.

In short, a platform-based PLM solution “breaks down organizational boundaries so companies can achieve the ultimate goal of increased patient safety while delivering innovative healthcare breakthroughs.”

To learn more about how a PLM solution can help your organization, download the whitepaper:

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