BCT Software Insights

Use Case

Solid Edge Inspector with Teamcenter - Improving Downstream Consumption of Engineering Data

Global Trends to industries: Globalization, time to market, increasing product complexity, sustainability.

Industries worldwide are going through a tremendous number of transformations. Changes in global markets and political conditions put a lot of pressure on manufacturing companies. The constant need to introduce and invest in new features to meet the customer demands and stay ahead of competitors requires a shorter time to market for new products. Product complexity is expanding to meet the demands of personalization and innovative, modern technology trends. Greater sustainability is demanded by consumers for products and companies producing them.

Quality Management

Quality plays a key role in companies' success. It needs to be ensured that companies meet regulatory standards and full compliance by supporting several quality processes through quality management systems. Quality planning is one essential part of this process.

Focus on Quality Planning: Customer PPAP (Production Part Approval Process) / FAI (First Article Inspection)

Costs are subject to quality! Effective quality management is crucial for cost efficiency. By proactively addressing prevention and appraisal costs, companies can reduce both internal and external costs and thus increase overall profitability. In particular, the cost implications of design changes underline the urgency of early intervention in the product development cycle.

Inspection planning

Yet, the primary challenge in quality management persists. How to efficiently close the gap between engineering data and quality processes? How to efficiently capture characteristic data for inspection and documentation purposes?

Inspection planning is the process of ballooning and identifying characteristics, using manufacturing information based on a model or a drawing. The generated Bill of Characteristics is later used to create inspection reports (e.g. First Article Inspection Reports). When design modifications are made, the quality data (balloons and Bill of Characteristics) must be updated, and new reports (e.g. Change Reports) generated. To identify changes, either a graphical or spreadsheet comparison is made. The information can then be shared for downstream consumption – with quality managers, tools like CMM Inspection, or suppliers.

Present Process

In most companies, inspection planning is still a manual process. Characteristics are ballooned manually and the information (dimensions, tolerances, notes…) are entered manually into a spreadsheet. There is no relation between design data and inspection data, which makes the process tedious, error prone, time consuming and unintegrated. There must be a way, that enables an easy and unique identification of characteristics.

Process with Solid Edge Inspector: The specialized solution designed to automate and streamline inspection planning processes.

To address the challenges and to improve the processes, Solid Edge Inspector, which is an Add on for Solid Edge, was brought in. Solid Edge Inspector automates the processes of ballooning characteristics, identifying characteristic data and tracking design changes between different revisions, generation of First Article Inspection Reports and Engineering Change Reports, enabling the transformation of design characteristics (e.g., dimensions, tolerances, product manufacturing information) into quality characteristics. It identifies, labels and extracts (critical) design characteristics according to industry and customer standards giving them unique characteristic identifiers over the entire lifecycle of the design part. It supports drawing-based as well as and model-based (PMI) inspection. The generated data can easily be consumed by downstream areas.

Closed Loop Quality with Solid Edge Inspector and Quality Management Systems

The seamless integration of characteristics data from Solid Edge directly into quality management systems enhances operational efficiency. This integration is readily available for Opcenter Quality and Teamcenter Quality, facilitating streamlined processes and optimal utilization of resources.

Solid Edge Inspector is available with Solid Edge 2023, released 10/2022, by Siemens Digital Industries Software

Key Benefits

Further Information on Solid Edge Inspector

Featured News

Enhance Workflow Authorization in Teamcenter with BCT CheckIt

In the area of workflow management systems, the topic of authorization is of significant importance, especially when it comes to protecting sensitive data. For Teamcenter administrators, the challenge of controlling workflow initiation among specific user groups is a recurrent issue.

Imagine this scenario: An administrator aims to restrict workflow initiation solely to members of the owner group associated with a Teamcenter object to make sure that data sovereignty is maintained. However, many Teamcenter users are part of multiple groups, leading to instances where a user, logged in with a group other than the owner group, faces authorization barriers when trying to initiate a workflow.

The new capabilities in BCT CheckIt enables the retrieval of user data from active sessions, facilitating real-time checks to ascertain if the user belongs to the owner group, thereby streamlining the process and minimizing support efforts.

The enhanced capabilities of BCT CheckIt empower Teamcenter administrators with a refined approach to validation challenges. Configuring validation criteria becomes effortless, enabling administrators to precisely dictate which user groups possess the authority to initiate workflows. This validation can be seamlessly integrated into workflow handlers or executed on demand via BCT CheckIt, providing users with immediate feedback on their session attributes.

Unlike traditional validation methods limited to check the user session attribute “UserID”, this sophisticated validation mechanism allows for dynamic retrieval and manipulation of various user session attributes, offering a comprehensive validation framework. This not only simplifies workflow initiation but also extends to a variety of validation scenarios, ranging from document modification to diverse use cases covered by BCT CheckIt.

The process for implementing this improvement is simple but effective. Administrators configure validation parameters to align with authorization requirements. Users work on their tasks as usual, safe in the knowledge that the system's validation checks will give them proper guidance.

This extension replaces the days of rigid restrictions and limited functionality and instead provides administrators with a new flexibility that allows them to adapt the validation mechanisms to the individual needs of their organization.

Available with BCT v24R2, released 03/2024

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