Quality Gains Through a Virtual World

IndustryWeek (Alpern) - Ford designs and assembles its entire fleet using virtual manufacturing, bridging the gap between product engineering and mass production. Ford Motor Co. is now designing all its vehicles from the ground up utilizing virtual manufacturing technology. The system, based off Siemens' product lifecycle management software, allows designers and engineers to collaborate from the beginning of a product program using computer-aided design data to digitally piece together the vehicle and optimize the final assembly process.

"Literally, part by part, process by process, our product engineers and manufacturing engineers sat together watching a computer screen, making sure we agreed on the design and process, all in the digital phase," says Bruce Hettle, Ford's executive director of manufacturing engineering. When the engineers were ready to move to the physical build phase, Hettle says there were only 10 manufacturing items that required attention, a staggeringly small percentage at such an early phase in the production process..."The technology in this space -- and really in the CAD world -- has been tremendous," he says. "It's allowed us to get alignment between the bill of design and the planned manufacturing process -- and do it with efficiency, speed and quality."