Knowledge-based Manufacturing and Engineering and its Application to the Exhaust System

To improve the effectiveness within a development, it is essential to eliminate waste. Several tools focus on this goal: Lean Engineering, Lean Manufacturing, Design For Six Sigma (DFSS) and the Best Methods approach. However, none of these tools are focused on the sharing of knowledge. Modification on a development or production process influences all stages of a project. By a coupling of all processes, all influence factors are covered leading to the strategy of a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). All data which belong to development, logistics and sales are saved and administrated in a global information center. The existence of such a center and the evolution of design tools give us the opportunity of sharing process knowledge between all participants of a project. This data sharing process allows us to manage and optimize processes using objective criteria in order to find the best solution.

In a dynamic world changes occur at all levels of a product development cycle. A dynamic implementation of knowledge into the development process is therefore important. The approach for a full dynamic and interactive product development cycle is to integrate tools such as Lean Engineering and engineering expertise into a PLM system. This is a new way to implement Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE) to get a decision matrix for process management. A global strategy, a clear commitment of all instances of a management and of all participants is the key factor to succeed in a KBE project.

This paper will show the implementation of KBE in a PLM system at a leading automotive supplier for emission control systems.