Accelerating Product Development through Digital Transformation

#Altair #DigitalTransformation #productdevelopment

Looking at future-proofing digital transformation for the new manufacturing world, the second edition of the Pro MFG Digital Transformation Senior Leadership Roundtable, powered by Altair had Mr. Panduranga Rao, Vice President (Technical Operations) at Altair as one of the esteemed speakers at the event. The IIT-Bombay and IIT-Indore led IndAC- SM is the esteemed knowledge partner for the Pro MFG Digital Transformation series.

Emphasizing on the dynamic challenges in product development, Mr. Rao highlighted that development used to take even up to 5-8 years in the yesteryears which was mostly due to sequential engineering practices and most of it was based on experience. He said, "You make a product, put it in the market, see what goes wrong, come back, realign and from that era, we have now come to a stage where a whole lot of design and development activity is based upon the user experience and the customer perspective." He further added that we used to take a design activity, which was followed by making the prototypes and putting it in the market and running it in several user conditions. The last few years have helped to go into distinct product development.

Mr Rao went on to state that every product across several verticals like automotive, consumer goods, pharma, healthcare, etc have certain things in common - they’ve data driven designs, they are based on user experience, are connected, smart and are optimized. “It is not actually what used to be an infinite design with 15 years of product lifecycle or 20 years of product life check, our products are optimized for whether it is function performance, durability, reliability, regulation, taking in all aspects. And this optimization is based upon the infinite number of use cases, which are continuously evolving”, Mr Rao added.

Mr. Rao highlighted that what really helped in order to evolve the process is simulation-based design. That means taking the physical product to the virtual product development cycle, crashing the product development period from 8-9 years to 18-24 months and trying to see how best one can optimize whether in terms of part count production or process improvement. Today, all the designs have started incorporating manufacturability aspects, maintainability aspects, logistics, etc. A 'product design-product development' process actually started looking at all the aspects, starting from the concept of usability, to the toolkit replaceability, So, that is how the cross functional co-located product development, which was mostly physical, moved onto the virtual.

Entailing the gradual transition over the past 20 years, Mr. Rao said that by moving into virtual, this rapid product cycle has demanded reuse of the work done in the past. While one can now make an improvement, one doesn't continuously spend the same long hours in product development and product design anymore. This essentially means, looking at the tons of product design data, potential concerns which have come up in the market and lastly, the potential challenges which have come out in the manufacturing logistics, sourcing material changes, regulations, etc. and building on the same. Having said that, nowadays one has to wade through tons of data and make use of that. In fact, data visualization, data processing and pulling out what is essential and taking the design direction has become essential.

On a conclusive note, Mr Rao emphasized on the enablers of acceleration of the product development process. He went on to underline the importance of using digital intervention for manufacturing simulation, logistics, dealership development, tracking user preferences and so on. All of these end up generating tons of data points, which upon refinement, provide for better decision making and cost reduction.

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