| | | Traditional "Design-to-Order" product manufacturing can drain a company's engineering resources. Why? Because engineers must be involved in every order and every sales proposal, if only to check each for validity and/or actually perform custom engineering. Inevitably, this introduces inconsistency and compromises quality not only in how products are built, but also how in how quickly and accurately products are built. Part numbers proliferate, with multiple identical parts being recorded as different parts because engineers are constantly "re-inventing the wheel." Developing sales proposals takes an inordinate amount of time, delaying revenue, and introduces multiple opportunities for error. Inefficiency reigns. If ever there were an environment in which innovative technology could make an impact, it is this one. What is needed is a means to automate repetitive design configurations and bills of material (BOM) and to reuse part data whenever possible - freeing up scarce engineering resources to concentrate on product innovation. think3 has developed just such a solution, thinkconfigure, for Engineer-to-Order or Configure-to-Order manufacturers. Engineer-to-Order vs. Configure-to-Order In an Engineer-to-Order environment, products are created using: ► Some standard components with a significant degree of newly engineered parts and components, and/or, ► A significant degree of engineering required to make existing parts and | | components work with one another to meet customer requirements. thinkconfigure allows engineers to select from a combination of multiple engineering variables and product options. The system then automatically generates a new engineering product assembly, reusing existing components where possible and creating new ones where required, automatically generating the BOM for the custom engineering product. When used with thinkdesign or thinkiD DesignXPressions™, this results also in the automatic creation of 3D models and 2D drawings. In a Configure-to-Order environment, products are created from: ► Some unique combination of standard components with minimal or no engineering required to meet customer requirements, or ► A non-unique combination of standard components with minimal or no engineering required to meet customer requirements thinkconfigure allows engineers to select from multiple product features and options and then automatically generates a customized BOM for the manufacture of the custom configured product. The custom BOM links to part number drawings in the document vault managed by thinkteam. thinkconfigure helps automate both environments by automatically creating BOM, 3D models of parts and assemblies, and 2D parts and assembly drawings based on predefined constraints. | | |