Collaboration - Apriso

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UGS’ Tecnomatix is one of
the key solutions in
Volkswagen’s virtual vehicle
program and is helping VW
reduce development time,
increase product and process
quality, and increase
communication of product
and process data between
departments, plants and
external engineering
partners. A VW
representative explains “The
collaborative environment
helps us to coordinate with
our engineering partners
and suppliers. We are now
able to digitally plan and
simulate production
processes, balance lines and
optimise throughput very
early in the preparation of
production, and we can store
manufacturing processes
that can be re-used on the
next car program”.
Source: UGS (www.ugs.
com/about_us/success/
volkswagen.shtml)
Collaborative Environments in Design
and Engineering continued
UGS (www.ugs.com)
UGS is a major global product lifecycle management (PLM) vendor and provides solutions for creation,
sharing, management and use of both product information and the associated manufacturing process
information. Open technologies and an open business philosophy are important focus points for UGS,
including:
• Open business model, leveraging standard, open components;
• Open data model, ensuring interoperability;
• Open architecture, providing integration;
• Open applications, for automation and customisation;
Open communities for innovation, promoting partner and customer communities.
•
Originally, users of UGS applications were designers and engineers, but UGS has extended the use of
product data across the enterprise, and to other phases of the product lifecycle, and now serves many
other categories of user.
UGS’ Teamcenter supports collaboration by giving simultaneous access to shared data, and, when
required, enforces access control, update procedures, and authorisation processes. By combining change
management and shared access, UGS enures that distributed multi-functional teams, working on projects
of all sizes, can communicate and collaborate.
One area of Teamcenter development has been to integrate support for less formal, ad-hoc, spontaneous
collaboration between people inside a team and across teams. This type of collaboration is used to discuss
and develop ideas, and to resolve issues. Users can instantly create a collaborative session in which they
access relevant data from the controlled environment, share free format ideas including data from other
sources, then make decisions. This online support for immediate collaboration is particularly valuable for
people at different sites, for example:
• Same company, different locations;
• Multiple companies;
Temporary location at customer site – for example, installation and service personnel.
•
In deploying capabilities for spontaneous collaboration, UGS has confirmed that users should plan for
cultural as well as technological change. Then the new techniques bring out information, knowledge, and
creativity that is not usually captured by the formal processes of a company. This emergence of new ideas
is sometimes called “ideation”, and the results can be discussed and managed. It may be new information
rather than new concepts that keep the project moving. For example, a manufacturing engineer involved
in a spontaneous collaboration may share a personal spreadsheet that defines actual tolerances achieved
using certain procedures. Or a designer may remember “…we had a similar issue three years ago, we
solved it with a local increase in the material thickness…”.
LEADING EDGE COLL ABORATIVE ENVIRONMENTS IN DISCRETE MANUFACTURING INDUSTRIES