DATA STREAM SOLUTIONS -- tools for network documentation and information management : netViz

It stands to reason that United Technologies Corporation, whose companies design and manufacture products as complex as Sikorsky helicopters and Pratt & Whitney jet engines, would devote substantial resources to product design. In fact, UTC spends $1 billion per year just in R&D. And the tool used by United Technologies Research Center (UTRC) engineers to facilitate functional modeling during the most crucial early phases of the design process - netViz.

According to Dr. Larry Zeidner, Group Leader of the Advanced Design Methods group at UTRC, "it's crucial to treat the preliminary stages of any design or re-design cycle very seriously. Integrated Product Development (IPD) teams can get the most 'bang for the buck' innovating in the early stages of design. In conceptual design, an IPD team evaluates customer/stakeholder needs, identifies the product & process characteristics that best satisfy those needs and ultimately comes up with a product concept and risk-reduction plan. Once these basic elements of a product design are set, the detailed designers take over. But they're bound to follow the overall path set early on by the design concept. Alternatives overlooked in the initial stages of design can be very costly to adopt downstream."

"That's why the 'fuzzy front-end,' conceptual design, is where the game is won or lost. It is generally accepted that roughly 80% of a product's performance, quality, reliability, durability, safety, efficiency and life-cycle cost are set by decisions made in the conceptual design stage."

When people think of product-design tools, they often picture traditional CAD, CAM and CAE tools. But these tools aren't intended to represent product functionality, which is the focus of conceptual design. Rather, these tools support the detailed design phase, when engineers need specific answers to specific engineering questions in order to work out the details of product and process geometry. "But conceptual design often takes place before selecting specific technologies and implementations," said Zeidner. "It is important to have a flexible tool to focus our experts on the most important questions to brainstorm, and to quickly see how changes made to product functionality will affect the value that our products provide. We need a flexible way to visualize an entire product's functional model."

"netViz is a key tool in a new UTRC conceptual-design process called 'Collaborative Innovation' (CI)," says Zeidner. "Say a UTC IPD team is assembled to create or modify a product using CI. They first create a functional model of the product in netViz by placing graphical objects in netViz diagrams to represent each important system or process. A single netViz project can include different types of design elements such as mechanical or electronic systems, tools, information, people or processes. By drilling down on objects, the team decomposes each system or process into more

specific components, eventually creating a 'tree' that describes the most important issues to be taken into account during conceptual design. The team draws inter-diagram links between all of the objects that will have real-world effects on one other. Using this functional model, an IPD team works with product experts in pre-brainstorming sessions to build models that capture the design rationale behind the products and processes," says Zeidner. "This is all a precursor to brainstorming sessions where we explore alternatives to this current design rationale."

"This process helps us in our subsequent brainstorming in two major ways. First, we know which functions we're going to focus on in our brainstorming session, so we know which technologists and business partners to involve. Second, we can assure that everyone involved in the session has access to the functional model and the design rationale, so they can be up to speed when brainstorming begins. We don't have to spend much time getting everyone on the same page. We are able to use our experts' time effectively. And since netViz exports directly to Powerpoint and our intranet, accessibility is easy."

netViz also plays a real-time role in brainstorming. "netViz can model complex systems hierarchically," says Zeidner. "By drilling down on a sub-system, we can focus on it, and see it at a finer level of granularity without getting bogged down by a micro-view of the entire product. Once we're done examining and modifying a small sub-system, we can zoom back out and see what effect our changes have had on the rest of the interlinked system."

"UTRC also makes use of netViz's database connectivity to connect netViz models to complimentary Excel-based tools for other aspects of conceptual design. We've automated the linkage so that netViz and the other conceptual design tools feed each other automatically, says Zeidner."

"UTRC uses netViz's data-driven graphics to keep track of the effect a product's sub-systems have on each other. Sub-systems affect one another in multiple ways, some usefully and some harmfully. In a functional model, netViz can represent this with multiple connections between the sub-systems and can use color to differentiate between useful and harmful functions. This provides an intuitive graphical sense of which design decisions are causing problems. For example, if we see a useful function (blue) that's causing a lot of harmful functions (red), we know that we need to take a closer look at that design decision; perhaps there are design alternatives that don't cause as many harmful functions requiring mitigation. As alternatives are tested, modifications to our model are automatically reflected by color, so the look of the diagram gives the team immediate feedback on whether we're making progress," says Zeidner.

According to Zeidner, "the stakes are highest at the so-called 'fuzzy front-end' of product design. Tools that enable us to focus our efforts and make more informed decisions, at that stage, increase our productivity and capacity for innovation. When UTC designs innovative products and processes that provide more value, we get a huge payoff in terms of quality, cost and customer satisfaction, and that affects the ultimate measure of our success - our bottom line."

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