Sigmetrix: Mechanical Variation Management Helps Engineers Maker Better Decisions for Building Better Products

We recently spoke with Ed Walsh, VP of Global Sales at Sigmetrix for an update on the company and its technologies. During the interview, he spoke how the company continues to be focused on helping customer design and build better products through mechanical variation management.

Sigmetrix is unique because it’s not just a software company, but also a service and training company that together provide a comprehensive solutions approach for its customers.

Sigmetrix is a company whose focus has always been on helping companies create better products through mechanical variation management.

Walsh said, “We can break mechanical variation management down into two parts. Better products would mean a product that’s safer, maybe more efficient, produces less pollution, and is more accurate. For us, that’s what better products mean. Variation is something that comes in and can make those products not so good. Maybe makes the product less competitive or makes customers less happy. So, we’re trying to manage that to make better products”.

“Our customers want to get the most out of their technology investments with the most efficient use of their resources. This includes things like having solutions that scale to multiple skill levels in an organization. We address this need by having our cornerstone tolerance analysis tool (CETOL 6 Sigma) that is used for advanced applications because it’s very powerful, but also a 1D tool (EZtol), that’s relatively simple to use. We are seeing an increased demand for tools that teach people geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) as they use them by incorporating training solutions in all of our tools. We feel that that education helps establish a use case, or ability to be used, by that whole spectrum of users”.

MCADCafe Interviews Ed Walsh, VP Global Sales, Sigmetrix

What Does Mechanical Variation Management Mean?

Sigmetrix’s mission statement is “Better products through mechanical variation management.” We asked Walsh if he could elaborate on what that actually means.

“I think the way we can best describe it is by defining what variation actually is. Variation can represent any number of things between the viscosity of a fluid or the amount of flow through a circuit, just based on the random variation of how things work in the world, for example, weather”.

“Specifically, mechanical variation is based on a function of manufacturing processes that nothing is ever quite as big or quite as small as we expect it to be. When you’re just building a single part, that’s fine, but when a lot of parts have to go together and that has to be done many times, and you need to interchange those parts, that can become a problem. So mechanical variation in the mechanical part, which is what we are focused on, is that variation associated with the variability of the manufacturing of the parts and assemblies that go into a product”.

Sigmetrix is well aware that variation affects products as they’re being built and is one the company’s primary missions.

Walsh said, “As products are being built, variation could have a few possible effects. One is that when they go to put parts together in an assembly, the parts will no longer fit because they will be running into each other, so somebody might have to go out with a grinder or a crowbar and try to fit them together. Or, it could be that they try to account for that by making really big oversized gaps, but then the product doesn’t really have a good feel with regard to quality, or it might just slow down the production of that product. And then finally, they might just scrap some of those parts, and when you’re talking about some very expensive machine parts, that scrap could cost millions of dollars per year across all products for that manufacturer”.

Sigmetrix helps customers with these variation issues in a number of ways. According to Walsh, “We help customers by balancing cost and quality, we help them by achieving a faster time to market, delivering more of innovative products, capturing, transferring and retaining critical product process knowledge, all around the idea of mechanical variation. We are specialists in that area and with tools and training and other services, our solution set as a whole, that’s where we are actually helping customers manage that variation better”.

Sigmetrix can help customers:

• Maximize the return on MBD/MBE investment
• Improve profitability by balancing product quality with manufacturing cost
• Achieve faster time to market by reducing design and prototype cycles
• Deliver more innovative products through better understanding of mechanical variation
• Capture and transfer critical product and process knowledge

Focus on Designing and Building Better Products

“We have five areas that help our customers design and build better products, but there are two that stick out right now that I’ve been sharing with our customers and prospects. One is the idea of balancing cost and quality of products. The other one is helping them capture, transfer, and retain critical product and process knowledge. Those are two of the main areas that we focus on”.

When asked to elaborate more on capturing and transferring product and process knowledge, Walsh said, “What we see, especially now, is as workforces are moving around, people are job hopping or people are retiring. In a lot of companies these people have developed this tribal knowledge over the years. When it comes to mechanical variation, it could be on the manufacturing line. And that may be captured somewhere. It should be properly captured in the PMI of the product or on the prints, but maybe it’s in somebody’s head. Another example might be that always applying tolerances to products knowing these are critical areas but that’s not always necessarily captured in the drawing itself or in the model and why they are applied. When a next generation product comes along maybe somebody doesn’t really understand how to apply those. So, when we talk about that information, that’s really what we mean about capturing and transferring product and process knowledge”.

What do these areas have in common and how does this relate to Sigmetrix solutions?

“That’s a great question. They have a lot of things in common, but I think one of the items that stands out to me, it has to do with helping engineers make decisions for designing the product, what they choose to do. The next one would be helping other functional groups in the company make decisions, or at least communicate with those engineers. And then the design engineers, such as quality and manufacturing, and then the last one would be on a more enterprise level or macro level helping management make good decisions”.

“We have several examples related to balancing cost and quality. At the manufacturing process and assembly level for a particular assembly or area that an engineer might be working on they have to make a decision on how tight to make a tolerance or how many steps might be needed to fixture something, to locate the parts relative to each other in an assembly. And they have to balance that time or the processes with the cost. For a tighter tolerance, that means that there might be more steps in a manufacturing process. For example, instead of just punching a hole in something, you might have to laser it, which is more expensive, or maybe you have to do a multi-stage process on a machine surface to get that machining just right. An engineer may be cognizant of this. It might be something that’s part of their decision-making process. I know maybe five or six years ago when organizations were talking about value engineering. That’s really where some of that comes into play, but it’s really looking at that balance of those two at that assembly level”.

“When you roll that up a little bit higher to a program level or a product level in an organization, maybe some of those parts or assemblies that an engineer is working on might be in multiple products for a company. For example, multiple sizes of engines for different sizes of tractor. If the decision that’s made there in that one design, might be affecting multiple programs, management needs to know that. Then they also might want to be looking at supply chain issues and the need to source a supplier from another country or another supplier altogether. We know that we’re going to drop quality for a set of products. How’s that going to affect our whole program? Can we manage that the possible scrap rework warranty that comes back from a slight drop in quality for this new manufacturer or supplier”?

Capturing and Transferring Knowledge

As for some examples related to capturing and transferring knowledge, Walsh said, “That one’s a little bit trickier, I guess maybe it’s not that hard to understand, but getting an ROI on that is something that we’re working on right now. One example of that would be that companies really need to develop a common language amongst all the different groups that might be involved in the lifecycle of a product. The design engineers might have knowledge of GD&T in Europe or ISO GPS, and they might be very versed in it. They’ve gotten training from one source, but then you’ve got your manufacturing group that might not be very well versed or suppliers or quality people. And so when it comes to those disparities in how people are communicating, the language gets lost. You’re not transferring that knowledge. You’re not having a, really good way of communicating that, ‘Hey, design engineers, if, we don’t locate things this way, we’re going to have problems’”.

“One of the areas that we see that being done or done well is if people are using consistent, GD&T training. We have a GD&T training product that is now being used very heavily around the world. We have both a, ISO GPS version of it, as well as a ASME version of it. And what we decided to do was make this a high-quality computer-based product that’s very accessible and has a low barrier for entry to everybody. That way in an entire organization, everyone in both the design department, the manufacturing, the quality can all have this baseline level of knowledge of GD&T”.

“People are also talking about model-based definition (MBD), model-based enterprise (MBE) today. However, you can’t have model-based definition on a model without applying GD&T, so this is an area that Sigmetrix, even though we’ve always been a software provider and always been providing a 3D tolerance analysis tool by providing this educational service now. We’re really helping companies connect the dots. So that that’s one area. The other area is ease of use that has been very important to us. For a long time we have worked on making our product, easier to use, I think last time we talked a little bit about democratization of the product, and putting, guidance in the product itself on how to create the model and what to look for”.

“One of the things that I’m seeing in talking to customers is, when it goes then to the next level up the management, they’re saying, ‘Okay, well, our engineers are creating all these great reports and they’re great and making these great models but what does it mean to me?’ As we continue to develop our ease of use, we’re now looking at how do we help people better communicate what they’re getting out of our models? How do we help them report better? And that’s an integral part of our products and solutions approach. It’s part of our training. It’s just part of our solutions as a whole, so that there’s not this kind of a disparity between somebody that may be living in that world every day, and then somebody that may not be”.

“In terms of that philosophy, it’s been working very well for, enabling our customers. At one time, a company might have had a workflow that doing this work with a 3D tolerance analysis is something that’s a very ‘expert user’ thing; something that’s only done late in design process. We’ve seen customers transfer that thought process now to where they’re seeing the value of doing it throughout the design process involving multiple groups and not just being an expert user tool, but really everybody that’s designing a product. At the moment one of our largest customers is training a 120 people globally this year. They trained 80 people globally last year, on our EZtol product. They’re intending to continue to grow that training in the company. I would say in the past, our largest training group was 20 people, so that’s a tenfold increase and there are really great things coming out of that”.

Sigmetrix Differentiators

In the end, what makes Sigmetrix solutions and products unique and differentiated?

Walsh said, “I think that the fact that we, just like an engineer should, when they look at the products that they’re working on, see them as a system. You’re not just working on a seat, but you’re working on a seat that has to work with the cabin and a person and everything around the vehicle. Well, we see our individual services and software solutions as a system. And, we really look at the interconnectivity between using the same terminology, using the same concepts and training, using the same data where we can, so that data’s being moved very freely. One example of this would be, our EZtol product which is our 1D product can now feed its results or its model into our 3D product”.

“If you have engineers in the organization that are not quite comfortable with the 3D product yet and they want to start on 1D but then they don’t want to lose that. If it turns out that an analysis really should have been done in 3D, that resulting data can just be pushed up to the 3D product. That’s a big part of our philosophy of having this interconnectivity which I think again is in line with where companies are trying to go with the digital thread with model-based environment, model-based development or in development and model-based environment. That’s really an area that’s unique and the other one is a continuous focus on product improvement specifically related to ease of use, making it easier to use, easier to understand, easier to jump back in if you haven’t touched it in a while. Our customers tell us all the time that that is what really differentiates us”.

For More Information: Sigmetrix

Tags: CETOL Sigma 6, Ed Walsh, EZtol, GD&T, Geometric Dimensioning & Tolerancing, MBD, MBE, mechanical variation management, PMI, Sigmetrix, tolerance, tolerance analysis, tolerance stack-up, Video Interview

Category: Interview

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