The Factory Design Solution Your Plant Managers Have Been Dreaming Of

No one feels the pain of making sure manufacturing business processes run smoothly than the plant or facility manager of a modern factory. The buck stops with them to ensure quality products get out to market inexpensively and on time. When it comes to ensuring no product defects leave the factory, facility and plant managers are goalie, guardian, and Gandalf.

No bad product shall pass!

Problem is historically plant managers have had to race from machine to machine on the shop floor to get a glimpse of the entire factory operations. Managing so many machines and cross-functional processes at once leave many facility managers feeling like acrobats, peddling a unicycle back and forth across the shop floor to keep a dozen plates spinning on sticks; if one crashes, then the whole system breaks down so it’s no wonder they lose sleep pondering how to achieve the following:

·      Keep machinery functioning with preventive maintenance. 

·      Reduce manufacturing lead time and meet timelines.  

·      Lower the total time required for converting raw materials and parts into products.

·     Prove factory compliance and the compliance of suppliers. 

Making things even tougher for facility managers is that the shop floor is often times where the first warning signs of product failure occur. And catching these issues at the 11th hour can be stressful, creating a sense of urgency and need for smarter factory layouts.

Autodesk Understands the Challenges Plant Managers Face

To help manufacturers visualize, optimize and design smarter, more efficient factory floors Autodesk created Factory Design Utilities, the market’s only factory design visualization and optimization software.

Factory Design Utilities gives factory executives the ability to validate factory layouts for efficient equipment placement to improve production performance and make life easier for your plant managers. Factory Design Utilities is the only factory layout design solution that extends the familiar AutoCAD environment with the ability to automatically synchronize 2D and 3D workflows. The solution also supports installation documentation to reduce the cost and time waste resulting from installation problems. Factory Utilities is integrated inside Autodesk’s Product Design & ManufacturingCollection bundle, offering manufacturers the following benefits:

•      Create electrical schematics inside AutoCAD Electrical and establish an electromechanical link with Inventor for routing and harness design.  

•      Use AutoCAD or AutoCAD Mechanical for 2D conceptual design – and use that data to generate 3D models in Inventor that will update if the design is changed.

•      With ReCap Pro, you can process point cloud data capturing the as-is state of your factory and integrate that into the model in Inventor or Navisworks.

•      And with Navisworks, you can perform large scale design review, including collision detection for factory layouts.

When a problem occurs somewhere in the manufacturing line, shop floor managers have to keep their eye on the ball and act fast. The shopfloor is a place of action — not talk — because that’s where raw materials are transformed into finished goods. Because of this, factory managers need a streamlined environment that facilitates the efficient management of machines and processes.

By using Factory Utilities, manufacturers can design streamlined efficient factory floors that will simply life for factory plant managers, resulting in factory operation excellence and superior business results.