6 February 2008

Adam Lawrence finds out how dental equipment manufacturer A-dec found moving to a catalogue-based product range hard, until it updated its PLM systems using technology from Microsoft and Dassault Systèmes.

Perhaps the single central challenge of managing manufacturing businesses is to cope with the inherent disconnect between productive efficiency and customer centricity. Production facilities thrive on stability and economies of scale. Put the same product down a manufacturing track for a long period of time, and the line will run smoothly, with few quality issues, and costs will be kept down. This is the essence of mass production, as created by Henry Ford, and captured in his legendary quote ‘Any colour, so long as it is black.’

Customer needs, though, are different from manufacturing simplicity. Customers want what they want, and if you are not able to deliver it because your plants are insufficiently flexible, you will surely lose business. But flexibility brings its own problems. The challenge is to find a happy medium.

The ability to store design history, work in process and production data is the real power of the system

Chris Etzel, A-dec manufacturing engineer  The modern solution to this dilemma is best termed ‘mass customisation’. Essentially, this means that you must design a product range that enables you to satisfy your customers’ demands for product variants, but to do it using a range of standard components. Customisation thus becomes an assembly business, not an engineering one.

Dental equipment manufacturer A-dec trod this path a few years ago with its dental furniture business. Founded 40 years ago near Portland, Oregon, A-dec has developed into one of the world’s largest producers of dental equipment, with annual sales of more than US$250 million, approximately 20 per cent of which come from the dental furniture division, which now manufactures more than 17,000 parts per week, and is the leader in the North American market. “In 2000, we changed our product line, which had previously been largely bespoke, and introduced a catalogue from which customers could build their order from standard parts,” says engineering manager Wes Snyder. “The new range is highly configurable, in fact there are billions of potential configurations – and there is great variety in what customers pick.”

A-dec’s customers are building operating rooms to suit the needs of their facility, and thus their needs are hugely varied, says Snyder. “Finish is really important to dentists nowadays, and often our cabinets play a big part in the interior design. Some might prefer to have more storage in the operating room, whereas others use procedures that are pre-treated, so don’t need as much storage,” Snyder explains.

The introduction of the new cabinetry catalogue saw A-dec’s dental furniture business explode. “We had been making dental furniture as far back as the 1980s, but it was the new catalogue that drove the business forward,” says staff manufacturing engineer Chris Etzel. “Our largest competitor is not other dental manufacturers, but individual cabinet makers. They’re willing to do anything you want them to. In the past, we had a limited range of standard equipment, but the creation of a customisable range of standard components meant that we were providing bespoke service as an off the shelf price.” Not surprisingly, then, the market reacted positively to the new offering.

“At that time, our IT systems were the last thing on our minds,” says IS manager Becky Urwiller. “We were more focused on adding staff and machinery, increasing our capacity in any way we could.”

But it soon became clear that this lack of focus on IT systems would have to be remedied. The additional volume of business was beyond the limits of the company’s production system, and orders quickly outstripped capacity. Designs created on 2D and 3D CAD systems were entered into the production system by programmers, not designers. Multiple rounds of physical prototypes were needed just to locate and eliminate the coding errors before production could begin. And as the order volume grew, the system began introducing errors of its own. “We outgrew the system,” says Urwiller. “It was using a flat-file database and it just ran out of processing capacity. So we would purge records, and that caused rework, because there were jobs that had been done in the past, but we had eliminated the files so we couldn’t see that. And if we didn’t do the purges, we would get corrupted data.”

The product capacity limits of the legacy system caused A-dec to turn away requests for custom designs and new product offerings. To avoid disappointing its customers, A-dec needed a new approach – a system that could automate growing volumes of routine orders from design to production, giving designers more time to spend on custom orders and new product development.

“We started this project in October 2004,” says Etzel. “At the time, we were running on an old DOS-based software system backended on Microsoft Access. And by then, the software we were using was no longer a supported version. Upgrading was not an option, because the system had too much bespoke functionality. We had to start again.”

In August 2005, the company decided to build its systems on the V5 product lifecycle management (PLM) platform from Dassault Systèmes (DS), using including Catia V5 for 3D modelling and Enovia SmarTeam for data management. The close links between V5 PLM and Microsoft technologies, including SmarTeam’s use of SQL Server and the ability to use the Microsoft .NET Framework to provide system integration, offered additional value.

Catia generates the numerical control (NC) instructions to manufacture the components, outputting them to A-dec’s milling and routing machinery directly from the 3D model. This eliminates data re-keying and its inherent potential for error. “Planners analyse sales orders and fire them into Catia to get production data,” says Etzel. “Two hours later, they have paperwork they can send to the shopfloor, and that’s it. Previously, there were between five and ten unique steps to achieve the same goal, so we can now get jobs onto the shopfloor much quicker. Even the way data is delivered is different: in the past we’d have had file sets manually copied to certain machines. Now, as part of our automated flow, we go from stem to stern. When we generate the data it goes straight to the machines.”

Enovia SmarTeam, based on Microsoft SQL Server, serves as the data engine and manages the intelligence behind the parametric modelling capabilities as well as the history of Catia designs. A Microsoft SQL Server database designed by A-dec stores the results of every project for future reference. “The ability to store design history, work in process and production data is the real power of the system,” Etzel says.

A-dec uses Microsoft SharePoint to make 3D XML viewing available to any authorised employee, regardless of whether they have access to a Catiaenabled desktop. “It makes delivering information easy and lets us display it for each user exactly the way they need to see it,” Etzel says.

A-dec also appreciates that Catia V5 and Enovia SmarTeam are Microsoft Windows-based, allowing Adec to leverage its existing investment in Microsoft Office and Microsoft SQL Server to wring even more value from the project. “In the past, our capacity was limited to what our software could handle and to how many production planners we had working,” Etzel says. “V5 PLM allows us to do more with less. On a purely theoretical basis, our capacity is now infinite.”

“We knew automation was key in the system,” says Snyder. “We have a vast number of configurations in our cabinetry, and previously, we essentially had manual NC programming. The key for us was how automate the process. Most of our parts come out of flat panel stock, so we have to create a parts list, with an identifier, the part’s size, the material it needs to be created from. That’s loaded into our cutting optimiser software.

Special orders are back on the menu since A-dec adopted V5 PLM. “We’re in a relatively small industry and we sell through dealerships that also sell products from other manufacturers, so we like to offer what our customers ask for,” Snyder says. Now that its product capacity limits have been eliminated, A-dec has the ability to develop new product offerings.

The limits of A-dec’s previous system forced employees to remember which products required exceptions to standard practice. By using Knowledgeware to build that ‘tribal knowledge’ into Catia V5, the system automatically propagates changes to all affected parts, and A-dec achieves higher levels of quality control. Microsoft .NET, meanwhile, simplifies the process of sharing data with A-dec’s ERP system and makes it easy to update integrated applications without damaging the links between them. “We have an online configuration system so our dealers can enter proposals and order. That has all the rules that our customers need to see,” says Snyder. “It connects into our Baan ERP system, and at that point, in addition to all of the things Baan needs to be aware of, we also have an Outlook file in XML format which has all of those customers’ options.”

The control application that moves between the ERP system and Catia V5 is built on the Microsoft .NET Framework. “.NET makes it painless,” says Becky Urwiller.

Management information and post-sales service is improving too. “Previously, for reporting, we had lots of data sets from different applications, but now we can go immediately to any cut list from the last year of production,” says Snyder. “ This level of traceability really isn’t something we had before. We didn’t know how much we would use it but we’ve found it really useful. We have a change management group, and they meet weekly to look at reports from the field, maybe be damage to a part, or something we missed. We’re using Catia 3D XML which generates a model of the actual cabinet. They can look at it, and if the part is in the model, there’s a high probability it was actually manufactured, and if not it probably wasn’t. That’s a great help.”

“A key benefit of our new IT approach is that we have added scalability,” says Urwiller. “If we need to grow the systems further, we’ve built the architecture so it’s expandable. Maybe we might need to add more hardware, but that’s easy. One of the primary tenets of this project was to figure out how to get scalability, because we’d had such difficulties with growth in the past. Previously, to grow we had to add people, but we can now make significant capacity expansions by adding computers, rather than just extra bodies. Which makes us more efficient.”

This article first appeared in the Winter 2007 issue of Prime magazine.

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