Tecnomatix 9.1: Automotive Body-in-White (BIW) Planning on Teamcenter

What’s the big deal with Teamcenter here? The manufacturing engineers now can use the same environment as the product engineers. This enables the manufacturing engineers to get product updates immediately without data conversion.

In addition Teamcenter provides platform services like revisions, effectivity, and change or variants management. And not to forget the communication and collaboration capabilities which support global engineering and manufacturing.

Let’s take a look at the planning workflow and focus on weld points. They are used to hold the nearly 400 single parts of the car body together.





These weld points are sometimes defined by the product engineer or by a weld specialist. Sometimes the weld points are not in the CAD system, but delivered via a Microsoft Excel file including x-, y- and z-coordinates. How do you know which weld point is relevant for which part or better parts? You can use the new and automatic capability to connect welds and parts based on spatial proximity.

Sometimes it happens that weld points are missing or that additional ones are required. In this case you can use the weld point creation wizard which guides through the creation process and demands all relevant information.

If you would like to go on working in Excel, the Excel Live integration enables you to load the weld points in Excel. Now you can change them having the rules engine of Teamcenter in the background ensuring the consistency of the data.

 

Once the weld points and parts are connected, the manufacturing engineer goes on assigning the single parts to the robotics stations.

The next step is the creation or re-use of weld operations and assigning to stations. These operations are later assigned to the single robots. But before that, the manufacturing engineer chose the relevant weld points and assigns them to the operations. The extended manufacturing search capability helps to find these weld points, e.g. find all welds in a certain area or from a certain type.

 

Finally the definition of the right sequence of operations is done, so that the cycle time (or takt time) is utilized as good as possible.

Once the planning part is done, you can go on with the 3D planning and simulation by using Process Simulate. You can launch this directly out of Teamcenter. But that’s something for a different post to write about.

You want to know more? Take a look at the Tecnomatix 9.1 or the Robotics and Automation Planning page.