Manufacturing
Feature:
Product development at Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte
27 October 2007
Consumer goods manufacturer Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte has a complicated development operation, involving hundreds of engineers in more than a dozen countries creating new products for a large number of different brands. Adam Lawrence hears how the company manages this process.
Large-scale product design and development operations are perhaps the most demanding of all manufacturing IT environments. The sheer scale of rich 3D CAD models, combined with the need to share those models around multiple locations, puts huge strain on both IT hardware and the wide area networking capacity that supports it.
Until fairly recently, therefore, design and development departments have typically made use of specialised high-performance IT equipment. Only in the last few years has wide area networking technology – and mainstream desktop PCs – become able to deliver the kind of performance needed for design operations. But the change has been dramatic.
Munich, Germany-based Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte (BSH) runs one of the world’s more complex design and development operations, with 31 production sites and 43 factories in 15 countries across Europe, Asia, the United States and Latin America. BSH designs, manufactures and sells large and small household appliances, as well as an assortment of internet-compatible household appliances, under well known brand names as Bosch, Siemens, Gaggenau, Thermador, Neff and Constructa. BSH’s products – ovens, refrigerators, dishwashers and the like – might seem to be relatively static markets, but in fact demand relentless innovation in order to stay competitive. What’s especially challenging is that the company’s products, under the many different brand names, compete against each other.
“The visible components, such as front panels, oven cavities and the like – are specific to brands,” says Uwe Tontsch, BSH’s head of information technology, product development and industrial engineering solutions. “There we have to be very careful to ensure they look different. So we have different industrial design departments for each brands, and they keep separate.”
At the same time, though, Tontsch says it’s important for BSH’s designers to be able to exchange information on areas that are not competitively sensitive. “We have platform concepts for products,” he explains. “For some products, they might be the same across different brands, in terms of the overall concept of how the products will look or be made. But within that, there may be different looks and feel, performance etc, although performance. We try to have every brand stand for different values and attract a different audience. For example, NEFF stands for easy operation – just one button to control the oven. Bosch, by contrast, stands for reliability.
“The industrial designers sit within our marketing and are organised by brands,” he continues. “We have regional design teams for Gaggenau and other brands, again within marketing. But when it comes to R&D we organise by product division – cooking, refrigeration, whatever. In these teams, people are organised by project and by market.”
Tontsch explains that the company’s platform strategy is well established, yet remains flexible. “We have operated by platforms in our refrigerator business since 1993,” he says. “But it’s not a religion that a concept must be adopted by the entire company. We have competing ideas within organisation just as we have competing brands, and that is working really well for us. Sometimes it can be a diplomatic mission! You have to put the effort in to get people to buy in. We have over 30 different development departments across Europe, China, North America and Latin America. These are organised by product division: if we start a new cooking product, the participants can come from Spain, Turkey and many other countries.”
It’s this global distribution of designers that puts BSH’s IT under strain. Sharing CAD data around such a large network, ensuring that version conflict is managed and allowing designers to work on the same model at once is highly demanding, as Tontsch explains. “We have to share the data and keep it updated,” he says. “We’ve been doing this for more than ten years. We started with a product data management (PDM) implementation in 1996, and that’s still the backbone of our R&D operation. Now we have more than 2.5 million 3D models and subassemblies, and more than 50 per cent are distributed. When we started we thought sharing 5,000 parts a year would be impressive! Our models can be huge – for large assemblies we’re often dealing with models of between 6-8 Gb. As a result, we have to use very powerful workstations – for simulation, as an example, we use PCs with up to 32Gb of RAM.”
BSH’s partner for CAD and product lifecycle management (PLM) is UGS, now a part of Siemens Automations & Drives. “We’ve been using Teamcenter NG to create a common product development process across the BSH group,” says Tontsch. “Using the same software means we are able to share best practices, get the same results wherever the work is done, and work to the same milestones around the world. Now, though, we need to scale up our implementation while still keeping consistency. And we are building up lightweight model databases using JT from UGS. So we do the digital mock-ups with fat data – with NX – but suppliers have different CAD systems – and we have to find a way to integrate them into our virtual product development process.”
BSH’s culture of innovation is demonstrated by the more than 300 patents and trademarks the company applies for annually. The magazine Wirtschaftswoche and management consulting firm AT Kearney recently voted BSH as ‘Best Innovator.’ An example of BSH’s innovation is its OptoSensor that detects trace amounts of calcium deposits on glasses in the dishwasher and controls the wash cycle accordingly. To support this level of innovation, BSH employs approximately 600 design engineers in a global development group. Over the years, as the company grew through acquisitions, management realised the need to create a global collaborative environment that would allow designers at different locations to benefit from each other’s work. After evaluating a number of leading systems, in 2000 BSH decided to standardise its worldwide development efforts on UGS technology, implementing its PLM solutions, NX and Teamcenter. BSH uses NX and Teamcenter to deliver a managed development environment for global digital product development.
Like many large product development operations, BSH was traditionally a Unix-based shop, running its CAD and PLM applications on Sun Solaris equipment. Now, although it is still, for the moment, using Solaris as its server environment, the company has made a major move towards Windows – and it is reaping the benefits.
“We have three strategic partners, Microsoft, UGS and SAP,” says Tontsch. “We are committed to Microsoft for infrastructure and office communications, using Windows, SQL Server, Office, and SharePoint. Most of these technology we already have in place – the only exception is SQL Server, which we are currently looking into. We know it can be a cost benefit for us for many of the locations where we maintain databases – for example, for PDM. We’re currently still running our PDM systems on Solaris, but looking to move to Windows Server as soon as we can. We have already proved that Windows and Intel can give us better performance that the equipment we were previously using – six months ago, when we implemented Teamcenter NX version 4, we did away with the last of our desktop SPARC machines in favour of high-spec PCs for performance reasons. We are finding that Teamcenter is running at twice the speed on the Windows/Intel equipment than it did on Sun. That time is over for us. We are very happy with Windows on client machines, and now we’re implementing 64-bit and Windows XP. We’ll continue 32-bit Windows support until we bring in Teamcenter NX version 6 in 2009 – but in the long term we want to support only one platform, and that will be 64-bit Windows.”
This article first appeared in the Autumn 2007 issue of Prime magazine.