Trip report on concurrent engineering in the USA

Transcription

1 Trip report on concurrent engineering in the USA Citation for published version (APA): Graaf, de, R. (1993). Trip report on concurrent engineering in the USA. (TU Eindhoven. TUE/BDK/FT, Fac. TBDK, Vakgroep FT : rapporten; Vol. 9302). Eindhoven: Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. Document status and date: Published: 01/01/1993 Document Version: Publisher s PDF, also known as Version of Record (includes final page, issue and volume numbers) Please check the document version of this publication: A submitted manuscript is the version of the article upon submission and before peer-review. There can be important differences between the submitted version and the official published version of record. People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website. The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal. If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the Taverne license above, please follow below link for the End User Agreement: Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us at: openaccess@tue.nl providing details and we will investigate your claim. Download date: 18. Apr. 2019

2 Trip Report on Concurrent Engineering in the USA TUE/BDK/FT /93-02 Ir. R. de Graaf, Eindhoven University of Technology Graduate School of Industrial Engineering and Management Science P.O. Box 513; Paviljoen C12; 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands tel.: Abstract Concurrent or Simultaneous Engineering originates in the USA. As a doctorate thesis was started concerning visibility support for this development method, a trip to the USA was used to validate the subject. Eight institutions were visited, industrial and scientific, giving a picture of the state of the art. The thesis subject is valid, but two comments should be made. First, communication between development and production or on communication between different disciples could have quite different information flows. Second, the abstraction level for the study should be clearly defined at team level. Future cooperation on this thesis with some of the visited institutions might be possible. 1. INTRODUCTION Literature research is a quick way to acquire knowledge about a doctorate thesis. The title of the thesis is 'Visibility Support for Simultaneous Engineering" (VSSE). Object is to support communication between development and manufacturing of durables - TV, car - in a Concurrent Engineering (CE) environment. This support should come from information technology (IT) and should not have a technology specific design. Especially articles can give a good view of related research. A lot of the articles studied have an American origin. As an opportunity to go to the United States was presented, the authors of, or companies described in, the closely related articles were contacted. Goal of the journey was to get a picture of CE in the USA and to validate the research theme, through interviews, discussions and demonstrations of CE-supporting software tools. The next section shortly reviews the institutions visited. Section 3 defines CE and comments on its environment. The subsequent section shows an impression of the state of the art in CE, from research, through software to applications. In the final section this trip's conclusions are drawn. 2. COMPANIES AND INSTITUTES VISITED This section shortly introduces the companies and institutes visited. Their appearance is in order of date visited. Stanford Research Institute (SRI) SRI - Menlo Park, CA - is divided into three main groups. The Business and Policy Group, the Science and Technology Group and the Engineering Research Group. The Engineering Research Group develops advanced electronics, telecommunications, computing, and information systems. The Network Information Center is working on collaborative environments for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Initiative on CE, to support the specification phase of the development-cycle. Concurrent Engineering Research Center (CERC) CERC - Morgantown, WV - is fully DARPA (Department of Defense) funded and affiliated to the West Virginia University. Because of the need to improve product development capabilities, CERC is promoting and facilitating CEtechnology. Besides internal research and training capabilities, CERC also has some application sites in companies around the USA. -1-

3 Square D Company This - Palatine, IL - producer of electrical distribution equipment, controls and automation products, is part of the French Groupe Schneider. Total Quality and rapid response to market need have their main attention. Illinois Institute of Technology (lit) Professor Goldhar teaches Technology Management at lit - Chicago, IL. His main attention is moving from CIM to strategy. The role of manufacturing in the next decade is one of his interests. Motorola Inc. The Corporate Manufacturing Research Center in Schaumburg, IL, is mainly a service institute for plants all over the country. Their emphasis is on quickly developing and innovating production processes. CIMLINC Inc. CIMLINC is an international UNIX software developing company in Ithasca, IL. Their focus is shifting from manufacturing support to engineering support. LINKAGE, a multi media work instruction application, and CECS (Concurrent Engineering Control System) are examples of the software they have been developing and marketing. Xerox Corporation In Webster, NY, Xerox is implementing engineering software tools for design and manufacturing. Manufacturing at Xerox is mainly assembly, therefore specifications are set for subcontractors. Research is done in many different disciplines, there is a lot of attention paid to the on time maturity of technologies for completely new products. Purdue University Purdue's - West Lafayette, IN - School of Industrial Engineering features a federally (NSF) funded Engineering Research Center. The main research themes are integrating production technologies and product! process relationships. There is a Ph.D. student at Purdue with an assignment closely related to VSSE. 3. CE: DEFINmON AND BOUNDARIES The formal definition of CE according to Winner et al. [10] is: ita systematic approach to the integrated, concurrent design of products and processes, including manufacture and support. This approach is intended to cause the developers, from the outset, to consider all elements of the product-life-cycle from conception to disposal, including quality, cost, schedule and user requirements." In Europe Simultaneous Engineering, one of the synonyms, is a more usual term. Palmer et al. [7] give three factors to consider to incorporate concurrency into a process: 1. faster product development 2. better communication and information flow between tasks 3. progressive refinement through innovation of similar activities VSSE is mainly oriented on the second factor. Concurrent Engineering tends to be a fashionably used word. A lot of companies are considering it, but not all are equally successful. Especially when the time to market is important, the two other factors (communication, progressive refinement) are often neglected. One of the key discussions around CE is whether CE should imply cultural changes or whether a cultural change should create multidisciplinary teams which engineer together, decomposing the complexity of CEo A similar discussion can be held on the IT support for CE; if the organizational structure is transparent, it might be obsolete. Still in large development departments IT support will be necessary. Implementing CE could give a company a time compressed strategy in stead of being a first order manufacturer, see Lei and Goldhar [6]. In first order manufacturing development does not fundamentally change the organization and strategy. -2-

4 When time compressed strategies are used, the company tries to redefine the market and to offer a constant flow of innovations. In their opinion the first order manufacturer will not survive in the durables environments, where high variety is a must. A differentiation should be made between development and innovation. Development is incorporating new technologies where innovation is advancing technology that is already in use. For Xerox it is important to get new technologies to the market. A laser-color-copier that can be used as a printer too, incorporates new technologies. Motorola has chosen to focus on innovation, perfecting current products and technologies. 4. CE: STATE OF THE ART It's hard to get a nearly complete view of CE when only eight institutions are visited in little more than two weeks time. Nevertheless the picture of CE became much clearer during the trip, mostly as a result of the discussions, demonstrations and acquired articles. This section will give an overview concerning CE research, software-tools, and applications. Research CERC's research covers a large part of the CE process. Main topics are structuring CE, readiness assessment for CE, and managing constraints during development. Structuring concerns formally describing activities and tasks - combinations of activities - in the CE process and can be used to compare different CE processes and can give insight in the trade off between concurrent and serial tasks. Tasks in CE may consist of nested tasks, decomposition is possible. A process-tree is used to represent the process and can have several levels. The more complex tasks get the more management effort is needed to tie them together, see Palmer et al. [7]. Concurrent tasks can reduce development-time, but on the other hand, need a communication overhead. Like the definition in section 3 states, implementing CE is only possible when technologies and processes for product development are completely controlled. CERC has developed a way to measure the concurrency in a company. Both technologies and processes used, are scaled in several key areas. Karandikar et a1. [4] discuss the readiness assessment categories and how to scale them. Managing constraints is of particular interest in larger product development cycles. Violated constraints should trigger trade offs, so insight is needed in the effects of changing constraints. The constraints should be represented in the way the user encounters them; mostly in an algebraic way. Constraints~hould be dynamicly created and modified and of course be consistent. CERC is therefore trying to develop a generic constraint management system, see Karandikar [3]. Ongoing research is done to be able to represent any type of constraint with IT and to manage constraints more effectively. Software tools Both SRI and CERC are developing software that supports collaborative design processes. CIMLINC is developing CE tools from the manufacturing basis. CECED is especially developed to support redesign activities, facilitating effective communication and capturing the history of the specification phase, see Craighill et ale [2]. Reuse of acquired knowledge may make iterating between manufacturing and engineering to get specifications set obsolete. CECED can provide views on different levels of abstraction, conform the expertise of the designers involved. It is based on a multimedia system (MOSAIC) and supports the work-space, conversations and connections. It is still a prototype system. MONET is a multimedia system for conferencing and application sharing in distributed systems, developed by CERe. Geographicly dispersed people can work team-like on engineering problems. -3-

5 MONET enables to communicate audio, video, images, graphics and CAD data. It features several servers - e.g. conference, application sharing - and X-windows. The Srinivas et a1. paper [8] describes the servers and system architecture. Currently operating system support for MONET is investigated as are techniques to update data. CIMLINC has been focussing on computer support for manufacturing and engineering. LINKAGE is a UNIX and X-windows based multi-media system focussed on work instructions. It provides access to the current data, creates manufacturing instructions and creates setup and tooling sheets. Above that it features CECS, the Concurrent Engineering Control System that manages review, comment, approval and release in the engineering process. Thornton [9] discusses both systems. lems are solved in a concurrent way. As the focus is on innovation, the emphasis is more on processes than on products, though. At Square D and Xerox the focus is not so much on CEo Square D's top priorities are quality and quick response to market need. Square D is not that much a manufacturer of durables. The culture is changing though, trying to break down walls between functional departments. At Xerox assembly is the most important part of production as they use a lot of subcontractors for their parts. CE is therefore not top priority. Integration between the many technologies incorporated in their products is more important. One technology may be dependent upon the outcome of another. Communication nets can help to determine where the product development is at a certain time, see Brooks [1]. 5. CONCLUSION The trip described in this paper has fulfilled it's goal, by clearing the picture of CE and validating VSSE. Though the thesis subject is valid, it is necessary to determine whether information flows in communication between development and manufacturing and in communication between different disciplines involved in development are comparable. Furthermore, an abstraction level for the research should be set. Just stating the research should be technology independent is not exact enough. The focus should be on the teams responsible for the development tasks. Implementing software to support CE can be a problem in Europe. In the USA Sun work stations and a UNIX environment are regularly found in companies. In Europe a lot of smaller, PC-like stand alone systems are in use; integrating them can cause serious trouble and standard software from the US will not be applicable. During the next months the research should be concentrating on CE readiness assessment and formulating different CE-like processes, to be able to compare them. Applications The automotive industry in the USA, has put a lot of effort in designing new cars or parts in a concurrent manner. Best examples are Cadillac, Chrysler and Saturn. Cadillac won the 1990 Baldrige Award [5] because of it's improved quality - from 1 to 3 year warranty - and drasticly shortened - 50% and more - development lead times. In 5 years the top management supported CE program made Cadillac an agile competitor. Chrysler developed the Dodge Viper in less than 3 years. Teams were in charge of development and tasks were carried out concurrently. Finally at Saturn, the new GM make, the organization structure is fully product characteristic and very flat. Teams are in charge of engineering and the development cycle lead time is about three years. Motorola has built a complete plant for their new cellular phone. Here too the organization is product focussed and production is very flexible. Tiger teams are in charge of developing new variants. At the Corporate Manufacturing Center, small manufacturing engineering prob- -4-

6 A master thesis-project, retrospectively studying a time constraint development cycle like Philips' DeC, could be supervised. The research should come up with the right abstraction level, and distinguish what information flows to represent and how to represent them. Cooperation with one or more of the visited companies and institutes could be started when the above research is concluded. Especially CERC and CIMLINC could be interesting partners. Xerox might be, depending in what direction the research is going. Acknowledgement This trip was funded by Eindhoven University of Technology, Graduate School of Industrial Engineering and Management Science, department of Manufacturing Technology. Drs. Van de Linde of the Dutch Embassy in Washington, D.C. made many of the visits possible for which I am grateful. During the trip professor Goldhar got some extra meetings set in the Chicago area. I would like to thank all companies and institutes visited for their time and interesting discussions. REFERENCES 1 Brooks, B., Design the starting point for CIM, R&D Management 20, 3, Craighill, E., et al., Environments to Enable Informal Collaboration Design Processes, SRI International, Menlo Park, Karandikar, H.M., Managing Constraints in Integrated and Cooperative Product Development, CERC, West Virginia University, Morgantown, Karandikar, H.M., et al., Process and Technology Readiness Assessment for Implementing Concurrent Engineering, CERCI West Virginia UniverSity, Morgantown, Kendrick, J.J., Customers "Win" in Baldrige Award Selections, Quality, January, Lei, D. and Goldhar, J.D., Multiple niche competition: the strategic use of CIM technology, Manufacturing Review vol 3, no 3, September, Palmer, B. et al., Measuring the Concurrent Engineering Process, DEC/CERC, West Virginia University, Morgantown, Srinivas, K., et ai., MONET, A Multi-media System for Conferencing and Application Sharing in Distributed Systems, CERC, West Virginia University, Morgantown, Thornton, J., CIM Newslinc, Autumn 1991, CIMLINC, Ithasca, Winner, R.J., et al, The Role of Concurrent Engineering in Weapon Systems Acquisition, Institute for Defense Analyses, IDA Report R-338, December, t~ " INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING AND ~ MANAGEMENT SCIENCE '-./