3448. The Role of Effective Mass Property Management in a Global Product Creation Process

Paper

Abstract

Mass property Management is an integral part of the overall system design. Therefore the information should be managed like other requirement and design data in a centralized location. This could be either a specific database application, which is closely linked to other product data in a PLM system, or it is embedded into the enterprise PLM system.
This paper outlines specific requirements to a PLM system, which has been implemented at a large tier1 automotive supplier for advanced product data management with integrated mass property handling. The first discussed challenge for complex system design is the huge variety of different configurations – which can easily lead to millions of combinations. The handling of mass properties in combination with different configurations is one of the most complex tasks. The introduction of a conceptual product structure is a very powerful vehicle to meet this requirement. In general the end product of each aerospace and automotive supplier has always a similar body structure, whatever it is – a plane or a car. A plane has in general engines and wings; each car has wheels and a roof. Therefore the manufacturer has lots of information, which he can re-use from his past projects. The discussed Conceptual Product Structure describes the data model, which supports advanced tasks in product data management with all the different aspects of aggregating information like mass properties.
The next discussion point is a methodology of how to create target views (Parallel Structures) for different departments (mass, regulations, materials/environmental, supplier). This is a quite interesting methodology, if mass management is treated as part of the overall organization, contributing to one end product.
The last topic which will be discussed is the role of configuration management throughout the product lifecycle and its impact on the mass properties. Bringing different information sets for mass properties of different design stages together and keep track of all the changes, requires also in the mass property department clean processes for an efficient configuration management. As long as mass property information is part of the global information set, this shouldn’t be an issue in theory. In this paper it will be discussed, what processes are affected if mass property management is done outside the enterprise system.
The paper will close with the discussion of how efficient mass property management systems will address the need for globalization. Especially, the role of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) will address the increasing business process complexity in global organizations.