Assembly Instructions in Excel

Today was really a great day.  A customer called with an idea on how to use Vuuch in their assembly process.  Yes you guessed it right, they have been managing their assembly steps in Excel, see image to the right showing the first 4 assembly stations of a process that has 100+ assembly stations.  Now that is one hell of a spreadsheet.  Who would have thought?  Of course no one manages assembly instructions in Excel.

As the story goes… I was speaking to the manufacturing engineer that manages the assembly line and I got the feeling they were like a one armed paper hanger, that is when I could hear them over all the grinding going on (reminded me of those old notes I use to put on drawing FTF – File to fit).  From my days at Seemage and then Dassault Systemes I learn to love the work instructions discussion.  PLM and especially Dassault Systemes have delivered Work Instructions planning and management through Delmia/PLM, yet in many places Excel previals.  This manufacturing engineer is also a 3DVIA Composer user (al la Seemage) and like their design engineer counter part they share in the value of keep it simple.  I expect if there was endless time, money and huge monitors assembly plants would be completely planned, debugged and built first virtually and then turned on to pump out product with no issues and at standard cost.  But of course this manufacturing engineer lives in the real world so life is all about building product and managing line problems in reality and in real-time versus in virtual reality.

OK so why and how would Vuuch ever fit into this use case?  Well this is why I was so excited, it is like a hand in glove fit.  For each assembly task on the line you create a Vuuch page (use the basic page, today called a placeholder).  Now you have a web page that will track everything and anything you want to track about each assembly step.  Put notes about the task on it’s page, track issues about the task or define links to supporting information (even a link to 3DVIA content).  And don’t worry, when we did this live today with the customer over a go-to-meeting it only took 5 minutes to create 150 steps (the assembly steps used in the first 4 assembly stations on their line).  All we did was open their Excel file do a little reformating and import the data.  Done – 150 web pages created, completely defining each assembly step!  Next we created four Vuuch pages (we used Part Pages for this), one for each of the first four assembly stations and then navigating to each assembly station page we related the appropriate assembly task pages for each station.  Done, we now had a complete view of the assembly line defined in Vuuch.

OK so now what.  Well now when there is an issue on a specific assembly task or assembly station just navigate to the appropriate page and define the issue.  By including the appropriate participants they will see the Vuuch pages and issues that are relevant to them.  What is really cool for these people is they only see the pages they need to see and therefore do not need to navigate through tons of information.  And better yet if they are not involved in any issues they see nothing.  If there is an operations person that is responsible for three of the stations, just invite them to the pages associated with these stations and they can monitor what is going on.  Using the Vuuch add-in for Outlook anyone and everyone in the plant is instantly aware of any issues on the line, as the appropriate information is displayed to them right in Outlook – an instant manufacturing dashboard, right where they already work.  How’s that for cool?

OK you want more cool stuff?  At the end of the day when operations walks the line to see what issues they have… all they need to do is capture an issue in an email (bet they have never done this before) using thier iPhone, Blackberry or laptop and email it to their Vuuch account and the manufacturing issue list is up to date, those involved are informed and the issues are tracked with respect to the manufacturing line as defined through the Vuuch pages.

OK so you want even more cool?  Simple, relate the appropriate 3DVIA Composer models to each station and if you wanted to get really crazy display the working instructions through the appropriate Vuuch web page.