What is Digital Manufacturing ?

Digital manufacturing is also referred as Manufacturing Process Management (MPM). Digital manufacturing is an emerging technology and is a key element of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). It is an important component within PLM.

The concept of concurrent development of both the product and the manufacturing process was introduced through concurrent engineering. Concept and product engineering are primarily concerned with development of a product, whereas manufacturing engineering is primarily concerned with development of the process to manufacture the product.

From software perspective, CAD and CAE tools are employed to help define what is to be made and MPM tools are employed to help define how it is to be made.

Digital manufacturing is a method to define manufacturing processes, manage the process information and support effective collaboration among engineering disciplines by using digital product data. It supports visualization, manufacturing simulation, ergonomics and other engineering analysis tools necessary to optimize the manufacturing process design. It also ensures the integration of product and process designs of overall product life cycle. Thus it ensures the product design to be sensitive to process constraints and capabilities.

Digital manufacturing includes software support for following functional areas:

• Translation of design data to manufacturing
• Process planning
• Operations planning
• Assembly definition and sequencing
• Detailed line, cell, station and task design
• Quality measurement and metrics
• Manufacturing documentation
• Collaboration between departments
• Knowledge base like best practices, lessons learnt etc.

The leading software in digital manufacturing is Delmia (a product of Dassault Systèmes) and Tecnomatix (a product of UGS-Siemens).

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