IEN: How much progress do you see toward integrating the different segments of product development -- design, engineering, manufacturing, supply chain?
Drust: Integration of these segments has made progress, but still faces numerous challenges -- not least, the complexity of change within the different segments. Product development-design is successfully changing to 3D from 2D, creating new integration issues of data size and file format standards. Just as 3D machining (CAM) has already had a major effect on QA approaches, so 3D will have major effects on the manufacturing and supply chain segments. For example, companies will want to leverage maximum value from their 3D data assets by reusing them downstream wherever productivity gains are available. Lattice3D's 3D compression technology and downstream applications are aimed to deliver exactly that value.
For success, 3D publishing needs to alleviate problems with proprietary CAD formats as well as the file-size problems that 3D brings. Simply put, major 3D assemblies are usually extra-large files, which are difficult to handle. Most CAD formats are proprietary and unable to be shared with non-CAD users. 3D publishing tools such as those from Lattice3D solve these problems and deliver tools that enable fast creation of manuals, assembly instructions, process instructions, and websites. Providing 3D data, and the applications to use it, is key to integration of product development, engineering, manufacturing, and the supply chain.
IEN: How can/will collaborative manufacturing management strategies address problems related to integrating design with the industrial enterprise?
Drust: Different types of suppliers are approaching the problem with solutions grown from their own particular focus -- for example, CAD vendors developing into PLM from a CAD point of view, ERP vendors developing PLM applications from an ERP point of view. 3D publishing tools, a rapidly growing industry, provide the key that opens integration of design, collaboration, and the manufacturing enterprise. These areas have remained locked in disparate systems, using proprietary file formats and design systems, without any real method to be able to reuse design data wherever it is needed. Lattice's 3D publishing tools use a form of XML called XVL, which brings the design data into a highly compressed (typically 98+%) common format without losing the intelligence of the design. Once in XVL, the 2D and 3D data can be viewed, seen, used, and exploited by all authorized users. Data can be used in something as simple as a printed help manual, an online interactive assembly instruction, through to complex, automated parts lists, bills of materials, and online procurement systems.
IEN: Will Product Lifecycle Management play an increased role in design? Why/Why not?
Drust: Yes. Product Lifecycle Management is really about providing the 3D data wherever it can enable productivity improvements. Essentially, PLM is designed to enable the use, reuse, repurposing, and leveraging of design data from beginning to end, from the birth of a product to its obsolescence. Once the 3D data and applications to use it are available downstream, users will first apply it to automating their own functions (e.g. procurement using 3D views of exploded parts and individual components), then they will use it to efficiently and effectively provide feedback to the design segment (e.g. the product leaks here, please redesign this component - xxx material could handle the temperature gradient . . .). Lattice3D solutions are being recognized as an obvious way to enable the use of 3D data anywhere and it is therefore gaining acceptance as a serious PLM tool (e.g. recently Lattice3D agreed on an alliance with Dassault Systems to enable the use of XVL within the company's CAD and PLM implementations).
