It seems safe to say that the two greatest revolutions in the modern means of production — CAD-based collective creativity and additive manufacturing — came from the industry requirement of getting a product to market faster. That is why PLM (Product Life-Cycle Management) Systems were originally developed by American Motors Corporation in 1985, allowing the company to drastically abate costs by centralizing and streamlining all information on a product’s development. Now, PLM sees a product all the way through its digital, rapid prototyping, additive manufacturing phases and beyond.
This quest for speed is further evolving with the new standalone system introduced by CADENAS PARTSolutions at Siemens PLM World, that will allow engineers to rapidly manage the standard parts in their projects to be able to spend more time on value-added complex designs. The concept behind it is simple: the only thing faster than rapid prototyping is no prototyping, at least for those parts that do not require it.
The PARTSolutions PLM was shown to integrate into a PLM system such as Siemens Teamcenter, giving engineers the possibility of searching for standard parts such as springs, cylinders, casters, cable trays, grippers, valves, pumps, lighting, electronics and so on. They simply select it in the Online Product Configurator, define all the variables and get the 3D model to integrate into the design.
“PARTsolutions SPM platform beefs-up the power of your organization’s PLM system,” said Tim Thomas, CEO of CADENAS PARTsolutions. “Our powerful classification capabilities ensure the ‘parts vault’ is clean and accurate, removing duplicates and organizing components in a much more intuitive way. Once the ‘vault’ is clean, our system confirms the accuracy of parts for designers to choose from in the future, while adding powerful capabilities to search standard parts and speed up their specification process. Engineers won’t have to waste time hunting for the right part, they can quickly find what they need, drop it in their design and move on, that’s value-added design!”
By implementing the CADENAS PART platform into the PLM cycle, engineers will have access to a simple interface to find, visualize in full 3D, reduce, manage internal standard parts (which basically means those parts that are all the same in any industrial design project and thus do not need to be developed internally) form a list of more than 600 certified manufacturer catalogues. The system automatically avoids duplicates by “checking the parts in” to the main PLM system (such as Siemen’s Teamcenter PLM in this case).
From a non-engineer point of view, the systems seems to me like an engineer’s wonderland, where just by assembling the many different components who knows how many incredible industrial products might come out. The truth of the matter is, though, that even in a world of more and more automated, digital, robotic manufacturing, the real added value remains the human creative work that can make standard products evolve into something new. And this seems to be exactly what the PARTSolutions platform is built to support.
Great stuff. Seems like a simple but brilliant idea. Is there a case study of its actual usage that you could share?