An increased competition on the product development market pushes the industry to continually improve product quality and reduce product cost. There is also a trend towards considering a products life cycle aspects including environmental sustainability. The manufacturing process is a major cost driver in the product life cycle; hence, there are many initiatives to improve manufacturability and reduce production cost. Learning from earlier projects is essential to avoid recurrence of problems and is generally realized through use of concurrent engineering and design for manufacturing (DFM). Other research provides general DFM principles which state detailed guidelines for how different geometries combined with different manufacturing processes affect component quality and cost. The real competitive edge lies however in the development and application of company specific DFM principles that are based on manufacturing experiences. To do so requires an overview of and access to the collected manufacturing experiences. The aim of this paper is to point out key enablers for efficient reuse of manufacturing experience, which is considered to contribute to lower product cost and higher product quality. A study performed at an automotive and at an aerospace engine manufacturer pointed out the apparent need and lack of reuse of manufacturing experiences in product development. Applications supporting reuse of manufacturing experience through embedded DFM knowledge in designer's CAD system were found in the literature. However the issue of integrating these applications with the enterprise environment, in order to capitalize on existing sources of manufacturing experience, is not addressed in a wider extent. A concept for this integration, applying a service oriented PLM architecture and using the standard PLM Services 2.0 provided by Object Management Group, was proposed. In addition, a graphical user interface visualizing the manufacturing experience in as well a design as manufacturing process and activity context, was proposed. The validation of these concepts was done through interviews and workshops. The conclusions are that visualization of manufacturing experiences in a process and activity context provides improved understanding of how the experiences relate to each process and activity history and that a key enabler for integration is the use of standard architectures and neutral formats.
Godkänd; 2009; 20090908 (petand)