Delivering Customized Products Fast and Efficiently
The challenge in responding to customer demands
Digitalization of manufacturing industry is driving the design and production processes into a significant change. Global supply chains have been optimized for cost rather than time-to-market. Demand for customized products and the rise in the degree of automation in manufacturing forces a change in design processes as well. These changes cause challenges that need to be addressed as a priority.
Another force regarding design process changes is the change in consumer behavior. Consumers want a wide range of options in the purchase stage. We have come far from the time of Henry Ford, when you could get a car in the color you desired, as long as it was black. Graphical representations such as 3D visualizations are used to support the purchase decision, offering insight on what the final product will look like based on the customer’s decisions. All of this is offered before the actual purchase decision, in some cases even before the vendor is aware of the customers’ existence.
Due to its geographical location, Finland doesn’t have a particularly strong competitive advantage in global commerce. That’s probably the reason why the Finnish manufacturing industry has focused on a customer-oriented approach. This has resulted in a significant number of configurators and customized calculation tools having been developed.
Finland has a competitive advantage in implementing customers’ behavior — placing the highest value on the product that best fits one’s needs — in manufacturing industry. But for how long? Responding to customer demands has lately become the most important factor in remaining competitive in manufacturing industries globally.
Engineer-to-Order (ETO) automation makes the design of customized products possible, gathering all the process elements into one place, and creating a digital version of the product, minimizing manual labor.
Rulestream ETO (Engineer-to-Order)
Rulestream ETO is a solution developed by Siemens for building design automats and configurators. ETO products, e.g. products that require order-specific design, only have a few designed and modeled components from the start. An automat is then used to create 3D Models, Assemblies, and Drawings based on the chosen design rules and calculations.
Daily used design rules and heuristics in Rulestream are gathered into one product model. When using the product model, offering and supply design can be automatized entirely or partly which removes routine tasks. Rulestream offer tool integrations in for example CAD (including solutions such as NX and Solid Edge), PLM software and Microsoft Office. The goal is to fasten the design process for basic products, leaving more time for customized products.
4 benefits with Rulestream
- The design rules and product model can be built without programming skills
- All the design rules can be gathered into a database
- Core rules are separated from changing data
- Rulestream can be used as an effective calculation platform
Boost your business
Rulestream enables you to respond to your customers’ demands efficiently without reducing the variability of the products. Configuration, design, and delivery is faster, human errors decline to lead to more time for tasks that create added value.
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