To survive and succeed in the global market, manufacturing firms are churning out innovative products with continual improvements in price-, quality- and response- competitiveness. Products now incorporate new features, materials, or technologies with: additional functionality, better user interface, higher efficiency, or smaller size. Price competitiveness relies on manufacturing a product within a target cost given by the target market price, minus desired profit. Quality competitiveness involves designing robust products and production systems to get the quality right–the first time and every time. Response competitiveness implies faster development and introduction of a new product by working proactively with respect to customer expectations.

What is Collaborative Engineering?
Aggressive innovation by competing firms is leading to more complex products which require specialist teams to handle different activities in product lifecycle, such as: concept design, engineering analysis, tooling development, manufacturing planning, part manufacture, product assembly, delivery, service, and disposal. The teams need to work with each other concurrently to optimise the product, and launch it early in the market. Concurrent engineering is, however, difficult to practise when the specialist teams are located in different parts of the world–an increasing trend with globalisation.

The solution lies in connecting the team members through a digital communications network and providing them appropriate software to create, analyse, and modify a virtual model of the product. The model and results are stored in digital form in a central or distributed server, which may be accessed by all team members over a local area network or Internet. This approach to product development is referred to as Collaborative Engineering.

Computer-aided Product Development
The virtual product comprises a digital assembly of its part models. The parts are modelled in 3D using computer-aided design (CAD) programs and saved in standard formats (e.g. IGES and STEP) for exchange between different programs. Computer-aided engineering (CAE) programs enable simulating the product mechanism, and optimising the shape of each part under static or dynamic loads by simulating the internal stresses. The part models can be sent to a rapid prototyping system for automatic fabrication of a physical replica for form, fit and function testing. The tooling models (moulds, dies, jigs and fixtures) can be quickly developed by modifying the corresponding part models. Computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) programs enable planning, simulation and optimisation of process parameters. Finally, computer-aided inspection systems enable automatic comparison of virtual and real parts for quality assurance. .....more on next page

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