Case Studies
General Motors Metal Fabricating Division - System Consolidation
Provide the thought leadership needed for success.
The Challenge
The Metal Fabricating Division (MFD) of General Motors (GM) has on-going strategic initiatives to increase die face design throughput, and reduce the overall cost per die. Heading into the year 2000, MFD had too many disparate applications contributing to their overall die engineering process, resulting in productivity and efficiency challenges. Although these individual technically advanced systems offered a competitive advantage, they were complex, difficult to use and integrate, and did not always map well to MFD's traditional workflow processes. To justify further investment in these tools, management investigated a solution that would address these issues in support of their strategic objectives.
The Solution
Xede combined its core competencies in Manufacturing Engineering and Information Technology to provide MFD with the thought leadership needed to pave a clear path to success. Xede first presented MFD with an assessment of MFD's processes and tools. Understanding that molding the process to the tool is more difficult than molding the tool to the process, Xede identified several high impact areas for enhancement. These enhancements would significantly contribute to the strategic advances management was looking for in die design project duration and success. Xede recommended:
- Providing engineers with a better understanding of the capabilities these advanced technologies offered
- Providing engineers with better interfaces to these complex systems that followed familiar process flows
- Empowering engineers to own and validate tool requirements, and helping define the processes they enable
- Implementing process automation and application integration improvements
Xede worked with MFD to identify the users that would help drive requirements, and then established a project team to translate these requirements into a system architecture and user-interface that bridged the technology with the engineers and their processes. A phased approach delivered the following improvements to the die engineering groups:
- Better guidance in preparing, controlling, and monitoring processing jobs related to die design projects
- A more intuitive processing system user interface, including the separation of specialized functionality into different modules
- A transparent integration of tools and capabilities and the elimination or automation of various die design process steps
The outcome was an application that was easily integrated into the die engineering processes and adaptable to the skills of very different user groups.
Results
Due to Xede's leadership in successfully delivering the first phase of the project, MFD outsourced the second and third phases to Xede under a fixed price contract. Under this agreement, Xede took full ownership of delivery, including: management of the project; analysis of requirements; architecting, modeling, and design of the solution; building, testing, and deployment of the system; and training of the users. To date, the solutions that Xede has delivered to MFD have reduced the number of separate tools for engineers to interface with from five to two, reduced die optimization process times from weeks to minutes, and increased die design project success rates by 50%.
