PLM (Product Lifecycle Management)
I PLM gestiscono i dati relativi al prodotto, durante l’intero ciclo di vita dello stesso
The documents mainly issued from the technical area to the production departments are the drawings of components and assemblies of product groups or subsystems.
The use of technical information is not always easy, and designers are often involved in their interpretations and in supplementing missing information.
Work that is labor intensive that is necessary to enable production to have the necessary documentation to build and assemble the product.
When working in agile mode in hardware product development the cross functional team including people from production, time and methods, and purchasing and those involved in development.
When integrating the needs of design with those of construction, assembly, purchasing, budgeting, time and methods, and more, it is necessary to make information sharing fast and sustainable.
The most effective solution is to share CAD information in 3D format as soon as it has the consistency to be shared.
By doing so, a product under development can be analyzed and studied by people in the cross functional team without requiring continuous sharing meetings.
Thus, the laborious 2D tables, which would have to be updated continuously anyway, are no longer needed.
And here a small technical problem arises, to consult 3D CAD geometries we need to make them usable even for those who do not have a powerful workstation.
In other words, native CAD information must be converted to much lighter and easier CAD formats.
PLM systems manage product data, throughout the product lifecycle (Product Lifecycle Management).
Product Lifecycle Management: Il gestionale, legato al prodotto, dei lavoratori della conoscenza.
PLM is actually the product-related knowledge worker management system, and they contain information such as, CAD models, drawings, BOMs, data sheets, electrical and/or electronic schematics, and much other information.
All of this is supported by databases that allow information to be searched.
PLM systems originate as environments for managing native CAD information through integration modules with different CAD applications (CAD Integration).
PLMs are then required to handle a multiplicity of technical information in addition to CAD information.
The interfaces of these systems, born for the engineering world, are generally unfriendly and heavy for use outside the engineering area.
In my latest work experience and my fourth PLM project faced, we made the choice with my teams to employ 2 tools:
- A Technical PLM, with native CAD Integration, for the various CADs employed by the company. This PLM intended for about 150 technicians who produce the CAD information.
- A Distribution PLM integrated with the Technical PLM and the CAD information distribution engine read to about 1000 people.
Within this Distribution PLM is included all the additional information that is produced around the product:
- Photo reports
- Movies
- Data sheets of products or their components.
- Papers related to both computational and experimental engineering verifications
- Test sheets
- etc..
A dedicated Server makes 2D and 3D CAD information available on any computer device with a Web browser.
This deployment mode allows 3D models of industrial machinery to be opened in a few seconds compared to a few minutes to open the same information in native CAD format.
It is thus possible for any technician to make sections and take measurements, making the workshop very autonomous.
In this way, workshop technicians become generators of large amounts of information, which are integrated with that produced by designers.
The amount of this information is of the same order of magnitude as that of CAD drawings.
Thus we have in “team” people from the offices, the shop floor, and the document PLM creating and sharing product knowledge, without unnecessary redundancy.
