The majority of businesses aspire to achieve sustainability but often lack clarity on where to begin. Many perceive adopting sustainable practices as a daunting task, believing it necessitates a complete overhaul of their production processes to make a significant impact. However, let me assure you that this is not the case.
So, where should you start your journey towards creating more sustainable product design and manufacturing processes?
To genuinely embrace sustainability, focus on making design decisions at the outset. Designing for repair, reducing material usage, refurbishment, remanufacturing, recovery, reuse, and recycling is crucial. It requires a holistic approach that considers a product’s environmental impact throughout its lifecycle.
Over 80% of a product’s environmental impact stems from design decisions made early on.
Here are three ways design changes can drive sustainability:
Sustainability in Design for Dematerialization
Dematerialization, or material usage reduction, emerges as a crucial strategy for sustainability, aiming to reduce material consumption and weight without sacrificing strength and durability. Leveraging cutting-edge technologies like Generative Design, engineers can optimize designs to use only the necessary amount of material, tailored to specific loads and constraints of each application.
Creo Simulation Live offers a seamless platform for quickly assessing how different materials or reduced material usage affect design performance, enabling adjustments earlier in the design process.
Moreover, with solutions like Creo AMX, designers leverage additive manufacturing capabilities to build structures in the most efficient direction, generating automated supports, and showcasing the potential of lattice structures.
These innovations not only allow for a material reduction but pave the way for lighter, more sustainable products that maintain the required level of performance. As we continue to prioritize dematerialization in manufacturing, we edge closer to a future where sustainability and efficiency are seamlessly integrated into every aspect of product development.
Sustainability in Design for Waste Reduction
Designing for manufacturability and minimizing material waste, such as through minimal stock allowance, ensures efficient use of resources from the outset. By leveraging die casting for near-net shape production throughout the manufacturing process, material waste is significantly reduced to maximize material utilization and minimize scrap generation.
Additionally, utilizing numerically controlled (NC) strategies optimized for fast machining and lower energy consumption, such as high-speed machining (HSM) roughing and finishing, contributes to waste reduction and energy efficiency.
Moreover, designing for ease of service and assembly extends product lifespan and reduces the demand for new products. While some parts of a product may wear faster than others, creating products for easy disassembly eliminates waste because you do not have to throw away the entire product to extend the lifespan.
Accurate documentation of assembly and disassembly instructions empowers users to maintain and repair products, minimizing waste and promoting a more sustainable approach to product lifecycle management.
Sustainability in Design for Energy Efficiency
Engineers globally actively address questions such as, “Can we reduce noise and unneeded energy consumption in design?” and “Can we make our design more thermally efficient?” to pave the way for eco-friendly innovation.
Their goal is to pinpoint areas where energy is wasted, but don’t have the most efficient tools to accomplish that task. Modal analysis and thermal analysis enable more streamlined and environmentally conscious designs. Additionally, tools like Creo Flow Analysis optimizes flow efficiency to ensure that products operate with maximum efficiency, minimizing energy requirements without sacrificing performance.
Furthermore, selecting materials that demand less energy to manufacture and recycle adds another layer of sustainability to the design process and reduces the overall environmental impact from production to end-of-life disposal. Through these proactive measures, energy-efficient product design becomes a tangible pathway towards a more sustainable future.
Sustainable Design Solutions
Our suite of Creo design tools supports sustainable practices:
- Generative Design and Optimization: Refine and optimize designs for dematerialization and material reduction goals.
- Simulation and Behavioral Modeling: Analyze environmental impacts and optimize designs based on real-life use cases.
- Additive Manufacturing: Support lightweighting through lattice structures, reducing material consumption and energy requirements.
- Disassembly and Remanufacturing: Design for repair, refurbishment, and remanufacture, enhancing product lifecycle and minimizing waste.
Designing for sustainability benefits both the environment and businesses. Companies can significantly reduce their environmental footprint by considering dematerialization, disassembly, and behavioral modeling.
By partnering with EAC for solution identification and utilizing PTC’s comprehensive Creo design tools, companies can pave the way for a sustainable future while improving their bottom line. Let’s talk about how EAC can help you identify solutions to help your company embrace sustainable design practices today!
In today’s world, it’s not uncommon for companies to be rich in data but poor in insights. Despite having access to a wealth of information, organizations struggle to properly analyze performance and drive transformational improvements. This is where ThingWorx Digital Performance Management (DPM) steps in to bridge the gap.
This week in your factory, you’ve applied maximum effort, pouring countless hours into perfecting your product. As the work week ends, a feeling of slight disappointment remains.
Could you have accomplished more? Where did it go awry? You may not be able to find the answers on your own, leaving your factory inefficient and operating below its full potential.
If this is you, look no further. With the capabilities of Thingworx Digital Performance Management, you will unleash an untapped potential of data and boost your manufacturing processes.
What is Digital Performance Management?
ThingWorx Digital Performance Management (DPM) is a cutting-edge solution designed to help organizations identify, prioritize, and improve production issues.
By capturing lost production hours and their causes, DPM indicates where to focus for the most critical impact. Also, it optimizes the finite time available, allowing organizations to reclaim lost hours and increase effective time by 20% or more. Thus, directly impacting the bottom line.
How Does DPM Work?
Consider a manufacturing facility that can produce one unit per hour. In a week with 88 hours worked, the facility manages to manufacture only 44 units. Let’s say 12 hours are lost through planned downtime and 14 hours are lost due to changeovers.
That leaves about 18 hours unaccounted for. Where did those come from? With ThingWorx DPM, you can quickly identify issues, and why they happened, and then take appropriate actions to fix them.
Moreover, DPM calculates and analyzes discrepancies, providing valuable insights to improve productivity. DPM is a comprehensive toolset that propels organizations towards peak performance by tracking performance, conducting in-depth analysis, planning, and validating improvements.
The Production Dashboard
One feature included with DPM is the Production Dashboard. The visual dashboard is a crucial tool for supervising shift performance and gathering vital data to inform reporting and analysis. It is designed for supervisors and line managers to track productivity across various production lines.
Some key features of the Production Dashboard include:
Provides insights into shift progress at the production block level
Allows for automated and manual data entry, including reason codes to capture all losses
And offers a simplified interface to minimize disruption
Bottleneck Analysis
The Bottleneck Analysis tool is designed to automatically detect and monitor the most significant bottlenecks in your factory, providing valuable analysis and insights into OEE and OLE.
One of the challenges that customers face is a lack of visibility into bottlenecks, which leads to a disconnect between continuous improvement efforts and their impact on the business. However, bottlenecks are often dynamic and complex.
To address these challenges, DPM offers key capabilities to help identify and resolve:
Automatically identifying and tracking bottlenecks.
Systematic identification of the top constraints, which can significantly increase factory efficiency by 5-20%.
Management of the dynamic nature of competing bottlenecks.
Overall, DPM works relentlessly, making up for lost time by tracing the root cause of issues and providing precise remedies to ensure smooth and efficient functionality. Consider DPM an invaluable employee, working tirelessly around the clock without additional overtime costs!
Accelerate Problem Solving with DPM
DPM’s capabilities extend beyond surface-level analysis. By combining Pareto analysis and time loss analytics, DPM users can uncover and address a significant percentage of production problems.
Additionally, with the further integration of AI and machine learning, DPM streamlines the identification of patterns in data, resulting in faster problem-solving and decision-making.
For instance, a DPM user noticed quality losses between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. Thanks to DPM’s automated analysis, the manufacturing team quickly determined that the issue was caused by a glare from the sunset, making the inspection camera unreliable.
All in all, DPM helped accelerate the problem-solving process saving valuable time and resources.
Reap the Benefits
Digital Performance Management is as remarkable as it sounds. DPM holds the secret to your production improvements and is ready to share them with you. Discover the plethora of benefits that are tied to DPM:
Standardized Measurement: DPM provides a consistent and standardized approach to measure losses, ensuring accurate evaluation of bottlenecks, and their impact on performance.
Efficient Root Cause Analysis: Leveraging AI technology, DPM identifies the root causes of bottlenecks and facilitates their permanent resolution, eliminating recurring issues.
Automated Problem Identification: DPM’s powerful AI algorithms automate the process of surfacing common issues, exponentially reducing the time spent on problem-solving.
Real-time Insights: What once took months to identify critical insights now becomes easily accessible through DPM’s intuitive interface, providing teams with immediate access to actionable insights.
Get Started with DPM Today!
In conclusion, if you want to revolutionize your performance management and take your organization to new heights, it’s time to embrace Digital Performance Management.
Remember, in today’s fast-paced world, those who leverage technology to gain insights and make data-driven decisions are the ones who thrive.
Are you ready to unlock the true potential of your organization with Digital Performance Management? Talk with an expert now to take your first steps toward success.
Attention engineers! There’s an easier way to conduct Tolerance Analysis for your CAD designs.
Transforming CAD designs into real and tangible parts is not only rewarding on a personal level but also professionally fulfilling. It combines creativity, problem-solving, and hands-on experience, all culminating in the sense of accomplishment that comes from creating something real from an abstract concept.
However, as you already know, physical parts deviate from the idealized representation (the design model) due to many different challenges and manufacturing constraints. Tolerance analysis involves assessing the impact of variations in dimensions, geometries, and other parameters on the final product’s performance and functionality. By utilizing Tolerance Analysis, designers ensure proper fit and alignment of the product components.
Improve Quality & Design Innovation
If the goal is to improve quality and design innovation, enable your engineers to perform comprehensive tolerance stack-up analysis. Traditionally this process is a massive pain i.e. repetitive trial-and-error tasks and tedious testing. This part of the design process can be frustrating and often slows down design teams. However, it doesn’t have to be this way!
The PTC Creo EZ Tolerance Analysis Extension is a dynamic computer-aided engineering (CAE) tool powered by leading Sigmetrix technology. This extension helps designers by creating a faster, more intuitive workflow to assess the impact of dimensional specifications on your product designs before prototypes or production.
The software provides algorithms to help engineers identify the optimal tolerance values that meet the design objectives while considering various constraints. This aids in making informed decisions and reducing the time spent on manual analysis and evaluations.
By considering these variations even earlier in the design process, engineers can make more informed decisions to ensure that the final product will perform as intended. Cheers to reinforcing Closed Loop Manufacturing!
The Positive Business Outcomes of Using EZ Tolerance Analysis
Below is a high-level overview of the positive business outcomes this PTC solution proves to provide for manufacturing companies:
- Speed time to market
- Mitigate risk
- Improve productivity
- Reduce costs by reducing rework and scrap
How EZ Tolerance Analysis Makes Your Workflow Less Stressful
Intuitive User Interface
Achieve your goals efficiently with minimal frustration. The EZ Tolerance Analysis extension’s user-friendly UI enables you to maintain a flow and continue work without disruptions as it is integrated into the familiar Creo environment. This mitigates any steep learning curve and helps with productivity to get new users up and running quickly and confidently. If you need help getting set up with the technology, give us a shout. We can help maximize your workforce capabilities and your technology investment.
Complexity Management
The EZ Tolerance Analysis software provides tools and features to manage complex designs efficiently. It offers intuitive interfaces and workflows that simplify processes regarding defining tolerance features. The extension extracts relevant information directly from your CAD models, reducing manual effort and potential errors. Visual dashboards: say goodbye to tedious spreadsheets.
Problem Identification and Resolution
No more flying blind, EZ Tolerance Analysis provides visualizations and statistical outputs that enable engineers to identify potential issues and bottlenecks in the assembly or system. After pinpointing problematic areas, engineers can devise effective solutions – such as adjusting tolerances, redesigning components, or modifying manufacturing processes.
Quick Iterative Design Refinement
Perform your “what-if” scenarios quickly and accurately. Using Sigmetrix technology, get immediate feedback on the effects of tolerance adjustments and trade-off analysis. Engineers can quickly refine and optimize tolerances based on the analysis results, reducing the time required for iterations.
Improved Collaboration
The software facilitates collaboration among multidisciplinary teams involved in the design and manufacturing process. Easily share tolerance analysis data, models, and reports via HTML reports to ensure everyone comprehensively understands design intent and can make informed decisions. Visual and data-backed reports can be shared with the shop floor, suppliers, or other stakeholders, facilitating effective communication and collaboration. Providing clear documentation helps to minimize misunderstandings and costly mistakes, saving time and effort in the design and manufacturing process.
Standards and Specifications Compliance
Ensure compliance with built-in libraries of industry standards and specifications. Engineers can access these libraries to ensure that defined tolerances comply with the relevant standards. Ensure compliance with ASME and ISO standards for your designs and create products that align precisely with customer requirements while operating within acceptable tolerances. This feature helps streamline the process of defining tolerance features by providing pre-defined templates and guidelines that match industry requirements.
Overall, EZ Tolerance Analysis empowers engineers to make data-driven decisions, reduce uncertainty, and enhance the efficiency and quality of the design and manufacturing process. It aids in achieving design objectives, meeting customer requirements, and delivering reliable and cost-effective products.
Back-Up Your cad Designs with Stack-Up Analysis
The technology performs comprehensive tolerance stack-up analysis by applying two methods for increased accuracy and precision- worst-case analysis and statistical analysis.
Worst-Case Analysis: Worst-case analysis, commonly employed for critical components, examines the scenario where each component in the stack-up attains its maximum acceptable measurement.
Statistical Analysis: On the other hand, statistical analysis utilizes statistical distribution models to represent the variation of each component. These distributions are then combined to predict the overall distribution of the assembly measurement.
Related Technologies To Use With Tolerance Analysis
Combine Tolerance Analysis with Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) to ensure your designs comply with ASME and ISO standards. Or take your designs even further to contain all the data needed to define the product with model-based definition (MBD). With MBD, your model becomes the source authority across the enterprise. The outcome is shorter product development cycles, reduced costs, and enhanced product quality.
PTC continues its investments in enhancing simulation-driven design and generative design with the new Creo 10. Some new features include Rotational Symmetry, Mass Point Constraints, and Remote Loads. Additionally, Creo Simulation Live now includes Contact Simulation options and improved options for fluid and structural results. Creo Flow Analysis and Creo Simulation now have better animation and multibody support.
For more Simulation and Analysis, we also recommend PTC’s Creo Simulation Advanced powered by Ansys technology. The brand-new Creo Ansys Simulation Advanced analyzes nonlinear contact and materials, with combined thermal and structural analysis. For more information about the latest release of Creo 10 check out the blog here.
