Intelligent Manufacturing € October € 1996 € Vol. 2 € No. 10

Ford Turns to Virtual Prototyping for Concurrent Engineering

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Automobile manufacturer Ford Motor Co. (Dearborn, Mich.) plans to use virtual manufacturing software as part of its C3P concurrent engineering initiative. The company has selected 3-D visualization and digital prototyping products from Engineering Animation Inc. (Ames, Iowa), as well as server technology for general third-party access to its digital prototype databases.

Ford engineers will be able to visualize and interact with entire vehicle assembly designs in real-time. This capability should help improve communication across Ford's design groups while taking significant time out of the product development process. Ford also hopes that these tools will help lower costs by reducing the number of physical prototypes needed to validate a design concept.

The C3P project at Ford integrates the company's computer-aided design, engineering and manufacturing into a global system of common data functions that will result in a seamless, unified system encompassing all stages of vehicle and component development. Ford is working to reduce the amount of time it takes to introduce a new model by one year, and it estimates that the C3P project will help to eliminate half of costly late development changes.

Engineering Animation's 3-D software tools facilitate the concurrent engineering process and help reduce the amount of time necessary to introduce new products by reducing the need for physical prototypes. Engineering and design teams can use the tools to more easily visualize their projects, see the effects of changes and then communicate in real time. This increased interaction can help reduce the total time it takes for products to move from initial concept to final manufacturing.

The server technology provided by Engineering Animation to Ford will provide interface capabilities between SDRC and other software vendors developing analysis tools for the C3P system.