Managing Approved Materials List with designers

[SteveShaw]

A few questions I'd be interested in hearing from you related to material use by design engineers

How do your companies manage the list of (engineering) materials that your design engineers are allowed to select from and use in their designs? 

Does your company maintain a global master listed used by all product design teams or are the approved materials different for different groups and/or different product lines?  if so, how do you organize and manage this to prevent mis-use?

What does your company do if/when a particular material becomes obsolete and should no longer be used in new product development?

[B_Scarpari]

Dear Steve,
below you can find the answer from our side.

We have a global master list maintained by the Codification Dept. The published list is available to all designers on a pdf document (engineering handbook).

Filling the drawing title block, design engineers choose the material attribute from a drop-down list containing only released materials.

The handbook is visible to all design engineers regardless of the design team or product line.

Obsolete materials are removed from the drop-down list present on the material attribute in the title block.

[SteveShaw]

Thanks for sharing information on your company's process for managing materials.

[JenniferPierron]

Hello @B_Scarpari 

You mentioned drawing title block contains the material attribute.   Can you clarify how processes/coatings to the material are reflected in the drawing?  Does the material value change or is it shown separately?

Thanks

Jennifer

[B_Scarpari]

Hello Jennifer,

the designer gives information about finishing and heating treatments in the title block or through some notes on the drawing, for specific indications on the drawn part.

In the title block we distinguish the base material from the surface finishes and heat treatments using two different attributes.

[JenniferPierron]

Thanks for this information.

[AH_2209739]

Hi Steve,

TE has an internal home grown system that lists all the raw material part numbers (mainly resins and metals) that engineers can select and use for their products. On top of that we have indicators that list preferred materials using a green, yellow, red traffic light. 

Some of our BUs enrich that information with their own flavor and call it a material platform that their users are supposed to use for material selection.

When an EBOM gets released (raw material part numbers included) engineers can apply for an exception to use a non-preferred material in Windchill. 

Obsolete raw materials will be either removed or indicated with a red traffic light to not be selected. 

Hope this helps!

Andreas

[SteveShaw]

Thanks for sharing.  Do you design engineers assign materials (material properties) within the CAD authoring tools?  If so, how do they correlate this selection against the approved material list?

[AH_2209739]

Today they dont but we want to make all approved materials available through .mtl files in Creo to assign the material to the CAD file as early as possible. This helps for weight calculation as well as for "agile" simulation tools like Creo Simulation Live and Creo Simulate. 

[JenniferPierron]

Hi @AH_2209739 ,

Same question to you.   If you are selecting a raw material, how do you reflect the finished material properties desired?  Do engineers  provide information about processes (like heat treatments, quenching etc) or coatings to be applied to the raw material?

Thanks

Jennifer

[AH_2209739]

Our main processes are metal stamping and forming and plastic molding (with or without fiber). For stamping and forming we determine the final material properties after the product design and before tooling design, at a phase when we simulate the forming process with tools like Simufact or others. For molding we use the material properties for non fiber filled materials and for the fiber filled materials we use molding simulation tools and digimat to better understand the influence of the fiber orientation on the non-isotropic material properties.

[JenniferPierron]

Thanks for this information.  

[hjoshi]

Hi @AH_2209739,

After the engineering material is formed by way of processing raw materials in one of the product. Do you re-use that for another product and in such case how do you maintain it as reusable engineered material?

Thanks,

-Hrishi

[AH_2209739]

Hi Hrishi,

For molding we use a Digimat library for fiber reinforced materials.

For stamping we dont store the formed metal material characteristics centrally as they are typically always different on how and how often the metal was bent. 

[hjoshi]

Thank you for clarifying!

[FabioSambinello]

Hi Steve,

Raw materials are managed as master records on the Company ERP system, through a middleware we receive data on Windchill, managing the related wtpart.
The master platform for code, description, commodity class, price, and lifecycle status is then the ERP system.
Anyway, we apply Windchill classification (Partelink) to these wtparts to enrich them with technical information for use by mechanical designers, who find this list of raw materials in the Creo environment (a customized parameter form) and can associate them with newly designed drawing components.
When we apply the transformation from Design BOM to Manufacturing BOM on Windchill, the raw material becomes part of the structure of the drawing component, the quantity is related to the component dimensions.
Pharmaceutical and food regulations require us to track and document the sourcing of these raw materials, it is a key point for our customers.

Thanks,

Fabio

[hjoshi]

Hi @FabioSambinello, 

Thanks for sharing, Fabio!

One additional question when raw materials are part of Manufacturing BOM are there incidents where raw materials that is processed for finished good is again used for another product in exact same manner. If so, do you update ERP to record it as another material for reuse within another product or this recipe is copied to every single BOM while producing Manufacturing BOM? Let me provide example to describe analogy of my question.

Example: A special aluminum alloy is created that lightweight and meeting certain characteristics of stress strength. It was something engineer has created for say wheels of car. Another engineer realizes he needs a material with same characteristics for Aeroplan seats now in this case if engineer finds it in library can simply reuse it. If this is not maintained in database as a reusable stuff, then it needs to be recreated in the context of Aeroplan seat.  

Do you have some insight on this?

Thanks,

-Hrishi

[FabioSambinello]

Hi @hjoshi ,

The raw material list is centrally managed on ERP and is unique for the entire group, so the master records can be used by all engineers multiple times on Creo/Windchill, it is a relationship parent-child between the finished component item and the raw material item.
A new raw material item is created by the central entity (Corporate Purchasing dpt), which also archives all accompanying documentation.
The production of our "make" components is almost all done externally, so raw material procurement is managed by the supply chain, according with our indication on the BoM and the drawing.
The strategy of reusing the starting raw is therefore delegated to the supplier, who will also take this into account in the price to be applied to the production of our finished components.

Fabio

[hjoshi]

@FabioSambinello Thank you for detailed information!