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Tomorrow’s technologies hold innumerable tools and
benefits that companies can use to improve their processes and gain
efficiencies and profits. At Razorleaf, our focus is to find
tomorrow’s technologies and make them available to our clients
today. Our entire technical staff is consistently on the lookout for
tools that will help our clients gain a competitive advantage and
claim valuable market share.
Razorleaf currently focuses on three primary
technologies:
Below are brief descriptions of each technology,
but feel free to select a technology in the navigation bar to the
left to see a more extensive primer that explains the technology,
providing you with the basic knowledge that you need to start
investigating the application of the technology in your own
enterprise. As always, Razorleaf will be happy to assist you in
determining what benefits exist for your organization as well as
helping you to evaluate vendors and products.
Product
Lifecycle Management (PLM)
Product Lifecycle
Management (PLM) tools provide a secure, central repository with project management and
workflow tools for all of the information required to develop,
market, manufacture, distribute, and even dispose of a product (i.e.
throughout the product’s entire lifecycle). By centrally storing,
controlling and routing all of this information, PLM allows everyone
in the extended enterprise to be on the same page instantly and consistently.
This means, for example, that a component that is specified by engineering can
then be confidently ordered by purchasing, received and verified by
shipping/receiving and properly installed by manufacturing, all based on the information entered once, by engineering.
Presenting a single “system of truth” allows each group
to focus on their specific strengths and tasks, instead of focusing
on the development or maintenance of numerous disparate systems,
each holding their own separate information.
PLM tools allow you to track all of the
information required to produce and support your products including
product information, supporting files, vendor and purchasing
information. The management tools in PLM provide security, automatic
revision and change history, searching capabilities, project management and workflow
management. The benefits to these are many, including:
- Document security protects your intellectual
property from accidental and malicious modifications and
deletions. The advanced securities built into PLM, satisfy many
leading certification and governmental regulations including
ISO9000 and FDA 21CFR11.
- Automatic revision and change history
records all of the when, who and why information surrounding a
change. Full revision management in PLM systems allows
multiple versions and revisions of information to exist, and
revision states allow security and access to change based on the
approval or release status of a particular revision. Further,
these systems are sophisticated enough to fully manage revisions
of related items, tracking which revisions of a component are
associated with which revisions of an assembly. These tools combine
to reduce or eliminate errors and scrap caused by building to an
obsolete specification or drawing.
- Searching capabilities allow people to find the
information that they need very quickly by searching on the
information that they do know. No longer is a part number or item
number required to unlock the information for a part. This freedom
of access to information encourages corporate standards and data
reuse (ex. Design team members will look for existing components
before designing or specifying something new). The resulting
savings in time, effort and manufacturing simplification are only
eclipsed by the savings from increased purchasing power due to economies of
scale.
- PLM greatly enhances project management for
project leaders and design team members with executive dashboard views
into complete product information. As PLM tracks the current state of all
product information throughout the lifecycle, designers, managers and support
staff alike can instantly see the high-level status of the project. The centralized
information stores help resource allocation and collaboration, allowing
project managers to keep a firm handle on multiple projects and share
information across projects and across work teams.
- Workflow management tools allow users to
optimize their processes and automate the movement of approvals,
change notices, and other time sensitive tasks. By electronically
routing all of the supporting information and documentation with
the workflow, the time required for any user to evaluate their
part and sign-off is dramatically reduced shortening approval and
overall design cycle time. The time that the proverbial “notice
and folder” spend traveling is almost completely removed, and
there is no question where in the process an item stands (time
stamps record when the item passes through each checkpoint). With
predefined best practices built into the system, and the ability
to design any process of virtually unlimited complexity, PLM
systems can help design the optimal processes.
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Rules-Driven
Product Management (RPM)
Rules-Driven Product
Management(RPM) technology grew out of the Rules-Based Engineering
and Knowledge-Based Engineering capabilities of the past to provide
new and innovative ways for Engineer-To-Order (ETO) and
Configure-To-Order(CTO) companies to provide customized products to
their clients. RPM technologies capture the intellectual property
from ETO/CTO organizations to allow everyone in the organization to
have all of the rules-of-thumb from engineering, purchasing,
manufacturing and sales at their fingertips. These centralized
systems are typically used to manage and apply all of this knowledge
to sales and development processes that are typically very
engineering intensive. These processes can be optimized, leading to
faster, more accurate, and more complete quotations, more bids, more
wins, and a refocusing of engineering efforts, from completing
repetitive tasks, to focusing on specialized high-margin prospects
or new product development.
RPM tools allow you to capture and apply rules from
engineering, manufacturing, pricing and other areas to build
flexible products that can be sold and produced as easily
as standard products. The tools in RPM provide the capture and
management of intellectual property, easy and customized interfaces
for a variety of users, automatic and semi-automatic generation of a
variety of deliverables, and complete history tracking for product
designs and rules. The benefits include:
- Intellectual property is a company’s only true
competitive advantage. Once an employee leaves, their knowledge
cannot be replaced. Storing, documenting, and being able to
automatically apply this knowledge means that employees can
focus on providing continuing benefit to the company, rather than
just being a “goto person” for a particular subject. Additionally,
once Intellectual Property is captured and documented, new
employee training is rapidly accelerated, making new people
productive almost immediately. Finally, documenting the processes
and underlying assumptions behind a company’s products, allows
those processes can be optimized and improved as assumptions are
brought into the open and can be questioned.
- By allowing companies to create the
interface that users see, each group within the organization can
be presented with an customized, intuitive, easy-to-use environment in which
to work and capture the information that they need to complete
their portion of the process. This information is then centrally
stored, and made available to the next team member, in a format
that is most logical to them. Errors, miscommunications and
omitted details are avoided as everyone works from the same
data.
- Most impressive is RPM’s ability to generate
deliverables automatically or interactively based on the rules and
input from the user. This allows a salesperson to sit with a
client to collect the information required to specify a project,
and instantly present the client with an accurate quotation that
could include pricing, Bills of Materials, accurate delivery
times, 2D engineering drawings, 3D solid models, or virtually any
other documentation. The instant generation of accurate, high
quality documentation increases win ratio, maintains profit
margins, and even increases sales volume. RPM tools can even
integrate with content generating tools like 2D and 3D modelers to
allow users to interact with the models during the specification
process. This allows the prospect to enter or select values and
instantly see what they are going to order in 3D,increasing your
prospect’s tendency to purchase on the spot, shortening the sales
cycle.
- History tracking allows users to access past
quotations, orders, or other products that have been specified.
This ability allows a company to save time and effort by easily
reuse products that have been produced before, making custom
products instantly “standard.” RPM tools also track the history of
the rules, so that any changes can be tracked with a time, date
and user stamp. This complete audit trail helps to satisfy a
number of certifications including ISO quality standards.
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Product
Data Management/Technical Data Management
(PDM/TDM)
Product Data Management/Technical Data
Management(PDM/TDM) technology is similar to PLM in that it provides
centralized security and access to technical files. PDM/TDM
solutions, however, are a much more focused set of tools designed to
manage the electronic files developed by groups and smaller
organizations. By integrating directly with the tools that workers
use to develop their files (ex. SolidWorks, AutoCAD, Microsoft
Word), PDM/TDM tools provide a fast, easy and convenient way for
files to be securely and centrally managed. By allowing users to
track information about their files, searching capabilities are
provided to help users find files that they created, or information
that may already exist in the system. PDM/TDM tools also provide
centralized file security, revision management and storage, allowing
multiple users to collaborate and share information.
PDM/TDM tools allow you to easily share, secure
and manage your company or group’s important electronic files. The
tools in PDM/TDM provide central storage and security of important
files, browsing and searching capabilities, revision and lifecycle
states, and integrations with the tools your organization uses to
create files. The benefits to these are many, including:
- Central storage and security of your files
means that they are easily archived, available to be shared by all
users, protected from accidental and malicious destruction or
modification, and completely traceable for ISO or other quality
process certifications.
- Browsing and searching capabilities allow your
team to quickly find the files that they need based on the
information that they know, or on the relationships between files
(ex. between a part file and it’s specification document or
analysis results). Searching capabilities also make it very quick
and easy to find if similar files already exist, encouraging the
design team to reuse parts and other documents, saving time and
money and encouraging corporate standards.
- By tracking revision states, users are assured
that all version of their documents remain safe, and the proper
relationships between revisions are retained (ex. this revision of
this part was used in this revision of this assembly). By tracking
a lifecycle state or utilizing basic workflow functionality,
document access can be controlled throughout the design process.
For example, manufacturing can be provided with access to only the
latest approved revisions, while designers, approvers, purchasing
agents and other groups or users can all have their own access
rules. Errors, miscommunications, and scrap are no longer caused
by the use of outdated files or prints.
- Automatic routing of files for approvals reduces
the time required for release and change process, reduces errors, and
eliminates miscommunications. Some PDM systems allow for the creation
of custom workflows for file review and approval, further integrating
the PDM/TDM system into the company's internal processes.
- Integrating PDM/TDM tools directly into the
programs that you use everyday allows users to have their files
managed as quickly as the files are created. Additionally,
relations between files are automatically derived from the
programs, so complex relationships like part-assembly, drawing-3D
solid model, and externally referenced files are built into the
files, so that all users can browse and find all related files.
This increases communication resulting in better designs in
shorter times.
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