CHALLENGE
A world-leading equipment manufacturer in the aerospace and defense industry found that increasing activity and production ramp-up were intensifying the pressure on its quality management processes. The company needed a way to monitor critical resources and process-plan maturity, so it could measure and manage performance and continue to ensure the high quality its customers expect.
SOLUTION
The company chose NETVIBES data science solutions to help tackle these productivity and quality challenges. Manufacturing Engineering Intelligence was selected to enhance factory performance and operations planning. In addition, BOM Intelligence made accurate data accessible across previously siloed departments and processes.
BENEFITS
NETVIBES has enabled an intelligent and accurate bill of materials (BOM) across various enterprise disciplines, helping the company to achieve its quality excellence targets in less time. Meanwhile, harmonized manufacturing and enterprise resource planning (ERP) data has helped to enhance factory productivity through better resource management and operations planning. End-to-end traceability makes it easy to monitor projects, validate milestones and produce reports that meet quality and certification requirements.
Meeting Quantity with Quality
For over 100 years, a world-leading manufacturer has been creating and marketing equipment for civil and military aircraft, on its own and in partnership with others. Demand has continued to grow, causing the company to ramp up its industrial resources and production lines. But as activity increased, so did the pressure on vital quality management processes.
To expand manufacturing productivity while ensuring the highest quality, the company needed a holistic view of its critical resources and process-plan maturity. Any gap in the process plan – such as a missing step or work instruction, or disparity between the parts in the engineering and manufacturing BOMs – would impact quality and delay the product’s readiness for manufacture. But with different departments and processes using separate systems and data, it was difficult to see the complete picture.
Process planners and engineers needed all the relevant data at their fingertips so they could quickly identify and address any issues and optimization opportunities. This would also support them in measuring and managing performance against pertinent key performance indicators (KPIs).
The company chose the NETVIBES portfolio of data science solutions from Dassault Systèmes to help it achieve those goals.
An Intelligent BOM
Efficient, high-quality manufacture is built on an accurate BOM. But this wasn’t possible with the silos and lack of standardized data that existed between the company’s departments and suppliers. Data management was complex and difficult, bringing the risk of inaccuracies and costly delays. Crucially, the lack of visibility across this misaligned data could also cause shortages of the components needed to deliver an order, while unused parts were needlessly held in stock.
To prevent these problems, the company needed a detailed understanding of how each product’s engineering BOM (eBOM), manufacturing BOM (mBOM) and bill of process (BOP) align with each other. That meant dissolving silos and harmonizing data across design, engineering and manufacturing departments to create a coherent view of how the relevant parts and processes fit together – and how to resolve any issues if they don’t.
NETVIBES BOM Intelligence solution was chosen to achieve that goal. The solution uses advanced data consolidation, semantic analysis and data visualization to make BOM data visible to every stakeholder who needs it, in a way that is relevant to their role. Manufacturing engineers can create report tables that provide a clear picture of BOM reconciliation progress, including 3D views to show which parts are aligned between the eBOM and mBOM and reveal in detail any parts that have not been implemented. When the engineer makes a change, the BOM reconciliation is recalculated automatically to make sure it’s always up to date.
Stakeholders across the organization can access relevant BOM data, from engineering to manufacturing, with a clear view of key metrics. This has enabled the company to guarantee more accurate BOM consumption and validation, helping it reach its target of quality excellence with better-performing BOMs and fewer development hours.
This solution strengthens the digital thread between engineering and manufacturing departments. It ensures that vital resources like manufacturing process plans and service parts lists are always in synch with the product definition and each other.
Head of Shopfloor Digital Method
Optimized Process Planning
Another goal for the company was to optimize the processes it used to manufacture its products – and that meant improving the way engineers planned those processes. If engineers could detect and address any planning issues early on, they would reduce the risk of issues like disrupted production schedules and missed capacity targets later. A full view of any relevant engineering data was the key to achieving that.
Enter Manufacturing Process Engineering Intelligence (MPEI), a solution that combines NETVIBES’ data management, analytics, visualization and search capabilities with DELMIA’s process and operational planning resources and ERP data.
MPEI draws together data from multiple applications and makes it easy to navigate, so users can quickly assess the cost, quality and maturity of each plan against KPIs. Manufacturing engineering and planning managers can quickly identify any gaps in the proposed process and the actions needed to fill them, as well as spotting opportunities to optimize the plan. For instance, if an item in the mBOM doesn’t have a process step or work instruction assigned, it is easy to collaborate on completing these elements so the project can move forward.
Addressing issues like these early in the planning process is much more efficient because it is easier and less costly to make changes at this stage. This enables the company to release complete, timely and high-quality process plans to the factory floor, smoothing the path to successful production.
Reliable Resources Management
Efficient planning and management of resources – the tools, machines and people involved in making the company’s products – is the other side of the quality and productivity coin. Smooth manufacturing can only be achieved if the right resources are made available every step of the way. A complete view of ERP data is essential to get it right.
The company is now able to combine and analyze manufacturing and ERP data for various processes. This empowers plant managers to review the maturity of areas like procurement, inventory and process planning through the lens of resources. By reviewing process maturity alongside areas like site capacity and skills ramp-up, managers can make sure they meet the finalized production plan with the right resources to carry it out.
Confident Certification
Better planning, resources and BOM management all contribute to ensuring the product’s quality, but one more key ingredient is needed: end-to-end accountability. This is especially important in a highly regulated industry like aerospace, where each product must satisfy a growing number of regulatory and certification requirements before it reaches the market.
Harmonizing data from different systems has allowed the company to create a digital thread that runs through its entire manufacturing engineering process. NETVIBES data analytics capabilities provide insights that support accurate decision-making, to help planning and manufacturing engineers get it right first time. This is enhanced by search capabilities that make it easy to find technical documentation and to identify the information needed for certification.
As a result, the company can ensure that all the characteristics and requirements for quality and certification are factored into the planning and manufacturing process. Real-time project monitoring, based on production part approval process standards, is used to validate milestones. It’s also easy to generate reports containing all the relevant information and transmit them to certification authorities.
In the aerospace and defense industry, quality and accountability are paramount. This company faced growing demand for its products, so it needed a way to optimize productivity while continuing to deliver the quality its customers expect. […] This helped create a solution that will support its continuing growth.
Morgan Zimmermann, CEO of Dassault Systèmes NETVIBES
A Data-Driven Future
By harmonizing its data and making it available with NETVIBES real-time analytics and visualization capabilities, the company has empowered itself to meet growing demand with greater productivity and the highest quality standards. Crucially, these capabilities are available to experts and non-experts alike, putting relevant information, analysis and actions in the hands of every decision-maker across the planning and manufacturing process.
At the heart of this achievement is the reduction of silos across the organization. Data management is much simpler, as disparate sources are connected and knowledge graphs provide a clear picture of data relationships. This has enabled the company to ensure the quality and consistency of the data that its product design and manufacturing processes are built on.
Better data is the basis for all the improvements the company has made – from enhancing the quality of its manufacturing ranges to rationalizing its production tools and equipment, reducing the time it takes to find technical documentation, and supporting excellent decision-making. And it will continue to support better productivity and quality assurance, whatever the future brings.
“In the aerospace and defense industry, quality and accountability are paramount,” said Morgan Zimmermann, CEO of Dassault Systèmes NETVIBES. “This company faced growing demand for its products, so it needed a way to optimize productivity while continuing to deliver the quality its customers expect. The organization’s people have a deep knowledge of its data and a desire to optimize the value it delivers, and this helped create a solution that will support its continuing growth.”
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Brand content creator on the NETVIBES Marketing team