Renishaw uses PLM from Siemens to grow their business

Martin Rudnicki, the corporate PLM Manager from Renishaw started the morning off with a talk on how they have built their business through a strong PLM foundation.  Renishaw’s first product was a touch trigger probe that allowed manufacturers to check product quality without removing the product from the production line.

 

Renishaw’s strategy has been to focus on successive generations of more functional solutions – adding more incremental capabilities to each product line and then at some point also putting resources behind developing the next generation of product.  A balance between incremental and disruptive innovation.  Teamcenter is one of their three core IT systems that enables their innovation process, both for product and manufacturing process innovation.

 

The continual drive for innovation has caused a number of operational pressures:

• rapid growth in R&D staff and their dependence on design tools


• system design that requires tight integration between electrical and mechanical


• Knowledge sharing


• Location of deign and manufacturing in one site

They do have a formal one page product development process which fits on a single page.  For Renishaw, PLM creates the opportunity for a centralized digital environment for engineering and manufacturing, an open system that manages all product data (not just CAD), a managed check in and check out process to restrict access to WIP data, automated version control, workflow, part & document classification, and the ability to give access to non-designers.  Today Renishaw has more than 80 seats of NX CAD and __ seats of Teamcenter.  The benefits they have seen from their PLM system include real time data access, design efficiency and ease of deployment.  For all the great results they aren’t sitting still.  A few specific projects they are working on now include enterprise visibility through web access, unified BOM management for electrical, mechanical AND software, implementation of global search and classification, and MRP integration.

Martin concluded by sharing the learnings they have had in the past 4 years.  He spoke about making sure to take advantage of the opportunity to re-look at your processes before you start to define what you want your PLM system to look like.

PLM is just as much about people and process as it is about technology

A really good overview of what it takes to get value from a system.