Integrating Value Chain Networks Empowers Companies to Achieve Operational Excellence

 

Kumar Batalada and K. Shankar Narayanan, business consultant and manager respectively of Siemens, explained how PLM, digital manufacturing, and other solutions help companies achieve collaboration across their planning, design, and production teams and effectively transform production.

 

Krishna Chilukuri, program manager at Defiance Technologies, spoke about the importance of integrating key IT platforms such as PLM, MES, and ERP to extract additional business value. 

 

Kumar Batalada, Siemens, spoke about assembly planning and validation; all integral parts of product lifecycle management (PLM).  He highlighted the challenges due to escalating customer demands, such as more features at lesser prices, customization, and others in the automotive sector, and the importance of technology solutions to meet evolving customers’ demands.  According to Mr. Batalada, companies that can deliver personalized products to their customers will have competitive advantages.  Batalada spoke about Siemens' automotive suite, integrated automation, and PLM.  The focus of the automotive suite is to integrate product design with factory design, factory design with automotive design, and automotive design with the production process.  Such integration will help companies shorten time to market, analyze products and production digitally, re-use several assets, simulate and validate results, and manage changes throughout the product lifecycle.  

 

Typically, a company's R&D and production departments will use sophisticated design tools and machines, but the planning department will use spreadsheets and paper-based documents to create production plans.  When changes take place from design to planning and then to production, the number of changes multiplies and the situation becomes overwhelmingly complex.  This often results in large number of errors.  Most of the errors are due to the manual process of data input and changes.  Batalada also explained how the negative impact of these errors increases exponentially when the error is identified at later stages of product design.  He recommended that industrial companies adopt and rely on advanced technologies to anchor and build a bridge between planning, design, and production departments for effective operation. 

 

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