Tecnomatix Digital Manufacturing Symposium – 2012 Indianapolis
Indianapolis has changed. The last time I was in this city was too many years ago… growing-up in a small Illinois town about 20 minutes from the Indiana border. It has an amazing city-center with lots to do which provided a great backdrop for this year’s DM Symposium.
Only one day long, it was a whirlwind of activity. As much as I wanted to provide a recap of the entire day, I could only spend concentrated time in our customer presentations. So here’s what went on.
After a welcome from Jeff Miller our Americas Zone Marketing Director, Jon Riley, VP of Digital Manufacturing for NCMS (National Center for Manufacturing Sciences), provided eye-opening statistics on the shift of manufacturing R&D from large, multi-national OEMs to the SMB market. In fact, as of 2010, mid-sized manufacturers were responsible for 72% of manufacturing R&D spend in the U.S. This astounding shift has generated the need for digital manufacturing tools for the “missing middle”, as the NCMS organization has coined it. Jon’s organization is all about making this technology available through collaborative research, outreach and access through new innovation centers.
Next we heard from Dan Rediger and Josh Simons from Rolls-Royce. These gentlemen have been in the middle of the rollout of a Teamcenter to Simatic integration that is currently deployed in at least two Rolls-Royce plants. This integration eliminates multiple legacy systems and greatly improves productivity across several manufacturing disciplines by driving standard processes through the manufacturing engineering community, directly to the shop floor. They said that first-time build issues on a specific engine program had been reduced by 30%. Because of this integration, Rolls-Royce is now faster to quality than ever before.
Our next customer was Alan Baumgartner, Technical Lead for Ford’s Virtual Manufacturing organization. Alan described the complexity of manufacturing to meet the demand of global consumers and how Ford attacks this complexity with what he called; “Standards Driven Product and Process Convergence”. Leveraging Teamcenter manufacturing solutions, Ford has set standard processes for global vehicle programs enabling efficiencies to plan and optimize mixed model and cross plant production modes while comprehending the details necessary to leverage plant-specific requirements. Ford is mastering global production complexity.
Finally, we had a very interesting presentation from Dave Anderson from Spirit AeroSystems. Dave has been a pioneer on the development and deployment of dimensional management processes at Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems since its adoption into the aerospace industry in 1992. Dave described how Spirit is using dimensional management and the Siemens PLM Software solution Variation Analysis, to drive out cost and increase quality in production. Dave was able to show the impact of design choices on the cost of production and described how dimensional management helps you deliver reliable build processes, predictable build flow times and significantly reduce scrap, rework and repair.
This was only the morning portion of the day. The afternoon sessions kicked-off with a strategic direction update from Zvi Feuer, EVP of Manufacturing Engineering Solutions. From there we broke-out into three industry tracks: Auto, Aero & Machinery, covering multiple topics in more detail.
As always, it couldn’t be done without great customers, so hats-off to those who came and made this year’s DM Symposium a resounding success!
