There isn't much fruit left for picking in the once abundant orchard of UK industry.  We've tried working leaner, delivering just-in-time, automating the supply chain and implementing enterprise resource planning (ERP).  But, business process automation is becoming a "must have" rather than a strategy for competitive advantage and manufacturers find themselves running just to stand still.

On the design side we've done computerised drafting and now we're moving to 3D modelling with all the advantages of speed and accuracy that this brings.

Yet it's easy just to lament the state of manufacturing without appreciating what we do have going for us.  For example, here in the North East of England, it's true that most manufacturing operations have been streamlined or migrated offshore.  However, in many cases, UK design teams have been retained and have since evolved to become centres of excellence holding extensive intellectual property.

Our best opportunity is to ensure that these pockets of innovation work as effectively as possible. But how?

While business process automation can reduce operating expenses, it does nothing to help generate revenue.  This only comes about through innovation, so the pressure is on the design team.

But there is still some low hanging fruit, ripe and ready in this area. The intellectual property is held as design data.  When this is of the highest quality - when it has been kept totally current and contains all the right reference points - it can be made to work much harder and much more effectively than it seems to be doing at present.

Research shows that the design of a product determines as much as 75 per cent of its cost over its lifetime.  It is estimated that more than ten people use the data that each design generates.

It has also been said that anywhere from 60 - 90 per cent of product designs are used again.  More often than not, improvements tend to be made incrementally, rather than by developing a totally new product.  In other words, it's easier to be both innovative and targeted if you don't keep reinventing the wheel.

To make this policy work, every different department needs to communicate its experience of the product.  There also has to be some line of connection between silos of information.

For larger companies, product lifecycle management may be a way of providing a holistic view of all processes that bring a product to market.  However it is no quick and easy win.

The systems available tend to be at the upper end of the software price range, usually involve board-level decisions and can be potentially disruptive to operations.  To date, most have been designed for the needs of large enterprises and can be complex and costly to implement.

Yet, smaller companies face the same competition from developing economies as larger ones.  They are looking at the same challenges of shorter project cycles, the need to be first to market and shrinking profit margins.

So how do manufacturers grasp this opportunity to make their data really work for them?

What is needed is a pragmatic solution at a price affordable to most.  It also needs to be easy to implement and provide almost immediate benefits.

Practical requirements

Imass has always specialised in both CAD and data management solutions and for a long time has foreseen the convergence of the two.  However, it is only recently that vendors have begun to "democratise" these solutions so that they can be introduced by the design office themselves, without major enterprise-wide decisions.

To be of practical use to the design office, data management solutions need to:

Manage work in progress:  With the increasing use of offshore teams and remote working, version control has become even more important than ever.  Often the most damage can be done by a relatively simple error - and working on the wrong version of a design is one of these.  A practical data management solution needs to minimise the possibility of this happening.  It also needs to give different designers the ability to work on a design simultaneously, without risking mistakes.  And, of course, if the solution can also give a history of who has accessed the data and when, all the better.  From a housekeeping point of view, it also needs to ensure data is easy to find and to access.

Offer release management:  For the same reasons, a solution also needs to help reduce the risk of releasing incomplete and inaccurate designs for production as mistakes here can mean serious delays in operations and incorrect bills of materials (BOMs) with all the cost implications these bring.

Manage engineering change orders (ECOs): Once changes are approved they need to be tracked, audited, monitored and automatically routed in parallel throughout the company, avoiding delays caused by ECO packages getting stuck on someone's desk.  This way change requests can be responded to far more quickly, helping to speed time to market and cut design overheads.

Once these processes have been established, the decision may be made to link the design data management system with other enterprise systems - either straightaway or at a later date.  For example, design information in the form of BOM data can be injected straight into supply chain systems, avoiding the need for time-consuming manual entry; it can be used by the sales team to start generating demand, in order-taking applications and in customer relationship management systems (CRM) that store information about demand.

Imass Design Solutions has been recently working with Miller UK Ltd, one of the first UK companies to implement Autodesk's new data management solution, Autodesk Productstream.... 

Miller UK designs and manufactures attachments for the construction industry, such as the innovative Miller couplers and excavator bucket and has worldwide agreements with major OEMs such as Caterpillar Inc, JCB, Komatsu, Case New Holland, Hitachi and Volvo.

Gary Thomson, Miller UK technical manager, had used Autodesk Inventor Series and worked with Imass in a previous job.  As a result, he was the driver behind the decision to invest in four seats of Inventor for day-to-day working alongside Miller UK's existing Pro/Engineer seats.

Using Productstream he anticipates an enhanced ability to share and re-use data, better version control and audit paths and the ability to transfer BOM data directly into his company's manufacturing resource planning (MRP) system.  This should bring considerable time savings, even reducing a day's work down to minutes, by eliminating the need to recreate and manually re-enter data into the system.

Thomson told us: "The company has been growing steadily since it was founded 25 years ago, but has seen rapid growth over the past few years.  Inevitably, the amount of design data we need to manage and re-use has grown with it.

"This has highlighted the need for design data to be carefully stored and managed from the very beginning of the design, in order to save time and resources further downstream."

Miller UK shows that already companies are implementing data management systems from the bottom up.   Solutions such as Productstream that enable first steps to be taken quickly and with only a small investment can ensure smaller firms don't get left behind.

One good thing about introducing a practical data management solution is that, by increasing its reach incrementally, the investment can be planned and staged and huge budgetary requirements avoided.

Another is that it raises the profile of the design team - putting its work at the heart of an organisation.