A Kink in the Digital Pipeline

Larry Boulden
May 10th, 2008.

The flow of digital information through a plant is often referred to as the Digital Pipeline. When something interrupts that flow, it can create a major kink.

Autodesk’s Jay Tedeschi remembers one kink, the type of event that still produces problems in organizations. “I was part of a small R & D team that was investigating viability of pure 3D design. We spent weeks not only securing workflows within our organization that could support working in this fashion, but we also carefully picked vendors that could work with our digital data instead of traditional paper drawings.

“One morning, after sending several parts and drawings to our own manufacturing group, I walked back to see how they were progressing. I found one of the manufacturing engineers working with what looked like one of our parts. However, while we had sent them 3D models, this gentleman was working with 2D orthographic views—views that he had created by taking projections of the 3D model. He was laying out fixturing and creating toolpaths on the 2D views, and when I asked him why, he said that it was how he always did it. I pointed out that he could simply import the native 3D model and work on that,  ,but the look on his face told me that I was barking up the wrong tree

Jay concluded, “He didn’t realize that once he began re-creating work that was already done, he had severed the link to the current design, and that he was essentially working with ’stale’ data. Indeed, many design/manufacturing mismatches can be traced to this type of loss of continuity.

Advice from the knowledgeable: don’t let your Digital Prototyping plan be foiled by an employee trying to do something “the way I’ve always done it.” For more advice, check out Jay’s upcoming article in our June issue, or read it then on www.designworldonline.com

Larry B