Introduction

During our various customer engagements, we saw that many of our customers and prospects are still suffering from working in data silos, and there are numerous file-based integrations between various business systems.  Our mission and opportunity is to help them transition to working within a Value Network, leveraging the Virtual Twin Experience thanks to a highly integrated and intertwined data model that spans across the full range of disciplines supported by the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform.

As you probably have observed, more and more products that are developed today are configurable so that customers can customize the product to their needs and budget.

Manufacturing Engineers need to take into account these different configurations when creating related MBOMs and process plans.

Configuration management functionality enables you to define variation within a product without completely duplicating the entire product structure.  You only create additional content for those items related to the specific “variant” of the product you are focusing on.  In addition, as the product definition evolves over time, Configuration management functionality enables you to incrementally update the product structure and trace the changes introduced at specific points in time or “evolution”.

One key concept to understand before we go further is the notion of a “Configured Structure”.

A Configured structure is:

• Any Data Structure (system, engineering, manufacturing…) where we define an effectivity on the instance between the parent node and the child node.
• The effectivity is a logical expression (including operators like AND, OR, NOT, …) using the elements from the Configuration Dictionary and defining under which condition a child belongs to a given configuration
• When filtering the structure, child nodes will be displayed only if the elements from the Configuration dictionary that have been selected in the filter criteria are validated in the effectivity logical expression

When we talk about EBOM or MBOM at 150%, we mean that such structures are configured structures that are not being filtered.  A “100%” structure is a configured structure which is being filtered to produce a precise result.

We also identify two axes for Configuration Management:

• Evolution: related to changes which occur over “time”, where the units of time may literally be based on calendar dates, or may be based on discrete units produced or based on milestones.
• Variant: used to define diversity within the product definition, typically to address varying customer demands for functional content within the product.

Example:

• The content of a Configured Structure may vary based on some combination of diversity of “Variant” criteria, as well as based on some ongoing change activity over time or “Evolution”.
  
• A Car may have a “basic” or “deluxe” Configuration where certain parts also evolve over time based on design improvements which are introduced periodically.

Based on the previous definitions, we can use a modular approach. To understand let’s consider an aircraft as a system of systems. A system would be called a module and each system manages its own baselines through a tree. All interfaces between these systems are identified.

Moving from the old paradigm of Revision based management to configured structures can lead to many challenges:

• Train your user about this new way of working showing the benefit of Configured Structures;
• Align engineering and manufacturing about the modules and levels of configuration in order to simplify the End to End management;
• Take into account the Planning / Execution / MRP systems especially when they do not support configured structures:
  • MRP Impact: if your MRP doesn’t support configured structures, the benefit can be close to zero due to the complexity of the required system integration between 3DEXPERIENCE and MRP
  • Planning / Execution: in this  case we can simply manage one process per configuration (as the Work Order will be generated with the same criteria) and limit the integration issues, but keeping the benefit of the usage of configured structures

Benefits: Why use 3DEXPERIENCE?

First of all, it’s important to understand that the main benefit of the usage of Configured Structures is mainly related to the possibility to introduce changes only once and became more important when we have a large amount of common assembly instances.

As such, management can be complex and it is important to have the right tools. 3DEXPERIENCE provides the following benefits:

• Common dictionary shared across disciplines (systems, engineering, manufacturing)
• Flexibility to adapt predefined configuration to customers’ needs in a easiest way
• Maximize reuse across predefined configurations
• Maintaining all variations within a single configured structure enables on-time and accurate delivery of product variants to market.

But, as already indicated in our first post, the 3DEXPERIENCE provides a collaboration platform to simplify the concurrent work between engineering and manufacturing. That means design engineers will start the study of a new variant / evolution while manufacturing engineers are still optimizing the previous one.

Other scenarios can be anticipated in the virtual world to consider the possible impact of a new variant/evolution example of tooling analysis impact for a new design solution.

If you want to see other examples of how to reduce Manufacturing Preparation Lead Time, look on tthe list of posts we are publishing.

For further clarification, do not hesitate to comments or ask us directly.

Thanks to @DB ​​​​​​​and @NY ​​​​​​​for their contribution.