Vision Of The Engineering Environment

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What would the computer-aided factory-engineering environment of the future look like? It would be based upon a computer workstation or network of workstations that provide an integrated set of Replica Breitling Watches design and engineering tools. These software tools would be used by a company's manufacturing engineering team to continuously improve its production systems. The tools would be used to maintain information about current manufacturing resources, enhance existing production capabilities, and develop new facilities and systems. Engineers working on different workstations would share information through a common manufacturing system-engineering database.

Using this environment, an engineering team might be able to prepare detailed plans and working models for an entire factory in a matter of days. Many alternative solutions to production problems could be quickly developed and evaluated. This type of capability would be a significant improvement over current manual methods that may require weeks or months of intensive activity. ...
... To achieve this ambitious goal, a new set of engineering tools is needed.
A company's manufacturing engineering team requires a number of different tools to support its mission. Examples of functions that should be supported include:
Identification of product specifications and production requirements,Reducibility analysis for individual products,Modeling and specification of manufacturing processes,
Modification of product designs to address manufacturability issues,Plant layout and facilities planning,Simulation and analysis of system performance,
Consideration of various economic/cost tradeoffs of different manufacturing processes, systems,tools, and materials,Analysis supporting selection of systems/vendors,
Procurement of manufacturing equipment and support systems,Specification of interfaces and the integration of information systems ask and work place design,
Handling of various organizational and personnel concerns, e.g. labor issues, human factors, health, safety,Compliance with various regulations, specifications, and standards, control of hazardous materials,
Management, scheduling and tracking of projects.
For more information on the types of functions that manufacturing and industrial engineers would need to perform.
The tools that implement these functions must be highly automated and integrated. Automation is needed to eliminate, minimize or simplify tasks that are mundane, repetitive, time-consuming, complex, and/or error-prone. Integration is needed to ensure that tools can share common data and operate in a consistent, synergistic manner.
The engineering tools, taken by them, are not sufficient to achieve productivity goals. The tools need data to be useful. Today, it is unlikely that the data required for a major engineering project could be loaded into the computer in a week's time. On-line engineering reference libraries are needed to streamline this process. On-line technical reference data must be maintained in a format that is accessible and usable by the engineering tools. Some examples of the information that might be contained in these electronic libraries include: Production process models and data.
Generic manufacturing systems configurations,Machinery and equipment specifications,Vendor catalogs,Recommended methods, practices, algorithms, etc.,
Benchmarking data,Typical plant/system layouts,Cost estimation models, labor rates, other cost data,Budget templates,Time standards,Project plans,Laws/government regulations and industrial standards.
The libraries would minimize the amount of time that the engineer spends entering data. They would also allow engineers to quickly develop solutions based upon the work of others. This on-line reference capability does not exist Hublot Replica Watches today.
Another critical aspect of this engineering environment is affordability. The engineering capabilities are needed by large and small manufacturing firms alike. Affordability can best be achieved by designing an environment that can be constructed from low cost "off-the-shelf" commercial products, rather than custom-built computer hardware and software. The basic engineering environment must be affordable. For both cost and technical reasons, it must be designed to be extensible, i.e. , support incremental upgrades. Incremental upgrades would allow companies to add capabilities as they are needed. Commercial software products must be easy to install and integrate with other software already resident in the engineering environment. These capabilities exist to a limited extent in some general-purpose commercial software today, e. g. , word processors, databases, and spreadsheets. Some installation and integration problems have been resolved in these software packages through vendor acceptance of certain de facto standard" file formats. Both technical and legal problems have resulted from current dependence upon this type of standard within the software community. In any case, there are virtually no existing standards that directly support the installation and integration of software tools within a CAMSE environment. 8. 3.