the digital domain
the factory, and monitor who and how they are using it to create better products,” he said. For automakers, that might mean embedding inexpensive sensors in cars as they leave the factory, then monitoring key indicators for quality or durability. That data then could be used in upgrading the quality of future cars. “It could also allow connectivity with suppliers, so that they have visibility into the quality of their components,” he said. “It could also allow you to manage warranty and customer service—it is about bringing it all together.” A key point he stressed is that ultimately it means inte- grating that data with existing information systems such as manufacturing execution systems (MES), customer relation- ship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. “That is important to allow true visibility across the supply-and-demand chain and integrating them,” he said. An example of a Bosch Software implementation is the
company’s Process Quality Manager package. It was designed and delivered to help automakers control safety-critical tighten- ing processes. Jennings described how they installed a number of Bosch Rexroth tightening tools, “a smart torque wrench,” as he described it. “It is connected to the network and so you can change the specifics of that tool remotely. More importantly, you can also document critical parameters for that tool, like how many rotations, how much torque, [monitor if it is] losing any torque, measure the state of the battery life, and if the bit is starting to go bad,” he said. They do this with an inexpensive sensor that measures vibrations and infers health of the bit. “This allows you to track an assembly on a bolt-by-bolt basis,” he said, giving the manufacturer more visibility and accuracy. An automaker could, if it wished, track this data by individual VIN number for each vehicle. This has profound implications on warranty and customer service as well as training, not to men- tion anomaly detection and trend analysis.
Current and Future States: Using Virtual to Advantage The same technical trends are enabling both improved connectivity and smarter machines in the factory. “This is the topic du jour today in the automotive manufacturing world,” related Fred Thomas, global industry marketing director of Transportation & Mobility for Dassault Systèmes (Paris). “The automakers I talk to want to know what they should be doing now and what implications this topic has on their future.” These discussions reflect growing concern in the “gap” be- tween their current state and how intelligent and connected
their factories need to be in the future. “Their perception is that this gap is bigger than they thought,” he said. “While one should think of this as an opportunity for improvement, I also think it is a mandate.” They need to remain competitive with other automakers, who are pursuing the same goals. What is that end goal of the future state? There actually may be many, but he stresses that flexibility in responding to customer demand is an important goal. “It could include a digital thread,” explained Thomas. “Through the thread, an organization and an infrastructure senses, pulses, and reacts as a unit to changes in demand all the way down to the sup- ply chain.” Smart automation and sensors will be important, coupled with governance to ensure a unified “ecosystem” to make sure vehicles and components are not only pro- duced quickly and flexibly, but they are made to quality and corporate standards as well. “I am talking about machines that automatically reconfigure themselves depending on the product coming down the line,” he said. While possible today, these future smart machines, he said, will have enough presence to know what they are, what they do, their role in creating a subsystem or a vehicle, and what other smart machines they should be communicating with to get that done. Process governance in such a system is vital. Thomas paints a picture of a factory composed of smart machines that will evaluate, say, an order for an engine. They examine the bill-of-material, download the relevant CAD, call up the relevant bill-of-processes and route the engine as it is machined and assembled. “There is a potential for several hundred items, events, and tasks that need to be accomplished and with very little human intervention,” he said. This kind of intelligence is enabled by today’s flexible manufacturing. Most vehicles are built in factories organized around variants of a platform—sometimes multiple plat- forms—that a line can produce. Ensuring proper governance in flexible, automated facto- ries is key to an optimized overall process. It does no good to only optimize individual smart manufacturing machines if they do not work in harmony. That is where combining physical factories with virtual factories enters the picture. Creating virtual model factories in a computer model is a specialty of Dassault Systèmes. “We can provide a full 3D world from ideation to finished product,” explained Thomas, speak- ing of the ability to take optimized plans developed in the virtual manufacturing world into the real world. In this case,
48 — Motorized Vehicle Manufacturing 2015
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