Manufacturability of sheet metal design with the help of Product Data Management (PDM)

In the today's industry the sheet metal design plays an important role, it has been said that almost the half of the designing is concentrating to sheet metals. But the lack of knowledge of the typical sheet metal aspects and basic rules of sheet metal designing, has led in to situation where more and more products are poor designed. This automatically leads to situation that the products are not manufacture friendly. Decreasing the time to get to product to market means that the designing time is shortening year after year; the pressure to design the part in shorter time is increasing. Unfortunately all the design information and the design intent is processed and filtered to be fit for the Product Data Management (PDM) system. As the PDM was firstly designed to be used only for the storage base for the design drawings and other data; the feature-information and design intent is lost. This paper deals with two distinct yet interlinked themes. The first theme is the new requirements set for the new Product (Life-time) Information systems that can save the product information and design intent. And the second theme is the modern, light-weight and updatable product-services that allow the manufacturability to be ensured before product realization. With the help of novel product-service such as Design Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA) for sheet metal industry designers will able to design in shorter time (because of simplifying the part structure) manufacture friendly sheet metal products.©(2014) Trans Tech Publications, Switzerland.