Layout planning for the medium-sized manufacturer

Medium-sized companies can benefit from digital manufacturing technologies for layout planning to address the requirements of product variance and manufacturing system complexity.

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This is the second in a series of blogs where we discuss the value of line planning in industry today and the potential benefits that can be realized by medium-sized companies utilizing Digital Manufacturing solutions for this purpose.
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Following up on our first blog post for overall line planning challenges, we remain focused on:

• Market uncertainties
• Ongoing improvement initiatives
• Rapidly growing portfolios
• Increasing system complexity
• Cost
• Visualization

When handling high product variance and manufacturing system complexity, you need to successfully plan the layout of production lines to fit different scenarios and options while reserving space and saving cost.

With each proposed layout, you are required to get buy-in from stakeholders, including management, customers, and other departments in your own organization. There is a need for a crisp and persuasive presentation. Of course, after the buy-in, it is preferred that the effort invested in the layout is not a throw-away, but that it can be used for the detailed design itself.

With these challenges in mind, do any of these statements sound familiar?

• Your customers and decision makers are tired of dull, difficult to read 2D layouts.
• You often wonder how to handle more projects in less time.
• Creating 3D content for downstream simulation models is a lot of effort.

What if you could quickly design and visualize layouts of production lines? What if your layout would lay the foundation for detailed design, specifying each production step down to managing a single manufacturing resource, such as a machine, robot or fixture? What if you could quickly create visual reports to queries about your layout, color coding the required equipment by vendor, or highlighting in red all long-lead items?

Enter Line Designer

Line Designer is a desktop solution from Siemens Digital Industries Software for layout planning, an integral part of the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio of digital manufacturing solutions for line planning, so you can continue to grow as your business grows.

Watch this video to see Line Designer in action:

Line Designer is commonly used for:

• New layouts
• Decision making support
• Layout updates referencing as-built laser scans
• Installation drawings

Line Designer offers:

• Easy to use tools
• Efficient layout creation through reuse of models and equipment
• Persuasive and clear presentation through use of 3D models seamlessly integrated with their 2D counterparts

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Learn more about > Line Designer.
Locate your local reseller using the > Siemens partner finder.

Contributors: Moshe Schwimmer, Noam Ribon