The digital-thread potential in custom metal fabrication

When you walk into the front office of a custom fabricator, you see a few engineers or CAD technicians working with a 3-D model from a customer. Sometimes the customer didn’t have a 3-D model, so the technician needs to draw one. But more often the technician is working on manufacturability, making sure a hole isn’t too close to a bend radius; making sure the drawing itself has bend radii that can be made with the tooling available at the shop; and so on. The engineers may have to go back and forth with engineers at the OEM. Do we need this hole here? Do we really need to hold this tolerance?

Wouldn’t it be great if custom fabricators didn’t need to do this?

People are asking this question, including those at the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute (DMDII), a federally funded R&D group of UI Labs, based outside of Chicago.

The organization supports the idea of maintaining a “digital thread” throughout the manufacturing supply chain. DMDII has partnerships with various companies—including GE, which gave a keynote presentation on the digital thread at FABTECH. They’re pursuing initiatives that aim to streamline myriad tasks in the manufacturing supply chain.

This includes the sharing of basic manufacturability data and feedback. If an engineer designs something, he or she should receive instant feedback as to whether the part can be made&emdash;a tenet of what DMII calls the iFAB initiative. (This isn’t short for iFabrication; for more, click here.)

When it comes to designing for manufacturability, or DFM, CAD plug-in tools exist—this current project, spearheaded by Penn State, works with the design-for-manufacturability (DFM) plug-in for PTC Creo. It also includes a so-called “virtual production” environment that essentially allows designers to implement virtual assemblies. Designers will see that if they design, say, part A to go into part B and C, each needs to abide by certain rules to ensure efficient assembly.

The goal is that when drawing a part, a designer will have a qualified “component library” at his or her disposal. These qualified components help ensure that whatever the designer is making can indeed be made.

As George Barnych, director of R&D programs at DMII, explained, Oshkosh Inc., the industry partner in this project, has a large component library that’s unique to the company. “But the way this program is being designed, it doesn’t matter if it’s Oshkosh’s program, or another company’s program; any company can integrate their own component library into this tool set.” This essentially creates a DFM platform in which companies can integrate their own tools. “And once they integrate their own tools, it’s done, and it’s theirs,” Barnych said. “It becomes an internal part of their ability to use the tool.”

The iFAB project focuses on large projects in the defense business, where design changes for manufacturability late in the game can be incredibly costly. And it’s not aimed at being implemented throughout a supply chain. But some of the ideas behind it may have significant implications for the short-run jobs that make up most of the work in custom fabrication.

In fact, according to a survey supplement sent with the November 2015 FABRICATOR magazine, most respondents said that engineering, programming, and scheduling were their greatest bottlenecks. A robust digital thread throughout the manufacturing supply chain could eliminate that costly constraint.

Consider the following hypothetical scenario: A shop buys a new press brake with new tooling. As part of the integration, the company collects information about those new tools, the tonnage and stroke capabilities of the new press brake, and any other information that could be used in a manufacturability analysis. That in turn becomes embedded into a shared database for product design. The next time the designer works on a part, be it a new project or product redesign, the product designer has manufacturability information from key suppliers baked right in to the software he’s using. And all this happens at the earliest stages of product design.