Deploying the power of CAD and PLM to improve the product development lifecycle
As we continue along the digital transformation journey, the key to success is managing the flow of information to allow internal and external partners to benefit from the power of digital solutions. One area that is particularly important is in the field of product design, and here CAD and PLM have a crucial role. In this PTC Talk, guest speaker, Ankush Kokas, Project Manager of R&D Hardware at ideaForge, discussed how they are overcoming the top three challenges of product design using PTC products.
What are the challenges in managing the product design process?
ideaForge is the pioneer and the pre-eminent market leader in the Indian unmanned aircraft systems or drone market. It has the largest operational deployment of indigenous UAVs across India, with an ideaForge-manufactured drone taking off every five minutes for surveillance and mapping on average. Its customers have completed over 300,000 flights using our UAVs. Its craft is equipped with industry-leading specifications and capabilities. The company’s design and technological ability to invent, design and deliver customer-centric offerings allows it to design, develop, engineer, and manufacture its UAVs in-house with control over performance, reliability, and autonomy.
Like any other organization, ideaForge has some principles under which it works. They aim to remain a market leader and are striving to reduce the product development lifecycle as part of that strategy. To achieve this, it faces three primary challenges achieving a faster design cycle, facilitating better internal and external collaboration, and ensuring data security.
How to reduce time to market
It all begins with the first challenge, reducing the product development lifecycle. The product development process follows the traditional design loop of requirements, design, procurement, prototyping, validation, testing, review, and release. A typical cycle takes roughly two weeks to complete and then two more weeks for each other cycle. So, for example, if a product must go through three design cycles, that is six weeks, and management cannot wait that long because the pressure is on from competitors, who will bring a competing drone to market by then.
Achieving this requires both CAD to manage the design and PLM to manage the information workflows. It is not just the products in Creo for CAD and Windchill for PLM that are crucial to this process, but access to the right resource and training to expedite the design cycle. The PTC products help ideaForge design and collaborate faster, but once the software is in place, the biggest hurdle is the training. This requirement is met by PTC associates and partners that deliver training on the user interface through a deep dive into the products or modules they are using, along with a program of continuous learning. Deploying, utilizing, and understanding the correct tools and techniques is crucial in reducing the design cycle for ideaForge.
What are the steps to improve collaboration in product development?
It is difficult to collaborate and to inform the changes, not just between departments but also between the teams, without a CAD and PLM tool. This is where PLM comes to the fore. How are other stakeholders notified whenever one team changes the design of part of the product, such as the battery? Two teams are involved in battery design – the battery itself and the packaging. If the design team changes the configuration that affects the length of the battery, how is this communicated to the packaging team? This must happen without having multiple discussions, meetings, and sharing of the CAD files via shared means, like in a shared drive, because it is often difficult to track those changes. There is no single source of truth, and deciding what the latest version always causes confusion.
With PLM in place, this crucial single source of truth is established. Both teams are provided with constant updates; there is no requirement for separate meetings to collaborate or to send information via email. Whenever the models are modified, they are saved in PLM; the changes are made in Creo and recorded in Windchill, and immediately, the changes are visible to the next team in the digital mock-up.
It is not just with a team that collaboration is improved but between groups. Once a drone design and development have been completed and released to production, other teams, for example, the marketing team, must start acting. The marketing team needs to start building their marketing collaterals, flyers, and videos and upload all the information in the social media plan for the events. But how does the marketing team know when to start these activities? In PLM, once one stage of product development is completed, the marketing team will be informed and can start their activities.
How to ensure data security
The third and most crucial challenge faced was data security. As the market leader, the focus was on ideaForge and its developments. According to Kokas, the company feared that moving the CAD and PLM to the Cloud presented opportunities for competitors to steal that data. He explained that convincing his superiors that the Cloud was the right place was a tough call.
The multi-layer security and the multi-layer architecture of PLM gave ideaForge that confidence. Data encryption is high, and when data is transferred from the local machine to the server, that encryption makes stealing the data useless. If somebody does manage to steal the encrypted data, they just see the file and cannot make any sense of it. That gave us reasonable confidence that Cloud is the right place to keep our data safe.
Another advantage is that PLM servers are designed in such a way that they allow users to scale up as the organization grows. When future products are brought to market, the multi-level architecture can scale up as ideaForge grows in a safe environment.