“design Consultant”: a Network-based Concurrent Design Environment

In today’s globally distributed business environment, resolution of the communication problems between team members is a critical issue. A project named the Design Consultant has been launched to improve inter/intra-departmental communications. Leveraging available Internet technology, the Design Consultant enables designers to share design information with other team members including colleague designers, CAE analysts, manufacturing engineers, and marketing engineers. The network accessible DFX modules assist designers to simulate manufacturability and to estimate cost and time for fabrication resulting in faster product development. Building blocks of the Design Consultant were established based on a 3-tier client/server architecture, and feasibility tests were successful. As part of the feasibility tests, the Design Consultant for Part Reuse and the Design Consultant for Rubber Molding were implemented to prove the concept of the network-based Concurrent Engineering. INTRODUCTION “Globalization” is one of the main trends of today’s business organization. Globally distributed design, analysis, manufacturing, and marketing facilities provide competitive advantages of technology, natural resources, and culture. However, at the same time, in the fields of design and manufacturing, a globally distributed business environment introduces potential communication problems that must be resolved. Two kinds of communication problems are expected. One is vertical communication which is based on the sequence of product development, i.e. from the design of a new product to Computer Aided Engineering (CAE), manufacturing, and marketing of the product (Figure 1a). Although the communication problems between different departments have existed even before the introduction of distributed business environments, it is certain that communication between geographically distributed departments is far more complicated, and it may delay information flows. Another potential problem is in horizontal communication between the people performing the same nature of work (Figure 1b). For example, a designer in the US may find it difficult to collaborate with other designers working in Europe and Asia. Considering the design environment in many of large corporations, seamless communication is not readily available partially due to the limitation of the localized network environment (Ethernet or Local Area Network, LAN, Figure 2). Engineers within the same network may share the design information, but the engineers working at remote network cannot easily access the information. Figure 1. Two kinds of communications in a distributed business environment. Design Design 1 Design 2 Design 3 Analysis