Making the Move to a Digital Job Shop

RYAN MCMAHON: Welcome. Thank you for taking some time to attend our class today. To make sure that you're in the right place, this is the class description. Hopefully, you are not the intended class that you wanted to be in. First and foremost, Rob and I are replacement speakers today. The originally scheduled speaker, Lars Christensen, had a baby two weeks early.

So we got called into to pickup for him, and hopefully, we're going to do is topics justice here today. Lars, in his professional career, spent a significant amount of time running a machine shop job shop. And so one of the things he had hoped to do during this period of time is articulate his experiences and some of the problems that he has faced in a manufacturing environment and how a digital job shop can address and improve some of those issues. So hopefully we'll cover all of those.

The course objectives, I think that this was-- should have been in the class when we posted all the classes. However, you may be wondering what Fusion Production is, since it is not a product that is currently listed on our product site. I'm happy to announce that today at Autodesk University, we're going to announce the availability of Fusion Production. It's a brand new offering for us that we think enables the Digital Job Shop.

And so I think it is at noon that the press release goes out, something like that. It's live today, now already, so Eastern time. So hopefully we'll tell you a little bit more about that and how you can take advantage of that to make the Digital Job Shop possible.

So real quick, show of hands, how many people running a job shop manufacturing environment, machine shop types? A few. OK. How many of you are using Autodesk CAM products today? A good chunk of you. How many are using Fusion CAM products? A handful as well. What was the other question I was supposed to ask?

AUDIENCE: Has anyone actually got data access?

Yes. Thank you very much. I know one does at least.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RYAN MCMAHON: Thank you, Sanjay. Fusion Production. Yeah, so the offering that we're going to describe today that was announced today is currently in beta. And if you're interested in trying it, Rob, Sanjay, and I can all gather information and get you set up to try that offering. OK.

All right, so the brief outline of what we're going to cover today is, you know, when you're running a manufacturing job shop machine shop, there's a bunch of challenges that you face that limit the amount-- limit your business, limit your growth, limit the amount of production you can run, limit your resource utilization, and so forth.

We believe-- we're asserting that if you can digitize many of those processes that you can get access to more information quicker, that you can be more efficient, more agile, more responsive, and ultimately run a better business. And Fusion Production, that we're announcing today is a new manufacturing solution that we're offering.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about what Fusion Production is. I'm going to have Rob Melly here, who's a product manager, working for me, do a demonstration of the product. And if you want to see it live in action, it is in the factory booth. Is it just the factory booth? At the far back of the exhibition hall, they're making speaker enclosures with it. So we're kind of using it for a simple assembly use case. But you can get a feel for what the capabilities are in that product.

All right. So we're going to talk a little bit about the customer challenges that we see amongst our customers. So there's really two people that we are addressing with this overall solution. There's the operations manager, the person responsible for keeping production running, for scheduling work to the production environment, making sure that we're achieving the best utilization of the resources possible.

And one of the many challenges is simply, where is this job? Where is it in the production floor? Is it at the right machine? You know, if you don't know where the job is, it's hard to get a status. When the customer calls and says hey, are you going to make the order on time-- They're not always yelling at us, but can you accelerate the order, can you ship it sooner, how do you adjust those things.

So needing to know where those things are so you can communicate more effectively is really important. Understanding the status of the given job. Where are you in that production cycle? Have you finished, you know, x percentage of the job? Have you finished cutting? Are you in inspection? Are you in surface finishing, whatever it is? Knowing where you are with that.

Unplanned downtime, always a challenge. It's unplanned, by its very nature, but how do you recover from that? When you have unplanned downtime, where can you move your jobs? How do you get the rest of your work done is a really important thing to be able to be responsive to.

We talked a little bit about customers and when things change. And actually, that's a great segue into the managing the schedule. So what happens when you need to change your order because you have a change in priority of something? How do you keep track of what is working where and move things around dynamically as the needs of your business change? All of these things are pretty common problems. Anybody have any other problems that we haven't really listed from that, any ideas, thoughts? I'm open to discussion. No?

AUDIENCE: Providing [INAUDIBLE]

RYAN MCMAHON: Say it again?

AUDIENCE: Providing the information [INAUDIBLE]

RYAN MCMAHON: Yeah, absolutely. So good segue. So the machine operator has a different set of problems, right? How do I know that I'm working on the right docs? Do I have the right prints? Do I have the right NC code? Do I have everything that I need? The right inspection plan? That's a real difficult challenge.

And so, you know, if you are counting on the paper to be right, we all know that that isn't always true. So making sure you have the right documentation and know what you're making, what do you do next at this workstation? What is the queue of work that I should be working on?

Many times machine operators are handling multiple different machines. And so they have to keep all of that work, keep all of those machines productive, so they need to keep that all straight in their head. What is the next job that I need to queue up for each one of these workstations?

How do we capture all of the results associated with our production? Did we produce good parts? Did we have any defects? Do we have to do any re-work? And if we're doing quality, if we have measurements inspection, how are we capturing all that quality data and making it available so that people can make better decisions? You know, what job is this? You go to a workstation, what is it really working on? If the job sheet gets lost, or if it isn't there, how do you identify work that is in the production environment?

I went on a tour of the CNC company in California. And they said that they had three people whose full time jobs it was just to find lost work, run around the production environment, find lost work, try to figure out what it is, and try to get a doc with the right workstation. This is a big problem is knowing what is where.

What is this machine working on is similar to that. It's cutting something, but I'm not sure what it is. And then capturing process changes. So on my job sheet, I have a defined process. But I have to change it for some reason. I strike it out, I say what I changed. I sign my name to it, and I put my signature, or the date on it. So I have a time stamp. And now this is part of the official record.

But if many of you are like me, you have pretty horrible handwriting and being able to read that and capture that as part of your documentation is difficult. So what if you have a lot of changes? So capturing all those changes is another big challenge for our customers.

And when you look at all of these changes, there are significant costs associated with them. They're in two big buckets. One is lost productivity. You're spending all this time looking for the right documentation, looking for work, trying to figure out what something is, finding the right documentation. That is all lost productivity. And you know, when this happens frequently, that lost productivity adds up pretty quickly.

The other is waste, you know, if we make the wrong parts, or we have defects, or we need to do rework or disposition, unplanned downtime. All of these things-- you know, both of these things really impact the bottom line of your business. And so what we're hypothesizing, what we're trying to prove is that if you had better access to information about what's going on in the production environment, you'll do all of these things better. You'll be more efficient.

All right. So what is a Digital Job Shop? What can you do in a Digital Job Shop that is difficult to do with other kinds of systems? Fundamentally, it's about better communication and better understanding of what's happening in the production environment. You have access to what all the machines are doing, where all the jobs are, all that information. You have a complete set of work instructions. What am I supposed to be making? What are the right sets of documentations? Complete working instructions, rather than just a single sheet checklist of the things you have to do.

Production tracking, making sure that you can understand where everything is, what the queue of work is that's available or required for each particular workstation. How do you move things around? What is the impact of moving this job to another machine or moving it ahead in the queue, being able to understand those impacts when the customer calls and says, I need a rush order on this? Complete tracking and managing from anywhere.

So right now, with many paper-based solutions, to manage the shop floor, you have to be on a shop floor. You have to be walking the shop floor. You have to be looking at the paper-based travelers, talking to people to understand what's going on. How cool is it that if you can just look at your phone and know what workstations are working on, what jobs are where, what is the status. I can actually go home and have dinner with my family I can take lunch and not worry that something's going to happen while I'm not there. It's really a very powerful notion that you have that information and have the confidence that you know what's going on in production.

And the value of doing these things are you get to production faster, you make fewer mistakes, fewer errors. When you make mistakes, you're aware of them sooner, so that you can address them faster. You know what machines are working on. You can be much more flexible and responsive, and you can communicate with your customers better, which is always, you know-- they're always calling and need information about what's going on. If you have that information, it makes it much easier for you to have those kinds of communications with them.

And ultimately, this will help you increase your production throughput, process more jobs, more revenue, impacts the bottom line much better-- running a much better business if you're doing those things. Does this resonate with everybody? Anything I'm missing should be called out? No? OK, great.

So we talked a little bit about Fusion Production. Fusion Production is a Digital Job Shop solution from Autodesk. Pardon me. This is our description of it. We're building a cloud based solution that connects people, data, and machines. It turns on very, very quickly, instant on, access anywhere, improve overall equipment efficiency and operational efficiency, sorry, OEE.

So we're trying to build a solution that connects up many of our products. It's not just a paperless job tracking solution. So as we are launching this, we are targeting machine shop job shop kinds of customers. Your production environment looks like this. It doesn't necessarily look like an assembly line where you're doing body in white or welding auto frames or things like that.

So we want to help customers that have lots of variety of production. They're making lots of different things. And low volume is a relative thing. It can be thousands of things. But if you're making, you know, 8,000 lots of 1,000 different things, that is a different kind of production management problem.

The machines don't move a whole lot. We don't change the layout of the factory environment very often. And we build things to order. You might have a large job that is 100,000 items. You might have a small job that is one or two items. Your production can vary pretty dramatically.

And so the challenges in running an environment like this or running a manufacturing line like this is how do you make sure that you keep these machines cutting all the time? How do you know what they're working on, so that you make sure that they're cutting all the time? How do we improve the utilization of them? How do we trace traceability and compliance for our customers? Many times our customers need the full history of what's been made, who worked on it, what process has happened when. So these are some of the things. And we talked about previously about some of the challenges in more detail.

Fundamentally, what we're trying to do at Autodesk is connect our tools together in a solution, not just point tools that you use, but make them work better together. So we're trying to build an integrated production solution that connects design and CAM. From CAM, you can create, automatically create working instructions. Those detailed working instructions turns into job sheets in the production environment. And so now all of the information is available.

When the operator uses the job sheet, they can capture complete details about what happened in production. You can use a mobile device, take a picture, dictate to your phone. And so you don't have the chicken scratch that nobody can read. We're also going to make available machine data as well.

So we want to have the operator capturing information, and we want to know what your CNC machines are doing. And when you overlay those, you can correlate what has happened and do a much more robust debugging of your processes for optimization, and ultimately, you get to reporting on that. So if we can connect all of these things up in a more seamless way, we think that we've enabled a much more robust toolset or solution to allow your manager production environment.

If we're doing this, we're connecting different people that have different roles and perform different tasks. And you know, this is back to the creating the connected solution for us. And ultimately, what this will look like from Autodesk is we have Fusion 360 today, that's been in the marketplace for quite a while. Fusion Production addresses many of these other capabilities. They will be connected.

We mentioned Fusion 360 here today, but we also have integrations with PowerMill and FeatureCAM. And over time, we will be working on integrations with many more of our authoring or our process tools like Netfabb, sheet metal nesting capabilities as well. You can see many, many other places where you could define work instructions that feed into this overall solution.

We're starting with CAM. And we think that that's a pretty valuable thing to do for our customers. The last point I want to make about a solution like this is that when you have all of these in a digitized format, you enable a feedback loop that is in near real time that is very difficult to achieve today.

So from design, I know what I'm making, how I'm making it, when I'm making it. It's like what do we need to execute this, what information do I need to be able to produce it, what did I actually make, you know, using our quality data, our inspection information, our scheduling information, make all of that information available back to the manufacturing engineer to optimize, address their processes, make it available to the design engineer to figure out if they need to update their design for manufacturability or other purposes. But you enable people to work more quickly and act on more current or more recent information to make those decisions much faster in overall process.

So a little bit about what the solution is. We are building a cloud based solution. It's built on top of our Forge platform, which is a cloud based computing environment. All of the data is stored in Forge. We have APIs, and we've built various presentation layers or user interface opportunities. We have a browser based management console that allows you to author the work instructions, allows you to import or get their work instructions from the appropriate tool.

We have a mobile client for use on a shop floor. If you go down to the factory booth, you'll see the tablets in use today. It also works on Android phones as well. This is for the operator to look at what-- be able to scan a QR code, know what this machine-- the queue of work is for this machine, know what this particular job sheet is, and know what its status is in production.

These are the tools that we will integrate over time, so PowerMill, FeatureCAM, Fusion, TruNest, Power Shape, and PowerInspect. Is that right? OK. We have too many crazy icons. I just memorized them. I actually don't recognize them. Excuse me. All right.

And then the last part of this is building it as making it extensible, so that we can plug in other capabilities as well. So machine data is one that we think is particularly compelling and important for our customers. And so this is the first one that we're looking at. So we're integrating with a partner that can connect to your machines, capture data, and generate a series of reports that we can superimpose or show with the production data as well.

So there are many other third party integrations that we think make sense, DNC, Inspection Solutions. There's a litany of things that we will be exploring over time to make this environment even richer. So that's the general description. And now I'm going to hand it over to Rob to give you a quick overview of what the capabilities really look like, OK.

ROBERT MELLY: So is my screen up there? OK. Apologies I can't see everyone on that side of the room. If you have a question, feel free to shout it out. I'm just going to do a quick walk through of where we are today with Fusion Production. Really, everything centers around the idea of a digital traveler or a digital work construction. Right, this is your set of instructions of how to make a product, and it can capture any digital information you're creating with other Autodesk tools, you're CAD design, your part files, your CAM, your tool paths, your tool lists, your set up sheets. Anything that you need can go into Fusion Production as part of this digital work instruction.

So here, I have an example for a transmission end plate. You know, my router here is in my list of tasks. You know, maybe it starts from raw material that I have to go cut before I can start machining. Maybe I have three setups that I have to do on different machines or on the same machine. But the idea behind Fusion Production is that your tasks are things that your operators have to go do.

Anything that they have to spend time, and they need information to execute, it should be a task in Fusion Production. You know, a deburring task and inspection tasks as well, each of these tasks have a bunch of details in them. I will take the job instruction, I'll dispatch it to the floor, and we can walk through and see what kind of data you can attach to it.

I can set quantity on a job instruction or a job sheet. I can set, you know, a due date, tags for searchability. One of the benefits of digital is you can organize things in any way that you see fit for your shop. Using tags, you can tag it by a customer, by order name, or by an area in your shop, and search for it later. We have a custom PO number or job ID number that you can add here to integrate with ERP system and keep your job sheets on your floor synced with your ordering and your billing system.

So the job instruction is meant to be like a template of how you make a thing. To actually go do work on an order, you have to dispatch it to the floor and make it live. That's what I've done here to create a job sheet. So this is live on the shop floor. You know, so if any operator is on the floor, they know this job has to be worked on.

All of these individual tasks have a bunch of information associated with them. There's a checklist that the operator needs to go through and check off every item and say yes, I've done this before you can proceed. There's a description, items that he can go through or any notes that you need to make. Components is meant to be stock materials that you could grab, things like screws, washers, nuts and bolts.

For something like a setup, you know, we can attach tool lists. We can attach setup sheets that had been generated out of CAM. Fixturing, if you want to take photos of what a particular fixture looks like or what a particular setup looks like for a job, you can capture that and put it in here. You know, photos of what the final product is supposed to look like all get reported in the digital work instruction.

You can assign each task to a specific machine in your shop. And as the operator goes through and starts tasks, a clock is running in the background. So every task, you know when it was started, you know who started it. If you pause it, you know who paused it when. So you can start collecting rich data about the operation in your shop floor that you don't have access to today with paper based systems.

When you complete a task, you can capture photos of the completed part. You can capture defects. You can mark scrap. Using the mobile app, it's really convenient to snap photos of a finished part. Then all get recorded in the digital job traveler. On a job sheet, there's a status report that can tell you everything that's happened with that job, every task that has gone through, every operator that's executed the task. If I was taking pictures, they would show up here as well. So when your customer calls you and says, hey where's my job, you have one place to go immediately know where that job is on your floor and everything that has happened to it up to that point, you know, to make sure it stays on schedule and your customer is happy.

In our scheduling tab, it's an overview of your shop floor. You can look at all the machines that are on your floor. You can look at all the tasks that are queued up on those machines. And as a manager, you can go in and rearrange tasks just by dragging and dropping. Right now, we have queue based schedule. But we're moving to a time based schedule, so you can understand the loading on your individual machines as well. If a machine goes down, you can go in here and react on the fly, and any changes you make here get pushed to the shop floor immediately.

On the shop floor, we have a representation for each machine in your shop. As an operator, you can go to this page, and you can look at the list of tasks that are queued on the machine. So you always know what you need to work on next. The machine can have some details associated with it, again, tags. As we build this out, we plan on putting a place in here to look at maintenance schedules, you know, maintenance documentation, anything you would need to know to service this machine or operate this machine could be associated with the machine and Fusion Production.

Here we also have a demonstration of what our machine data integration looks like, and this is just representative data, but for this machine, you can look at the last 24 hours to get an idea of what your productive time was, what your up time was, and what your offline time was. So to give a sense of how we can start layering in data from different sources, to give you an idea of what your operators are reporting, to give you an idea of what your machines are reporting. And if you have other devices or sensors in your factory, you can pull that all into Fusion Production to have a unified look at your shop floor.

You know, being on the cloud, it's accessible from anywhere. You can log in from any computer, you know go to Fusion Production, see what's happening on your shop. If you have the app on your phone, you can log in, and you can immediately see what's happening on the shop floor.

There's a reporting framework to allow you to access the data and do any additional analytics that you want to on top of it. You know, and the idea here is that we want to tie together, as Ryan mentioned, all of our vertical tools, our CAM tools, you know, our design tools, anything that we have really deep expertise to start connecting the workflows. So You can go directly from CAM right into Fusion Production. You can start collecting quality data, and you can feed that back into the CAM or into design, and inform the other people within your business. If you're picking up defects, or you're seeing low utilization rates, that all gets recorded. You can analyze it, and you can take action based on that data. And I think that's what I've got.

RYAN MCMAHON: So this is a pretty quick high level overview of the capabilities that we have in Fusion Production today that we think address many of the issues that we talked about earlier in the presentation. There are several other capabilities that are pretty cool. One of the items that I want to call out is the life set up sheets.

So you know, we show that we can actually include generic sort of attachments, PDF, NC Code, and other kinds of things. The Power Mill team and the FeatureCAM team are working on something called live setup sheets, where you can take the geometry, the fixed string, and tool paths and view it interactively in a browser based viewer.

We are intending to be able to integrate that solution as well, so you can integrate this live setup sheet into the browser here, but also see it on a mobile device. And so now when you're doing your set up, you can see all of these things together and interact with it to be able to tell what's going on. It makes it much, much clearer and easier to know what you need to do to set up that particular workstation.

So that's sort of a sampling of most of the things that we have in Fusion Production. You're teaching another class at what time?

ROBERT MELLY: 1:00 PM.

RYAN MCMAHON: 1:00 PM, so I think there may some other things going on in there. So there are several other opportunities to learn about it at both of the booths, attending Rob's other class, and I'll take questions at this point. Yeah, right here. And then we'll get to you.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

ROBERT MELLY: So we don't intend Fusion Production to be an ERP system or an ERP replacement. But we do intend to have it integrate nicely with an ERP system. So finding the right data that we need to correlate between those two would be an important step. We're also building Fusion Production on top of Forge, so the APIs are open. So we can have nice integrations that take data from Fusion Production or take data from the ERP system and add it to Fusion Production.

RYAN MCMAHON: So I'd also add as part of our thinking about what we need to bring to market, there will be certain integrations that we choose to pursue Autodesk with other partners. With those open APIs, it gives our customers the opportunity to build things unique to them that they want to integrate with it as well. So there are many options available to take advantage of those capabilities. Did that answer your question?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RYAN MCMAHON: Kind of. OK. Question?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RYAN MCMAHON: We're working on how do we make it part of the educational program. Given that generally we have to set up an entire tenant, so it's not an individual thing. It kind of is a different pattern for us in releasing software. So we're working on that. We're trying to make it available for our educational customers. Right here.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RYAN MCMAHON: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RYAN MCMAHON: Correct.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RYAN MCMAHON: So I don't think anything really prevents you from using it in a mass production kind of way. I would say, generally, given that this is a new offering from us, [INAUDIBLE] is getting into manufacturing, and there are other solutions that have been around for a very long time, that have a tremendous amount of domain knowledge. I think that we aspire to get there.

I would just say, you know, maybe we're not ready to be there yet, but we're willing to try. But there's a maturity question, right? We need to go initially where we know that we're solving problems and it's the right scope of problems. Adding complexity around general manufacturing where you have parts, you have assemblies, you have parent assemblies, and you have that whole hierarchy and needing to branch all of that, maintain the relationships between all of us things so they come together, that's a set of capabilities that we need to flesh out in more detail.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RYAN MCMAHON: Absolutely.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RYAN MCMAHON: Sure. If you will--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RYAN MCMAHON: If you wanted to draw a boundary around the scope of what you're manufacturing, absolutely, you could do that. Yeah, question.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RYAN MCMAHON: Yeah. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RYAN MCMAHON: So we currently, we have a very simple user access control. We have an admin, we have a manager, and we have a machine operator. And the machine operator can log into a mobile device, can log into the browser, and all they can do is start and stop jobs. And they can enter completion details for the jobs that they have.

And so in that way, you're controlling what they have access to-- we don't control what they have access to to view. They can pretty much view anything, but they can-- we're controlling what they can actually change. And then we're looking at over time, can we apply access control on content as well?

So one of these cases that we're interested in is could you give access to your customer and let them view the details directly, but you would want them to see any of your other customers' data. So those are some ideas that we're exploring, but we need to get a little further. One, we need to validate that those are important things for our customers that they want to do, and then we need to figure out how to address that. Other questions over here?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RYAN MCMAHON: So we do not start with-- we don't provide any templates for you to get started. We'll provide some sample content. But when you author one, your first one, then you can duplicate it, so in that way, you can use it like a template. And then-- so I guess that's the best way to answer the template question. Then, if you're making something, you can edit the job sheet in production.

So if I need to say, hey, look, I need to add a task, or I need to change something that happened, you can edit that and keep track of all of those changes without changing the parent work instructions. So the work instruction is effectively the pattern that you want to follow. When you dispatch that, those turn into instances of that work instruction they get followed in production. OK. There was another question back here. No? Yes? All right.

We'll hang around. We're happy to answer other questions if you have more detailed questions. Anything else? No? All right. Thank you very much for your time. Really appreciate it. Enjoy the rest of the show.