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