Common parts strategy to accelerate product development.

On the subject of digitization & automation of industrial companies, everyone agrees: you can't do without it. But as we all know, many roads lead to Rome, and this is one of them - perhaps even the shortest.

Common parts strategy & systematic reuse of process data to accelerate product development.

SIMUFORM is now everywhere: in costing, sales, purchasing as well as in work preparation and manufacturing. Sooner or later, almost every industrial company in discrete manufacturing stumbles across the software manufacturer from Dortmund at least once. With its groundbreaking technology, SIMUFORM delivers an effective and convincing solution that, once you have it, you won't want to do without - that's the tenor of SIMUFORM's customers. With the SIMILIA software solution, SIMUFORM aims to simplify the search for data for designers, purchasers and decision-makers, accelerate structuring and provide the availability of knowledge and know-how from existing data. Many well-known customers are already benefiting from the improvement in efficiency, quality, agility and availability of information in real time and are experiencing enormous potential savings. The side effect? "With SIMILIA, we benefit especially in cost calculation and AV. We shorten our process flows with it. The added value is clearly evident," says Klaus Liehr, Managing Director of S.M.A. Metalltechnik GmbH.

Data is the foundation for Industry 4.0

Data is the basis of decision-making in the great "Industry 4.0" process. The quick and easy exchange of information between system, machine and human is the lifeblood of every industrial company. Here it provides information about production performance, costs and possible profits, which contributes to the decisive success of a company. SIMUFORM creates real added value here from mere data - with visualization, analysis and powerful search functions that make decision-making faster and more informed. The SIMILIA software solution ensures increasing profitability by significantly reducing development, design and quotation efforts with effective process optimization in already existing ERP, PDM & PLM system.

Eliminate unexpected cost eaters.

Find duplicates & consolidate data stock

Double development costs, double master data management, double warehousing, double procurement costs, double costs everywhere you look.

Duplicates in the inventory cause confusion. This occurs more often than one would like. Manufacturing, assembly and service are often confronted with such situations, which lead to errors and complicate processes.

"The effort to find duplicates is great and there is no watertight procedure to avoid the creation of duplicates". Dr. Christian Klimmek, Managing Director of SIMUFORM, hears this sentence all too often. "Well - this is conditionally true. If you take conventional procedures into account, then it is a very tedious task to clean up the data stock."

But in the age of Industry 4.0, the answer to whether duplicates can be eliminated easily, systematically and effectively is "YES".

Keeping teams of several people busy with such a task over a period of months is a thing of the past. This effort is manageable with modern technology and can be completed in a few days - especially fast and effective.

With the help of modern search technology, duplicates for drawing parts can be identified easily, reliably and quickly.

This does not require any classification or other preparations and cleanups. With this method, the drawing parts are indexed via a special procedure, the shape indexing procedure. This index is suitable to compare all drawing parts in a very short time and to visualize and mark twins as well as triplets, quadruplets etc. in the data stock. Eliminating or marking duplicates becomes child's play compared to the tedious manual checking of data. This is where the automatic matching of 3D data with SIMUFORM's GATEKEEPER sets interesting standards.

Future 4.0

The future in production is called Industry 4.0 - no question about it. But knowing which options, tools and functions can support this process is still a challenging matter. Intuitive, intelligent and interactive software solutions should optimize processes to save costs, maximize profits, be more agile and react faster than the competition.

The market is looking for solutions with intuitive user guidance, fast integration, flexible usage models and relevant results. But above all, practical support. Hardly anyone still has time for extensive software training or complex IT restructuring - even if this is often still necessary in advance. The digital transformation is advancing inexorably - soon it will no longer be possible without, without Industry 4.0. Intelligent product development as well as efficient manufacturing and optimized purchasing, in the end it has to work.

This is exactly where the solution concepts of SIMUFORM Search Solutions GmbH come in. Digital, networked and smart. Or to put it more simply: faster, sharper, more effective - the processes in product development, costing and manufacturing.

Short & Concise

• Increase competitiveness by accelerating response times to customer inquiries, among other things.
• Design more cost-consciously, avoid duplication of work and eliminate superfluous master data.
• Requests & Orders Bundling for optimal price negotiation with suppliers.
• Visualization and organization of existing and future 3D & 2D data.

Digitization in purchasing

One of the current main topics of industrial companies is process optimization in purchasing. Perhaps also thanks to the word "Purchasing 4.0" that has just become fashionable. But Purchasing 4.0 is more than just the digitalization of purchasing. Purchasing 4.0 is not an approach to completely recreate proven and established processes in companies. SIMUFORM's solution for digitizing purchasing supports customers in focusing on their core tasks and implementing the tried and tested even better and more efficiently. SIMILIA is thus an effective tool for optimizing procurement processes. Complexity reduction is in the foreground.

SIMUFORM brings together the technical and commercial information in an automated way. This enables the user to efficiently optimize purchasing in cross-functional collaboration - ERP compliant.

Optimize the procurement process in three steps:
Consolidate - Structure - Automate.

The traditional image of purchasing and the demands placed on it have changed significantly. The term Purchasing 4.0 is on everyone's lips. The term focuses on the interdisciplinary, networked and systematic optimization of the entire supply chain. At the same time, operational and strategic purchasing must detach themselves from the technical constraints and devote themselves to the core topics. Tradition and digitization in the procurement process are coming together and unleashing their power.

Today, the automated coding of material groups and holistic, transparent data are key factors for successful inventory optimization in purchasing. Does that sound like a lot of work and effort? Yes, it does.

With SIMILIA, SIMUFORM offers here the tools to support target costing and coding into material groups for the area of discrete manufacturing, thus bringing enormous advantages for purchasing:

• Consistent implementation of the common parts strategy by the purchasing department
• Better purchase prices through the bundling of requirements
• Support of the standardization processes
• Sustainable monitoring of data quality
• Savings in material and inventory costs
• Transparent target cost referencing
• Support of the material group management
• Quick consolidation of the drawing parts

1 - What does your inventory data look like?

Everyone knows what is hidden here. Duplicates and multiple items. Incomplete material masters and superfluous articles. The work of sifting through all these data and drawings is a horror. Even if you know that every trip around the world starts with the first step, it would be good to know to have a rocket engine and not a bicycle. After all, one wants to quickly experience the beautiful sides of this "data journey".

Figures from practice

For a machine builder with good organization and about 100,000 drawing parts, the number of duplicates and triplets after a duplicate check by SIMUFORM usually amounts to about 2,500 drawing parts. Identifying these duplicates and triplets in the data stock is tedious and not a pleasure. Students and trainees are often tormented with this work.

This can be done easily and automatically with the SIMUFORM process.

2- Automation in purchasing and coding by commodity groups

Are you faced with the enormous task of organizing 100,000 drawing articles into product groups? And 10,000 more are added every year? That's a lot of work if you want to manage it conventionally.

Perhaps you are already using an eCl@ss approach for this. But there is no end to the work! So you take a shortcut in case of need: In many companies not all products, articles, drawings and parts are classified into commodity groups. Reason: The effort is too great and the work is very tedious. One uses the 80-20 rule, the Pareto analysis and applies the material group management only to 20% of the parts. Of course, it is better to record 100% of the materials - isn't it?

MORE SPECIFICALLY: The material groups are often subdivided via material, complexity and technology - alternatively via eCl@ss. These material groups can then be used to easily assign suppliers. Which path of material group assignment would a gear shaft, for example, go through at this point? In the case of gear shafts, for example, at least 2 pieces of information are certainly already specified in the design, which make such an assignment possible. The gear shaft is made of a hardenable steel, has several steps and is therefore complex. Technologically, it is a machined part, more precisely a turned part. Using this assignment to the associated material group, it can be further subdivided according to the size, weight and number of pieces and then requested from the relevant suppliers who specialize in the production of such turned parts. Optimally, a supplier evaluation has also already taken place.

Optimization of strategic purchasing - Fit for the future

With the help of the methodology presented above, SIMUFORM customers can already optimize the following purchasing levers:

• Bundling of needs.
• Bundling of required specifications.
• Bundling of purchasing volumes.
• Bundling of material.
• Bundling of technology.

That all sounds quite plausible, doesn't it? Well, It is. But it is precisely this allocation that makes life difficult for materials management, isn't it? Because with about 15,000 new drawing parts per year in the area of special machine construction, this would usually have to be done manually. In most cases, however, there is not enough time for this - according to the feedback from SIMUFORM's current customers.

3- Scale your success through automation.

At the speed of light through the world of data.

THE SOLUTION: From a purchasing perspective, 10 to 20 reference parts are assigned for all master goods groups. No more. This is not done manually, but graphically interactively via the SIMILIA solution from SIMUFORM. The work is easy to do. With the help of the simple set up system, all existing technical, technological, and commercial information is available to the purchaser.

At the same time, we have a complete visualization of the data for a graphical evaluation. The creation of, for example, 50 product master groups with 20 reference parts each requires no more than 2 to 3 days of work. Thus, of the total of 50,000 drawing parts, a maximum of 1,000 are entered into the goods master groups. Basically, however, the purchasing department should have knowledge of how to create these goods master groups.

Take it all and not just 20%.

As soon as the goods master groups with the reference drawing parts have been created, the next phase begins: automatic data assignment. Here, the automated procedure is started. This procedure is now able to automatically assign the remaining 49,000 drawing parts to these goods master groups. In this way, you are not limited to 20% of your data when coding by material groups, but to all available drawing parts.

The tool used does not require any attributes or material master data in this step, only the drawing parts. In this way, you could transfer a very large dataset to the material master groups in a short time. In the next step, each material master group is divided into subgroups based on only a few additional characteristics (material, technology, complexity).

In most cases, this flat structure below the material master group is sufficient to use the material groups sensibly for application area 12 of procurement. The information now available for the subgroups is basically available in the system, and a simple set of rules can be used to transfer each drawing part of a commodity master group to the correct commodity group - fully automated.

The flow of the solution concept of SIMUFORM for the optimization of purchasing.

Validate target costs with simple but effective procedures.

This procedure can be further refined in that validated price information is successively stored for the reference parts if it is not already available. In this way, regression methods can be used to determine the target price for each material group as a function of the number of pieces, material price, and weight. It makes sense to use the regression method at this point because it is only applied to a selected material group together with technology and material complexity information. Compared to the conventional method and the manual assignment of the drawing parts to the respective material groups, the effort involved in this solution is only a fraction.

Welcome to Purchasing 4.0

Discover now the possible applications of SIMILIA for your field of activity...

Or join us for a free webinar: