Day 3: Morning Update from the Tecnomatix Track at PLM Connection 2012
We kicked the morning off with three, well attended sessions. The customer speakers of course were the main draw, talking about Manufacturing Change Management at GE and Visual Work Instructions from Cortona3D.
Vodela Venkata, Product Manager for Manufacturing Process Planner (MPP), started with a deeper dive into the latest capabilities of planning production in Teamcenter. Highlighting the configurable UI we call Dynamic Framework, Vodela showed us how users can gain efficiencies by configuring their desktop to show just the information they need for the task at hand. Diving further into enterprise bill of process, which Alan Baumgartner from Ford spoke about yesterday, showed the power of MPP to handle the complexity of global production planning. Then we got a glimpse into the new area of Shop Floor Planning. Our direction here is to synchronize central office manufacturing engineering more tightly with shop floor operations. Stay tuned.
Next, Kevin Thompson of General Electric walked the audience through how GE’s Engineering Tools Center of Excellence has leveraged the power of their Teamcenter infrastructure to develop standards-based engineering and manufacturing change management. He spoke of the challenges GE was having with multiple plants managing their own workflows for change and the inability to connect manufacturing issues to engineering changes. Leveraging workflow and change management, they’ve developed a standard process to capture issues and problem reports when and where they happen, package the information needed to address the change and route it to the responsible organization. From engineering changes to manufacturing documentation, the process is virtually automated and fully in control.
Finally, Connell Gallagher, President of Cortona3D, closed out the AM track with a comprehensive view of the Cortona3D integration with Teamcenter. The rich information environment of Teamcenter, including bills of material, bills of process, tooling and of course product, combined with the inherent data management capabilities such as effectivity, drives considerable efficiencies, according to Connell. The Cortona3D Rapid Author application can read all this information through PLM XML to quickly author textual and visual work instructions. The flexibility is there to filter content to make sure your only sharing the information needed making it easy to control who gets what information. This is especially valuable for outsourced components and things like ITAR compliance.
I’ve had discussions with several people yesterday and today and one theme in common is coming out; once the manufacturing people start getting access to the Tecnomatix tools, they quickly realize the value and start to demand more!
More to come.
