Increasingly referred to as the ultimate industrial stimulus, digital manufacturing strategies can potentially satisfy the pressure to manufacture faster, better and at lower cost. For example, automaker giant Toyota Motor Corp. participates as both a shareholder and a user of digital manufacturing solutions. The concept builds on 3-D CAD, enables product lifecycle management (PLM) and ultimately includes the means for connecting with the customer.

Many manufacturers, to be sure, are still limiting 3-D CAD data to the design function. The experts warn, however, that such restrictions limit the competitive benefits that a digital manufacturing strategy could deliver across corporate functions. For example, enterprisewide use of 3-D CAD data is the first step toward capturing the benefits of PLM, says Tom Emmrich, president, Dassault Systemes Americas. He says it is no coincidence that his company, a provider of PLM solutions, believes that 3-D data is an effective medium of communication in order to innovate and gain efficiency.

"We feel that 3-D is the means that can be used to talk across functions and across countries, languages and cultures, Emmrich says. The issue, he notes, is that viewing something helps in gaining an understanding of it. "In addition, 3-D can span the understanding gap between functions -- such as a design engineer and a production engineer."

Emmrich says that Dassault's digital conclusion is that the ultimate goal of all manufacturers is the virtual representation of the product with the use of 3-D.

Consider the power of virtual prototyping, the design example of digital manufacturing: "Instead of physically making new prototypes every time a new product is called for, we create virtual representations of all variations on a computer," says Paul Reynolds, business manager at the PZFlex division of Weidlinger Associates Inc., an engineering consulting firm.

Critical to a PLM strategy is the linking of digital design to digital manufacturing, which allows you to kickoff and troubleshoot a new assembly line in the virtual world to ensure that it will function as planned in the physical production environment.

The result: faster time-to-market plus improved quality and better understanding of the designs, says Reynolds.

For example, just before PZFlex commercialized its virtual prototyping software, one of the company's consulting clients, a large medical transducer manufacturing company, was able to use the software to reduce the number of physical prototypes from 75 to just three, says Robbie Banks, lead design engineer for PZFlex. "In addition, the new designs reached the market faster and the software was also able to analyze and improve product performance."

As the time-to-market windows shrink, designers must ensure that what they build works the first time, adds Prabhakar Bendre, senior vice president, KPIT Cummins, an India-based IT service provider to manufacturing organizations. "Increasingly industrial designers are abandoning the hardware prototype approach for electronic virtualization, a technology that has been known to lop off as much as eight months from a development schedule." About 90% of KPIT's revenues come from services it provides to three manufacturing sectors -- automotive, industrial equipment and high-tech/electronic companies.

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