DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

Consider the single speed bicycle – it’s a seemingly complex arrangement of steel tubes, mechanical linkages, spoken wheels, gearing, pneumatic types, valves, rubber tyres and bearings. but when time optimises that combination, you reach something that provides transportation for millions, cheaply and efficiently.

I thought I’d start off with this first in my series of Elegance posts, as it’s fresh off the wire and brand new and all shiny. If you look at Siemens’ product portfolio, there’s an interesting dynamic. Solid Edge gains all of the marketing noise, all of the marketing push – after all, it’s the company’s mainstream offering to market. But behind this, there’s always NX, something I personally find much more appealing and interesting. Why?

Because it’s one of those systems that’s been around for so long that it does almost everything you could ever imagine. What Siemens are facing is the simple fact that while NX’s power lies in its long history, it’s problems also find their root cause in the same.

That said, there’s been a concerted effort that predates the Siemens acquisition, to bring NX up to speed. The work done on the user interface in NX2 (I think) has been progressed over the last four or five years and the system looks and feels fresh, but with all that technology behind it that allows you to define some very complex products. NX users spread across a huge range of industry sectors, but product complexity (in terms of assembly size), process complexity (in terms of development and manufacture) and form complexity (in terms of the shapes the users are defining) seem to unit them.

The big news for the NX 7.0 release is split into two areas. Of course, there’s extension of the Synchronous Technology that has been the big headline grabber for Siemens PLM over the past two years. Within NX, Sync Tech’s impact has been much lower key when you look at the grand scheme of things – much of this is down to the fact that with NX, you don’t have the bifurcating decision to go history-based or non-history-based as you do within Edge. NX is more refined and more flexible than that.

Yes, you can completely blow the history away or you can choose to use those more freeform modelling tools as part of a history-based part, recording each action, so its entirely traceable, repeatable and editable (this, I suspect, is how Edge will end up too – but that’s purely speculation). That’s a good example of this elegance we’re talking about. Sync tech isn’t a panacea for everything. It’s a technology that is best suited to solving specific design or more accurately, geometry creation and editing problems. Whether that’s down to working with dumb native data or working with highly complex feature-based parts, where you need to execute a seemingly small tweak, but doing so will require huge amounts of rework.

Sync Tech aside, the thing I’m most fascinated by is the introduction of HD3D or to give it its full moniker, High Definition 3D and this is a truly elegant solution – not necessarily because it’s new technology (which it isn’t) but the manner in which the various component parts have been put together and implemented to solve a very complex issue relating to buried data (both geometric and metadata) and issue resolution workflow. Let’s look at those two very quickly.

Visual Reporting: Take the average design and engineering organisation that’s fully adopted both 3D design and PLM. Within those two technologies you now have the ability to fully document a product. Not only it’s form and function, but the full gamut of information that relates to its development and its manufacture and further into its use lifecycle and eventual retirement. In short, that’s a crap lot of data. The problem is that unless you have a very intimate knowledge of where that data is, who created it and what you’re actually looking for, it’s very hard to get an idea of where a product is at. the 3D datasets contain the form, then these are linked to the metadata attached to each part, sub-assembly, sub-system in the form of documents, text, spreadsheets, pdfs etc etc etc. and to find both, you need, typically, to use two different systems – in the case of Siemens, that’s NX (or a 3D viewing technology) and Teamcenter and despite all of their best intentions, the two don’t exactly work together.

Here a visual report has been created based on weight, using customised ranges to define different categories of parts and sub-systems.

What HD3D does is provide a framework that’s delivered in both NX and Teamcenter, that allows you to use the graphically rich nature of 3D data to gain access to the metadata that’s underneath it, to explore and visualise that data, delve into details where needed and to filter it to gain the information you need. Whether that’s a peep at where development efforts are concentrating (by filtering and visualising parts or sub-assemblies under work – in itself derived from change status), what parts are being outsourced, where costs or weight are found (by filtering for parts within specific cost or mass ranges).

Customisable searches and filters allow you to find the information you want and filter out that you don’t need. Here, the Visual Reporting allows you to colour code the assembly by supplier, while the dialog shows you more detail.

What Siemens has done is take its experience with the JT format (for lightweight viewing and data manipulation), some of the technology it’s had for large scale visualisation and its master of data management with Teamcenter and build a technology that allows this to be done visually, efficiently and very cleanly indeed. Searches can be saved (there are presets delivered), but its possible to create custom searches and reports based on whatever search criteria you require. This allows you to load up, gain an idea of where things are at, based on your focus areas, then get to work. it’s a combination of some quite complex technologies that have been reworked into a very slick environment. One thing that’s key is just that: getting on with the job. This is the other focus for this first HD3D release.

Issue Management: When you have highly complex products and geographically dispersed and outsourced input into the development of those products, you have serious issues with data management. Not in terms of storing them within a database, but rather around the workflow relating to ensure that data is conforming to company requirements, whether thats in terms of geometry quality, ensuring compliance with company, customer or international standards. What NX 7.0 introduces is a workflow, backed up with better use of existing technology, to solve these types of issues. Siemens has, for sometime, had the NX Check Mate product. This has performed just these types of checks for a while. What Siemens has done is integrate these checks into the HD3D environment. you load up the assembly, run the checks and get back a very visual list of issues that it finds. The combination of visualisation tools and reporting allow you to work through those issues, find the problems that need to be addressed (whether that’s small faces that don’t match FEA requirements or PMI formatting issues doesn’t really matter).
It’s done very interactively and very efficiently.

The issue management tools built into HD3D inspect your product models, find potential problems and present them in a graphically rich environment that not only presents the information, but allows you to very quickly gain an understanding of the context in which they occur

What’s impressive from my perspective is that there are then tools available to move these issues you discover into a workflow to resolve them and progress the project forward. Essentially, an issue is identified through automated checks, you assigning it to the person or team responsible for its resolution and that then kicks off a change request (handled by Teamcenter) to progress and resolve it.

The CoverFlow style issue browser (top right) allows you to flick through issues, explore further. Clicking a part or issue tag (shown in a small red icon with a white cross) brings up further details.

This is an initial release but the promise it holds is phenomenal. None of this technology is new. Check-Mate, JT, Teamcenter and NX itself are existing technologies that have been combined, rationalised and delivered to create a solution to real engineering problems. Data burial and retrieval is a constant problem for many organizations. The data is there, but how you get at it is anyone’s guess. By providing a combination of rich graphical visualization backed up with clean efficient search tools, you can get the information you want, almost instantly. On the flip-side the issue management and resolution tools again do the same, take existing tools and redeploy them to create an environment where fundamental bottlenecks can be first identified, but then progressed through to resolution in a fully traceable environment.

To my mind, it’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about with this Elegance idea. Stay tuned for the next part, when we look at the seemingly complex world of rules-based design automation and how DriveWorks Solo is changing how it’s done.