Process Improvement

Integrating Solidworks in the Design Workflow

I believe there is always room for improvement; there is always a faster, cheaper, or more precise way to accomplish a task. The question usually resides in — is the effort worth the payoff. Transitioning Lyman-Morse’s design workflow from Rhino to Solidworks was an area that I found to have a significant payoff for both maximizing productivity as well as improving the quality of the end product.

 

Recognizing a Deficiency

All process improvement begins with recognizing the deficiencies of a given process. Within my first 2 months at Lyman-Morse, I found multiple short comings of the Design Department’s design process, primarily that there was not an actual defined “process.” Deeper within the general lack of “process” was a lack of drafting and modeling standard and no uniform approach to component design. Over the course of Lyman-Morse’s 40 years, multiple design department managers had come and gone, and none had established a standard that was carried on by the next manager. Being new to both the custom yacht industry and Lyman-Morse, I found the lack of legacy documentation and “off the cuff” approach of the design department was a major hurdle to learning how the rest of the company’s departments operated and how I could best support their needs.

The impact of these issues became apparent when, on more than one occasion, the latest edited file in the data directory was issued to production only to later discover that revision was not the customer approved design. Unfortunately, on multiple components this was not caught before production of the parts had started.

 

Changing Mindset & Establishing a Procedure

Operating in the one-off custom market and typically being understaffed, the mentality of the design department had been generally “we are not going to make this again, so just do the bare minimum necessary to produce the part/vessel and begin the next one.” While it is true that the same item was rarely made more than a small handful of times, this approach led to minimal documentation of designs. Lack of clear legacy data causes a design team to approach every new project as an entirely new design, and drives a large amount of inefficiency. This is further complicated when considering that on any given day the design department would be working on projects ranging from marine vessels to heavy industry and architectural fabrication.

Despite each project being vastly different in many aspects, there were clear similarities in regard to workflow and design approach that took little effort to implement. Some of these standardizations included mold framing designs for reduced material waste as well as the order in which 3D model geometry was added to model files for better communication with CNC CAM software. Additionally, while each vessel was different from a size and style standpoint, mechanical equipment installations, exterior hardware usage, and mold requirements all have a high level of similarity. These similarities drive the usefulness of a uniform file library, allowing CAD users to quickly find manufacturer supplied models for use in large assemblies.

In order to construct a workflow, I spent months working closely with project managers and each department manager to evaluate their workflow and design demands to form a procedure that best suited their needs. From a high level view, the design needs of the carpentry department running manual machines looks vastly different than that of the metal fabrication department utilizing CNC plasma cutters and CNC mills. Recognizing the similarities between six different departments’ unique requirements, I developed a workflow that found the best compromise between complete uniformity and project/department flexibility.

 

The Best Tool for the Job: Solidworks

If a perfect parametric modeling software exists to use in the yacht industry, I have not found it or spoken to anyone else who has. Although Solidworks is far from ideal for designing yachts, I found that it has many advantages that make it a “best fit” tool for all of the non-marine work at Lyman-Morse. Solidworks PDM, having a robust SQL database, lends itself as a great tool for tracking revisions, ease of searching for files, and preserving complex file relationship. While it is undeniably difficult to model undevelopable surfaces in Solidworks, modeling vessel interiors, pipe runs and metal weldments can be accomplished with relative ease and repeatability when leveraging in-context and equation driven sketches coupled with routing tools and parts libraries.

Lyman-Morse had been paying for 4 Solidworks licenses for 5 years before a serious initiative was made to fully utilize the software. Trialing the use of Solidworks and Solidworks PDM as the predominant modeling software for the construction of Anna required minimal capital investment, allowing for an easier proposal to management to provide the design staff a larger budget of hours to learn a new workflow.

 

Marked Improvements

After 3 years effort, 2 complete yacht projects and over two dozen smaller composite, metal fabrication and carpentry projects, the Design and Engineering Department saw considerable efficiency and data quality improvements. Due to the one-off nature of the projects and the still relatively short timeline of use, the hours improvements from the use of Solidworks have yet to be quantified into a percentage, although the workflow has  been significantly streamlined. Issued design errors causing mid production rework on the shop floor has been more than cut in half and inter-department communication has become clearer. The electrical and mechanical systems managers are now able to work in current models in real time to relay requirements to the design staff. Accommodations for pipe runs, electrical conduits, and equipment foundations can be made prior to production as opposed to working around completed hull structures and interiors.

In the latest efforts of implementing Solidworks company-wide, the focus has been on CNC CAM integration and uniform print production drawings. Cleaner parametric models and more standardized feature trees have improved communication with CAM software modules, which reduce programing and cutting times as well as more accurate finished parts. Preset drawing templates have created more uniform construction drawings and drafting standards which lead to less ambiguous documents in the hands of craftsman on the shop floor.